A New Page for EU-China Energy Relations? The Impact of Trump's Withdrawal from Paris Agreement on Cooperation and Competition in Energy Transition

This chapter seeks to analyse new forms of climate change cooperation involving the US, the EU and China, and the challenges influencing their competition in renewables following the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under the four-year presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021). By rethinking traditional multilateralism, it is argued that a new dynamic of climate cooperation that involves not only states but also sub-state and non-state actors is emerging. The EU-China partnership in mitigating climate change can be better understood through operationalisation of the concept of multilevel multilateralism. More precisely, this multilevel partnership incorporates entities above the state level (engaging the EU as a supranational institution), EU member states (intergovernmental level) and sub-state actors (city, company, NGO). On the basis of these different levels of analysis, the chapter proposes sets of favourable and disadvantageous factors that impact the implementation of the global climate obligations. The four-year de facto withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on the part of the United States has pushed a variety of actors to try to bridge this gap and thereby strengthened the multilateral setting of climate talks, in which China and the EU emerged as global leaders with aligned interests in fighting climate change and advancing energy transition