U.S.-China green tech cooperation is empirically successful, but if it does fail, it’s because of IP protections like the plan.

Scientists project that the world will likely  the 1.5 degrees Celsius redline set under the Paris Agreement in the next few years, unleashing more disasters like those that have hit Libya, Greece, Hong Kong, the Hawaiian island Maui, and other places in recent months.

One might imagine that such grave news could lead to a scenario along the lines of what Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin imagined in his 2008 novel The Three-Body Problem: the world’s most powerful countries, even adversaries, coming together in one room to confront an existential threat. In that case, the threat was extraterrestrial life; in this, climate catastrophe.

In , published in the spring from MIT Press, Georgetown Associate Professor of Energy and Environment Joanna Lewis calls for the United States and China to follow that script, joining forces to fight climate change. The United States and the Soviet Union were able to overcome their differences during the Cold War to eradicate smallpox, she writes, and the United States and China should follow suit to preserve a livable planet.

As the U.S.-China relationship has deteriorated, many other experts have, in broad strokes, made a similar case to Lewis, but this book gets into the mechanics of how cooperation—on green technology in particular—might actually work. Lewis helped build the roadmap for U.S.-China climate cooperation in the Obama era, so she brings unique insight. The book, with its academic analysis and abundance of acronyms, is not designed for the casual reader, but it offers one tangible model for future collaboration that is worth policymakers considering: the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC).

If you haven’t heard of the center, you won’t be alone. It was a technical project created during the early Obama years, the heyday of United States and China climate cooperation when a record number of clean energy bilateral agreements were signed between the superpowers. Lewis calls it the “most ambitious model of U.S.-China clean energy technology cooperation to date.” Through the program, the United States and China undertook clean energy research, development, and demonstration with national labs and private companies. The countries chose five research areas of mutual interest—cleaner coal power among them—and each invested a substantial $200 million sum over about a decade with the goal of leveraging each other’s strengths to jointly invent new technologies.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the initiative wasn’t an unambiguous success. When it came to the main goal—jointly commercializing new technologies—the hyphen between the United States and China dropped off. Intellectual property (IP) concerns led the U.S. project members to keep the most valuable research to themselves rather than sharing it with their Chinese partners. These concerns were not unfounded. The book points to two instances, one involving a battery company and the other a wind turbine company, in which U.S. tech was stolen by Chinese companies. Lewis acknowledges that the program didn’t live up to its full potential. “While the CERC indeed has produced inventions, it has not produced inventions that were jointly developed by U.S. and Chinese participants,” she writes, “nor has it yielded IP rights that were jointly held by entities in both countries.”

However, she goes on to argue compellingly that the program still provided value for both countries. The scope alone is impressive—the program involved more than 1,100 researchers in China and the United States. In some program areas, such as building energy efficiency, 100 percent of the projects were undertaken jointly after a few years, giving researchers heightened visibility into each other’s work. Much of the collaboration was in early-stage research, which was less contentious, but Lewis also points to some later stage success stories. One company, North Carolina-based L&P Anima, was able to set up demonstration projects in China for its technology to boost coal plant efficiency. Lewis also credits the center with helping build momentum toward the big climate breakthroughs under then-U.S. President Barack Obama: the  and the . “While claiming that the CERC led to the Paris agreement may seem like a stretch, it is possible to follow the logic,” she writes. “For many years, clean energy cooperation was embraced by China (and the U.S.) when climate cooperation was not.”