No more taxpayer dollars for environmental treaties until UN ends China’s developing country status

Most environmental treaties are a bad deal for the American people, and some are made worse by the fact that the United Nations (UN) classifies China as a developing country under them. As CEI noted in a March 2024 paper entitled Forcing the UN's Hand on China, doing so gives China an unfair advantage under agreements such as the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (Montreal Protocol) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) because they treat developing nations more leniently than developed ones. US law now requires the State Department to request that the UN reclassify China as a developed country, but a recently-completed UN meeting in Thailand shows that merely asking is not enough. The US must take an additional step and withhold funding for implementing these treaties until the change is made. House and Senate bills seek to do just that and are worthy of support.

On November 1st, the UN wrapped up its 2024 Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol held in Bangkok, Thailand. This is the second such annual meeting after the State Department was required to request that China be reclassified - the 2022 Senate ratification of an expansion of the Montreal Protocol called the Kigali Amendment included a provision to that effect. But, as with last year's Montreal Protocol meeting, nothing was accomplished towards that end and China's developing nation status remains in place.

It should come as no surprise that China vehemently opposes any change. Many of the chemicals restricted under the Montreal Protocol have important industrial and commercial uses. As a result of its developing country status, China gets to produce these compounds for a decade longer than the US. China is even eligible for foreign aid under the treaty, paid for by the US and other developed nations and administered by the UN.

Given the two years of inaction, it is also evident that both the State Department and the UN are not inclined to pursue the matter forcefully.

The time for asking nicely is over. Fortunately, Rep. Neal Dunn (R-FL), recently introduced a bill in the House HR 9447, the "Ending China's Unfair Advantage Act of 2024," that would affirmatively pull the plug on any US funding for these treaties until China is reclassified as a developed country. In 2023, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) introduced an earlier version of the bill in the Senate, S. 1035.

Most notably, both bills would extend this requirement to the UNFCCC, the foundational UN treaty targeting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and under which China's developing country status accords it the invaluable benefit of lower cost energy relative to the US because it has less stringent fossil fuel restrictions.

The ultimate policy goal should be to reconsider any and all US participation in the Montreal Protocol, Kigali Amendment, UNFCCC, Paris Agreement, and other bad environmental treaties. Nonetheless, ending the significant unfair advantage they hand China is an important first step.

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