President Donald Trump's pullback from a global climate pact could accelerate China's unlikely ascent toward leadership in stemming global warming and promoting green technology, and on global matters far removed from the environment.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s pullback from a global climate pact could accelerate China’s unlikely ascent toward leadership in stemming global warming and promoting green technology, and on global matters far removed from the environment.

Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would leave the Paris accord immediately sparked international criticism, deepening perceptions of an America in retreat after recent reversals on free trade and foreign aid.

China may be poised to fill the breach. The world’s largest emitter of man-made carbon dioxide, considered a top cause of climate change, is already making rapid progress toward its Paris goal of stopping emissions growth by 2030. It has overtaken the U.S. in transitioning to renewable energy, generating a fifth of its electricity from renewable sources. The U.S. only sources about 13 percent of its electricity from renewables.

And although China remains heavily reliant on coal and pollution is a persistent problem for its 1.3 billion citizens, the country’s communist rulers say they’re determined to institute fundamental change. That commitment has much of the world now looking to Beijing, which wants to assert itself on the global stage.

“They were doing this before Trump was elected,” said Carolyn Bartholomew, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission chairwoman. Criticizing Trump in a personal capacity, and not on behalf of the bipartisan panel that advises Congress, she added: “He’s just making it easier for them by pulling the U.S. back from the position of global responsibility.”

China was positioning itself even before Trump officially declared his intentions in Thursday’s Rose Garden speech. It said this week it would work with the European Union to uphold the agreement, whatever Washington decided, with Premier Li Keqiang and EU officials set to discuss the matter today in Brussels.

Even potential U.S. partners reached out across the Pacific.

Gov. Jerry Brown of California, America’s largest state economy, said he’ll travel to China this week to build foreign support for carbon-cutting efforts. Such alliances “build momentum for a clean-energy future,” Brown said.

China’s emergence as a new, alternative unifying force is hardly limited to environment. As the Trump administration has stepped back from America’s traditional role of dominance on trade and development, China has filled the vacuum, expanding its ever-growing footprint across the globe on everything from new roads and ports to bank loans and energy projects.

Trump has pulled the United States out of the ambitious Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that would have spanned a dozen nations from the U.S. to Chile to Japan. China wouldn’t have been privy to the deal. Trump also is proposing sharp cuts to U.S. budgets for humanitarian assistance for the world’s poorer nations.