Paris Climate Agreement

President Biden hopes to show that the United States is ready to be a leader again in combating climate change.

Biden’s election victory is a huge win for all who care about the living planet. The hard part will be delivering on his ambitious agenda.

How should world leaders prioritize global challenges in the coming year? Experts from twenty-eight think tanks ranked mitigating and adapting to climate change and managing the global economy as the two most important global issues.

Biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history. A bankrupt biosphere, however, is not yet destiny. To reverse course, nations must take a page from the Paris Agreement on climate change and negotiate a New Deal for Nature.

A version of this blog was originally published at The Hill website. Guest blogger Daniel Scheitrum, assistant professor, Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics, University of Arizona, contributed as co-author to this blog in collaboration with CFR David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment Amy Myers Jaffe.    Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill requiring the Trump administration to find a way to remain in the global Paris climate accords. The bill is not expected to find approval in the U.S. Senate.  However, it does reflect a subtle shift in U.S. elective politics. Even among Republican politicians, recognizing the popularity of renewable energy and other climate friendly goals is becoming politically expedient. Members of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of Defense, and corporate leaders are calling for a stronger legislative response to climate change with increased regularity. There is also growing concern on both sides of the aisle that the United States needs to be more proactive in countering China’s embrace of advanced clean tech and artificial intelligence assisted energy and transport systems as a major plank of Beijing’s aggressive China 2025 industrial policy.  Energy innovation is a vital U.S. national interest. It is a pivotal factor to ensuring the U.S. military and space program maintain a critical technological edge over geopolitical rivals. Moreover, energy innovation supports U.S. global competitiveness by spurring new industries and successful technology companies and by boosting manufacturing productivity. Sadly, as U.S. federal spending on energy research and development has shrunk, many American innovation companies have turned to China as a source of more patient capital instead of tapping limited U.S. venture capital markets. The Trump administration would like to address this exodus of jobs and technology in its trade war with China but misses the boat by ignoring the link between U.S. energy innovation and the vast future market for goods and services related to climate change mitigation and adaptation that will come to dominate global export trade in the coming years.  By dropping out of the Paris agreement, the United States runs the risk that China or the European Union could use the U.S. absence from official global climate working groups to set energy standards and other carbon-related rules that could harm U.S. exports and the U.S. economy. It might seem counter intuitive, but progress made in global climate talks at Katowice, Poland, laid the groundwork for the U.S. to stick with the Paris accord framework. That’s because countries attending the talks, including the United States, which cannot formally withdraw from the accord until 2020, agreed upon uniform rules for measuring and tracking their own performance in cutting emissions. Climate negotiators also agreed to continue intensive discussions this year in Chile on how to connect emissions reductions efforts across regions, countries and sub-national entities so that regions can exchange credits for emissions reductions. The finalization of such rules offers an opportunity for the U.S. to rethink its posture on the Paris Accords and to take better advantage of economic opportunities to participate in international carbon credit markets where they exist. The U.S. economy can generate roughly 65 percent of the emissions reductions required to meet the 2015 U.S. Paris pledge from existing regulations and market trends. To make up the remainder, Congress should authorize the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue a national call for states and localities to volunteer projects that will cut the emissions of heat-trapping gases. Such a federalist voluntary national tender would create a coalition of the willing while avoiding a legal fight with the few remaining states that oppose participating in clean energy programs. The most successful voluntary programs could prove out policies that might someday be passed as more broadly mandated regulations.  The Paris Agreement requires nationally verified processes, and the proposed national voluntary tender system would accomplish that. It would also facilitate exchange of credits already taking place on the sub-national level. A federal system for promoting and tracking voluntary contributions would allow the United States to use local initiatives that have proved popular around many parts of the country to bring the country back into the Paris accord. This proposed tender program could be administered by the EPA, which has the authority to regulate carbon pollution. A national tender would let states and localities decide whether they want to volunteer contributions to the Paris Agreement. The United States would in turn get the general national benefits of remaining in the Paris Agreement without burdening voters in states and cities that do not wish to take part. Aggressive climate policies such as renewable portfolio standards are popular in many sections of the country, including states that initially opposed the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) and the Paris Agreement: for example, Texas is home to some of the country’s largest wind farms and ranks third in the nation for new solar capacity. Other states that opposed the CPP—like Georgia, and Michigan—are now embracing renewable energy, given its popularity among corporations and cities: New Jersey originally joined the group of states suing the EPA to stop the CPP in 2015, but it has now rejoined the U.S. East Coast carbon market. In U.S. midterm elections, several newly elected governors—in Colorado, Connecticut, Nevada, Maine, Oregon, and Wisconsin—pledged to pursue 100 percent renewable energy state mandates, mirroring policies recently passed in California and Hawaii. The Math of Verifiable U.S. Contributions to the Paris Pledge Under the Paris Agreement, the United States pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decade by 26 to 28 percent of 2005 levels. This equates to a reduction of 1,737 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon-dioxide equivalent (CDE). Achieving this reduction target via federal policies was daunting even for the Barack Obama administration, which proposed the Clean Power Plan (CPP) as a pillar of its climate initiatives. That plan would have regulated the U.S. power sector and required each state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions significantly by 2030. The Trump administration is repealing the CPP. In August the administration unveiled its vision for a new rule, Affordable Clean Energy (ACE), that will focus greenhouse gas policies more narrowly in each state’s power sector on individual facility–level emissions rather than more ambitious state-wide comprehensive approaches. Based on official U.S. government statistics, modeling, and methods (as would also be the federal government’s basis), the United States could reduce its total greenhouse gas emissions by 1,150 MMT of CDE by 2025, or roughly 65 percent of what the U.S. Paris pledge requires, based on market trends and current policies. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects in its 2018 “high-resource scenario” -- which assumes falling U.S. prices for natural gas and solar energy -- that market forces and existing localized clean energy legislation will generate roughly 805 MMT of CDE reduction in the power sector by 2025. This projection represents a greater reduction than the 670 MMT of CDE that the Obama administration projected in 2015 that the CPP would achieve by 2025, according to the Federal Register. Official EPA calculations for emissions trends by 2025 under the proposed ACE mirror many of the assumptions of the DOE’s high-resource scenario. Market uncertainties and projected modeling differences weigh more heavily beyond 2025, when the politics of U.S. climate policy could be different than today’s. U.S. corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, mandated by Congress in 2007 and to remain in place at least through 2022, are expected to eliminate roughly 270 MMT of CDE by 2025 as compared with 2005 levels. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that reforestation and other voluntary agricultural programs will save up to 60 MMT of CDE. That leaves a gap of roughly 600 MMT of CDE reductions to be met in other ways.  The Proposal The United States can generate the remaining emissions savings by organizing a nationally verifiable record of voluntary state and local action, by launching a program structured as a national tender. Willing states and localities would volunteer projects to be combined into the official U.S. nationally determined contribution based on their verifiability, scale, and capacity to create jobs. The Paris Agreement requires nationally verified processes, and the tender system would accomplish that. The administration could work with governors, tapping state and local efforts to meet the U.S. Paris pledge in a manner that promotes some of Trump’s other economic and foreign policy goals including ensuring economic competitiveness with China. A federal system for promoting and tracking voluntary contributions would allow the United States to use local initiatives that have proved popular around many parts of the country to bring the country back into the Paris accord. The proposed verification system for voluntary action builds on policies, like the newly proposed ACE, that require the EPA to work with each state on individual compliance plans that include evaluating state actions and targets and verifying emissions reductions. Those federal resources could be reconfigured to oversee a tender for states to contribute the remaining carbon reductions needed to meet the Paris pledge. The cost could be relatively low and similar to the approximately $50 million the EPA requested in fiscal year 2016–2017 to develop tools and work with each of the fifty states on the (now defunct) CPP. As DOE forecasts show, emissions from smaller states that strongly oppose the CPP, like Kentucky and West Virginia, are relatively small (in 2015 West Virginia’s were half of those of New York and one-sixth of Texas’s) and unlikely to increase on a scale that would counter reductions elsewhere. Many large carbon-intensive industries have substantial capital assets that would make it highly expensive to relocate just to avoid regulation, but the EPA would need to evaluate any distortions from emissions shuffling in calculating the national pledge. Roughly 70 percent of Americans say the United States should lead on climate change solutions. Many states have already acted, alone or in regional coalitions to reduce emissions, including by carrying out their original CPP plans. Additional urban policies such as car-free pedestrian regions, expanded public transit, and energy-efficiency programs for buildings, trucking, and businesses could be substantive enough to achieve the remaining reductions needed to meet the U.S. Paris pledge commitment. To name a few examples, California, which has already cut carbon emissions by over 60 MMT since 2005 even as the state’s economy grew 41 percent, is accelerating its push for renewable energy, which is expected to reach 50 percent by 2020, ten years ahead of schedule. New York City is working on a plan to reduce emissions by 10 MMT by 2030; the plan includes a 20 percent drop in energy use for buildings and increased use of battery storage. The popularity of 100 percent renewable energy state mandates is growing.  Washington state is the latest U.S. state to announce a more comprehensive clean energy program. Moreover, a recent scientific paper also postulates that as much as 21% of annual U.S. carbon emissions could be offset via comprehensive natural climate solutions such as reforestation and restoration of grasslands, wetlands and seagrass, as well as other methods, such as use of biochar, improved management of plantations, cover crops, and manure management. Policies like these being considered around the country could approach the 600 MMT needed to stay in Paris, if the political signal of a national program were to create momentum. Revisiting Federal Energy and Environmental Policies That Benefit U.S. Competitiveness The Congress could choose to supplement the tender plan with other policies that would reduce emissions without undermining U.S. competitiveness and jobs. For example, Congress should revisit the Trump administration’s rollbacks of regulations on fugitive oil and gas methane emissions. While some oil-sector representatives argue that methane leakage regulations harm the industry, the opposite is true: implementation of these standards in California, Colorado, and Wyoming have spurred new technologies, jobs, and exportable U.S. products and services. Many large U.S. oil and gas producers have already pledged to address methane leakage from their operations. Using new monitoring and capture technologies to reduce methane leakage is vital to ensure that U.S. energy exports meet the future requirements of global investors and customers in Asia and Europe, who are increasingly focused on the relative carbon content of their fuels, as well as carbon pricing and other carbon-related regulations. Other countries would also purchase these new technologies to reduce methane leakage in their own industries. Revisiting U.S. rules for fugitive emissions could contribute up to 100 MMT of CDE of additional reductions of methane and other volatile organic compound emissions toward the Paris pledge. Congress should press the Trump administration to reconsider its approach to California’s stricter vehicle emissions standards by passing its own new bill to promote the manufacturing of advanced clean vehicles in the United States to meet competition from China. California’s policy to implement additional greenhouse gas emissions standards for automobiles from 2023 to 2025 is in limbo after the EPA proposed reversing an Obama-era executive order to align federal rules with these specific California vehicle carbon emissions restrictions. The proposed reversal would not affect greenhouse gas reductions that will come from congressionally mandated federal corporate average automobile efficiency standards that remain in effect. Still, a Trump administration decision to sue California to block these 2023–2025 greenhouse gas emissions vehicle standards, if implemented, would decrease the likelihood that the United States will set global standards for the next generation of vehicles. The aggressive California policy was a lever to press American carmakers to produce more electric and advanced vehicles. The U.S. Congress should revisit this topic. China has said it may ban sales of traditional internal combustion engine cars by 2040; France and the United Kingdom have already announced similar bans. Higher standards push U.S. carmakers to produce non-gasoline vehicles as fast as possible. U.S. cars need to remain competitive, which means retaining or strengthening current automobile standards, not weakening them. Capping the growth of U.S. domestic motor fuel use by improving automobile standards is a key lever that allows the United States to become a larger net energy exporter, thereby reducing the U.S. trade deficit. Congress should also consider improving fuel economy for U.S. trucks. Such a policy would enhance U.S. supply-chain competitiveness. Conclusion The national tender approach would allow the United States to remain in the Paris Agreement and continue a leadership role in climate negotiations that was allowing the United States to promote its global economic dominance in energy and automotive technologies. The United States needs to have a voice in the process to protect exports from border tariffs or taxes on greenhouse gas emissions embedded in U.S. goods and services. Under the Paris terms, the United States has until 2020 before a final decision can be implemented. Remaining in the agreement through a national tender would be a win-win scenario: it would allow unified verification for those states and municipalities that adopt climate-friendly policies, while those that do not choose to act on climate change would still gain all the trade and economic benefits of staying within the Paris accord, for the good of the United States as a whole. Remaining in the agreement is particularly important in light of a recent scientific report that suggests that the speed and scale of the direct consequences of global warming are more dire than previously thought.

Geoengineering is moving from the radical fringe to the center of global public policy, yet a multilateral governance framework for large-scale environmental manipulation remains lacking. 

Fifty years ago, a photo of Earth rising beyond the lunar horizon captivated the world and inspired the modern environmental movement. Humans have since despoiled the planet to the brink of environmental catastrophe.

U.S. oil production is set to surpass its all-time record monthly high (first set in 1970), and U.S. liquefied natural gas exports are roaring ahead, with 800 billion cubic feet already shipped since 2016. The U.S. Energy Information Administration is expecting the United States to become a net exporter of natural gas soon. This all bodes well for the Donald J. Trump administration’s aspiration for America to “dominate” global oil and gas markets and will improve the U.S. trade balance. The geographical diversity of the shale revolution across the United States now also partly shields the U.S. economy from the net ill-effects of sudden oil price rises. This stands in contrast to China, which has become the world’s largest oil importer. But could there be too much of a good thing? Rising U.S. oil and gas production is weakening Russia’s ability to use energy as a lever in international discourse and has diminished Iran’s ability to use its oil and gas sector as a diplomatic lure. Energy abundance provides many strategic and economic advantages. But lawmakers and the White House should think twice before focusing too intently on the current U.S. petro-economy. Petro-economies can become overly vulnerable to cyclical changes in commodity prices or worse in the case of Venezuela and Russia. Ask any Alaskan who is studying the possibility of a state budget crisis, petro-linkages are a double-edged sword. The United States needs to stay the course on advancing its digital economy, even if that means reducing demand for oil. Here’s why: China has recognized the strategic detriment of being too oil dependent when the United States is not and it is making a major energy pivot that could position itself to challenge U.S. energy dominance and even U.S. strategic pre-eminence. U.S. policy makers need to recognize this risk and take steps to mitigate it. As I explain in my latest article in Foreign Affairs, it is in the vital U.S. interest to remain in the Paris accord. China is banking on clean energy technologies as major industrial exports that will compete with U.S. and Russian oil and gas and make China the renewable energy and electric vehicle superpower of a future energy world. According to the International Energy Agency, the Chinese public and private sectors will invest more than $6 trillion in low carbon power generation and other clean energy technologies by 2040. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that Beijing has spent as much as $47 billion so far supporting domestic solar panel manufacturing, an effort that allowed China to dominate the panel export market and cratered costs. Chinese investment in battery technology is likely to have a similar effect on battery prices. Later this year, Goldman Sachs is bringing a $2 billion initial public offering to market for Chinese firm CATL that analysts are saying will quickly make the company the dominant battery manufacturer in the world. China is also betting big on electric vehicles, with BYD now the largest producer of electric vehicles in the world and another half dozen Chinese firms in the top twenty. Over a hundred Chinese companies currently make electric cars and buses. What’s more, China is hoping to bring all of its clean energy products to market as part of its $1.4 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure program designed to expand Beijing’s influence throughout Asia. To accomplish this, China is also working to dominate the financing of clean tech and renewable energy, opening the world’s largest carbon market and encouraging its major banks, including the People’s Bank of China, to promote and underwrite green bonds. China’s goal is not just to reduce its own dependence on foreign oil and gas. It hopes to use its clean energy exports to challenge the United States’ leading role in many regional alliances and trading relationships as well as to fashion an international order more to its interests. Its clean energy pivot is providing a platform for Beijing to court countries in Europe, Central Asia, and Asia with offers of cheap finance, advanced energy and transportation infrastructure, and solutions to pollution and energy insecurity. That raises the question of how the United States will sustain its energy dominance if it abdicates its role in multinational settings that will determine global rulemaking for energy exports and greenhouse gas emissions. Presumably, China intends to fashion a global energy architecture that will favor its interests. At some point down the road, that will not be defending coal use. It will be to sell its clean energy technologies free of tariffs (and possibly aided by subsidies) while European, Chinese, and other nation’s fees on carbon emissions hamper U.S. oil and gas exports. It could also make Chinese, rather than U.S., standards for green finance, energy product labeling, and advanced vehicles the global standard. The take away from this Chinese challenge is that the United States needs to find creative ways to meet its Paris climate accord commitments and continue to develop a substantive technology innovation and climate change policy approach. Washington should consider additional policies to promote private sector investment in clean energy, including allowing renewable energy investors to form master limited partnerships in the same way as their oil and gas compatriots. Washington should also consider new uses for natural gas and bio-methane that can help meet the U.S. emission reduction pledge and stay the course on automobile efficiency standards that contribute to our shrinking oil import bill. During the Cold War, the United States rose to the task of reasserting itself in science when it realized the dire consequences of losing the space race. Meeting the challenge of China’s pivot to clean energy will be no different. The United States needs to work diligently inside and outside the Paris accord framework to fashion trade rules and carbon market systems that will accommodate U.S. oil and gas exports now and lay the groundwork to promote clean energy technologies in the future. A version of this article first appeared as a “Gray Matters” column in the Houston Chronicle.

This guest post is co-authored by Joshua Busby, associate professor of public affairs at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin; Sarang Shidore, a visiting scholar at the LBJ School at UT Austin; and, Xue Gao, a PhD Candidate at the LBJ School at UT Austin. This post discusses the findings in two recent papers by the authors investigating the feasibility of reducing emissions in China and India. With the current U.S. administration turning sharply against the Paris agreement and carbon mitigation actions, attention has turned to other countries to take the lead, notably China and India. The two countries have reaffirmed their commitments to the Paris agreement even as the United States has announced its intent to withdraw under President Trump. The ability of both China and India to meet or even exceed their Paris commitments will be critical to the accord’s success. However, both countries face serious barriers to reducing emissions, motivating critical inquiry into how feasible their decarbonization plans really are. From China, we have seen mixed signals in recent years. Though some reports show a sharp turn away from coal-fired power, China’s greenhouse gas emissions are projected to rise in 2017, raising questions about whether declining coal use in China was an artifact of a slow economy or faulty government data. In India, as we have written previously on this blog, the scale-up of renewable energy has begun with vigorous government support, but challenges remain. While declining prices for solar have brought it to near grid parity with coal, rock-bottom prices in solar auctions have raised concerns about low margins for developers and a potential solar bubble.   Assessing the Major Sectors One way to assess the feasibility of greenhouse gas emissions mitigation in China and India is through sectoral analysis. For both countries, we have completed separate sectoral studies in the journal Energy Research and Social Science (the China piece is free to download until January 20, the India piece is behind a paywall.  we are happy to provide readers with copies via Twitter). In the articles, we analyze the feasibility of reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in the main sectors responsible for emissions. The figures below break down emissions by sector in each of these countries in both 2010 and 2030 (projections). We assess feasibility in two dimensions: what we call political/organizational feasibility and techno-economic feasibility. Political/organizational feasibility is underpinned by the premise that government or market fragmentation is harmful for collective action. A government with power fragmented among many different agencies or between the central government and state and local governments would have difficulty formulating and implementing coherent policy. And in an economic market where production is divided among many firms, behavioral change by any one of them would have limited impact on the overall market. By contrast, in more concentrated political institutions and more concentrated economic markets, the actions of a few policymakers and firms can have far-reaching effects on limiting greenhouse gases.   We first assessed the degree of fragmentation in the government and market spaces. Sectors where both the state and the market were fragmented were graded as low. In sectors where there was concentration, our grade was higher with some additional consideration given to the relative power balance between the government and firms. The second dimension, techno-economic feasibility, also depends on two factors. First, for each emissions-producing sector in each country, we assessed how close the technologies in use were to the cleanest and most advanced technologies available worldwide. For example, we asked if cement plants in India were as efficient as the best plants worldwide (they were close). And second, we assessed how costly it would be to upgrade the technologies in use to get to the global gold standard. If a particular sector in either China or India already used efficient technologies and it would be very expensive to upgrade them, we graded the techno-economic feasibility of reducing emissions as low. By contrast, if the technologies in use were inefficient and it would be cheap to upgrade them, we scored techno-economic feasibility as high. Other combinations yield mixed cases. In our final analysis, we evaluated the intersection of both dimensions of feasibility to make an overall judgment on the potential for greenhouse gas emissions reduction in India and China. Here are our key takeaways from both studies:   The electricity sector is a challenge in both countries. Electricity production in both China and India tends to be quite fragmented from the market standpoint and relies heavily on coal. We found that the scope for emissions mitigation in the coal sector in China was more promising than that in India, given government concentration in the largely state-owned industry. For both countries, we found that there was ample room for efficiency gains in the electricity sector, but these would likely be expensive.  In China, where the renewables sector is more established (indeed, China was projected to install an extraordinary 54 GW of solar capacity in 2017), we also found further renewables scale-up to be challenging given a more fragmented regulatory environment. While these barriers are not insurmountable, both countries will require sustained government attention and expenditure to reduce the role of coal and scale-up renewables in order to reduce emissions.   Buildings are low-hanging fruit but ironically just out of reach. In both countries, energy consumption in buildings is responsible for a significant share of emissions through electricity consumption and, in China, heating demand. The countries’ building sectors have a lot of potential for low-cost emissions reductions, and energy efficiency technology is easily available. However, in each country there are thousands of construction companies, and the state’s responsibility for regulating construction  is fragmented between the central government and state/provincial/local governments. This market and political fragmentation stymies rapid efficiency gains.   Cement and fertilizers in India are already efficient, but there is room for improvement in China. The cement and fertilizer industries already are near world efficiency standards in India, limiting the scope for further gains given current technology. Neither sector in China had achieved global efficiency standards, so there was considerable scope for further efficiency gains, though fertilizers were more expensive to reform than cement.   Steel, cement, and oil refining are the most feasible sectors for reducing emissions in China. In China, steel, cement, and oil refining were the most feasible sectors for major emissions reductions. In all three, we assess the costs of efficiency gains to be manageable. Both steel and cement markets are fragmented, but given high government concentration and power in both, we think the Chinese government is in a good position to regulate these sectors. Oil refining is a little different. Production is concentrated between state-owned companies CNPC and Sinopec. Because government policy is fragmented (hence limiting the impact of public policy), we actually found that the two companies have enormous room to make major emissions reductions if they were so inclined.   Road transport and petrochemicals appear promising in India. Road transport and petrochemicals were evaluated as the most feasible sectors in India for emissions reductions, with a range of technical interventions that were judged to be economically viable. In India, both sectors have a limited number of producers. Automotive production is both concentrated and lightly regulated with the power balance favoring a handful of automobile producers, meaning Indian car makers could potentially organize and collectively improve their efficiency standards through market-led interventions if they were so inclined. While assessing the motives of actors was beyond the scope of our study, the potential loss of market share to foreign competition might be one reason the auto industry might try to improve efficiency.   On the petrochemicals side, both government power and the market are concentrated, and powerful regulators ought to be able to improve energy efficiencies.   Road transport in China is a mixed bag. The vehicle production market is very concentrated in China. The government is fragmented but still possesses more power than producers. This limits the scope for self-regulation by auto companies, but the government lacks the capacity to issue coherent policies. That said, many interventions in this space are reasonably inexpensive. The sector could improve efficiency potentially through centralization of government regulation or more liberalization that encouraged private producers to self-organize and bring their vehicles up to global efficiency standards. China may well be trying the former with bold plans to ramp up electric vehicle production.   Addressing agriculture-related emissions tends to be difficult in both countries. There are hundreds of millions of farmers in India, many of whom are quite poor. Because they constitute the largest electoral constituency in the country, imposing costs on them through emissions mitigation actions is especially challenging. Fertilizers in China also appear to be a difficult industry to decarbonize. Fertilizer production is fragmented, the market is liberalized with limited government regulation, and the costs of policies to improve efficiency were judged to be costly.   Steel has a ways to go in India. Steel production is fragmented in India, and many of the measures to bring the sector up to international standards are expensive. Though government concentration is high, the sector has liberalized with power residing more on the market side, making efficiency gains through regulation also a challenge. The government might need to enhance its authority, particularly through tougher enforcement of efficiency standards under the so-called Perform Achieve and Trade (PAT) scheme, to be able to make gains in the steel space.   Conclusions We recognize that there are major differences between the two countries. India is an long-established federal democracy with a legacy of a strong bureaucracy, while China is an authoritarian one-party system in which the central government has further expanded its authority of late. While both face severe air quality problems, China is more industrialized but also richer and better able to invest in climate mitigation goals. Despite their differences, both countries face strong challenges of developing coherent national policy. As Elizabeth Economy and others have documented, China has long faced difficulties enforcing environmental policy at the provincial and local level, given strong preferences for economic growth. Indeed, the now classic model of Chinese governance in the reform era is called “fragmented authoritarianism.” While the Chinese government has re-centralized authority in some domains in recent years, some sectors such as fertilizers and renewables remain decentralized. For its part, India faces a similar, though perhaps magnified, problem. Some sectors are constitutionally concurrent responsibilities of both the Indian federal government and states. That complicates policy coordination. That said, the current government of Narendra Modi is the strongest in thirty years, which has enabled the Indian federal government to impose its will more decisively in a some areas, notably its ambitious effort to scale-up solar power. Even in these cases however, implementation requires state-level collaboration so the problem does not entirely go away. What these brief observations signal to us is that large countries face some common problems, and factors other than regime type may matter as much or more for whether countries can mitigate their greenhouse gases in different areas. This is one of the most important takeaways from our comparison between these two large, politically dissimilar Asian giants. In sum, we see this stylized sectoral analysis as a way to reveal the structural barriers to and opportunities for collective action and emissions mitigation. We hope that the analytic approach we have developed can help practitioners anticipate the barriers to implementation and where it might be most productive to focus policy action.