Crypto News: Exclusive: China weighs COP33 bid

Today’s edition has exclusive news on China considering a bid to host the annual UN climate summit in 2028, a move that would signal its ambitions to show greater global leadership.

Also today, we dive into the US court decisions that are frustrating Trump administration attempts to amend federal environmental protections. And, we have new details on the controversy over carbon credits in Germany.

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China’s COP Decision

By Lili Pike and Alfred Cang

China is considering a proposal to host the annual United Nations climate summit in 2028, a move that would signal the country’s intent to show greater global leadership on the issue.

Officials in Beijing are debating the merits of a potential bid to stage the conference — which attracted more than 42,000 attendees last year in Belém, Brazil — after India in April withdrew an offer to host the negotiations, according to people familiar with the issue, who requested anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The China Pavilion during the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil. Photographer: Alessandro Falco/Bloomberg — The China Pavilion during the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.

Discussions, which have involved the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and environmental officials, are at an early stage and there’s no certainty that China’s government will choose to move ahead with a plan to hold the COP33 talks, the people said. Any decision to do so would require support from the highest levels of government, they said.

China’s foreign affairs ministry and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The UNFCCC is the UN entity responsible for addressing climate change and convenes the annual COP — or Conference of the Parties — talks between 197 states and the European Union.

President Xi Jinping has made environmental protection a key theme of his leadership, and China aims to significantly enhance its “influence, guiding capacity, shaping power and moral appeal in global climate governance,” through 2030, according to a plan published last month by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the National Development and Reform Commission, and other key agencies.

However, hosting COP would put a spotlight on China’s own credentials and on its past lack of support for initiatives promoted at the UN talks, including efforts to set firm targets for a global transition away from fossil fuels and attempts to expand the pool of donor countries obligated to contribute climate finance to poorer nations.

The world’s No. 2 economy is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and is targeting only modest cuts of 7% to 10% by 2035 in its latest strategy submitted to the UN. A recent dip in emissions could reverse with the rise of power demand and carbon-intensive chemical manufacturing in the coming years, even as renewables continue to grow.

Big crowd

85,000

Attendance at the 2023 COP28 summit held in Dubai, the highest on record for the UN talks.

Tough task

“The job requires a host with both substantial diplomatic weight and the willingness to mobilize it. In this regard, China is an obvious choice.”

Yao Zhe

Global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia

Courts challenge Trump’s green rollbacks

By Zahra Hirji

The Trump administration’s many steps to reshape and shrink the scope of federal environmental protection have been met with a flood of legal challenges from companies, environmental groups and state officials.

So far this summer, it’s been losing more than winning in court.

A smoke stack at the Marathon Petroleum Galveston Bay Refinery in Texas City, Texas. Photographer: Mark Felix/Bloomberg — A smoke stack at the Marathon Petroleum Galveston Bay Refinery in Texas City, Texas.

Over the past three months, federal courts nationwide have delivered rulings in several cases centered on attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to terminate billions of dollars in climate grants and roll back Biden-era air policies. In more than half of them, the judges decided against the agency.

Some of those lawsuits remain unresolved. The EPA is looking to appeal some of the cases it lost — or already has, according to agency spokesperson Brigit Hirsch.

“The Trump EPA is committed to following the law, and courts have affirmed our rules and actions in a variety of contexts,” said Hirsch. “These wins rarely get the same attention in the media as short-term losses.”

But lawyers involved in the litigation challenging the EPA say recent court decisions represent a crucial backstop to the Trump administration’s aggressive pullback on environmental work.

“The tide feels like it is shifting,” said Jillian Blanchard, an attorney at Lawyers for Good Government who represents multiple organizations who lost environmental grants last year.

The usual way a federal agency goes about rescinding an existing regulation is through a time-intensive process that involves proposing a new rule and taking public comment before issuing the final version.

That’s not how the Trump EPA went about trying to roll back Biden-era soot standards last fall. Instead of starting a new rulemaking process to weaken them, it tried to achieve that via an existing court case.

When the Biden administration rolled out the new national standards in 2024, more than 20 Republican-led states sued to overturn them. The agency initially defended the stricter pollution standards in court, but under Trump, it reversed course. The Trump EPA told the court that it no longer believed the agency had the authority to update the soot standards when it did and asked the court to toss them.

Instead, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in June ruled 3-0 to reaffirm the stronger standards.

Carbon credits questioned

By Petra Sorge

A carbon-credits project funded by ExxonMobil Holdings Corp. was among dozens found by German authorities to be “suspicious,” to have overstated their environmental impact or to be fake.

Authorities withdrew carbon credits generated by 30 China-based projects that claimed to reduce pollution caused by fossil-fuel extraction. The projects included one purchased by the Texas-headquartered oil major, according to a German Environment Agency report dated mid-January, which Bloomberg News obtained via a Freedom of Information request.

The German government has not previously shared the names of companies involved in the scandal over upstream emissions reductions (UER) certificates, which first erupted in 2024.

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