In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.
At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.
The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States and China, are pursuing energy strategies defined mainly by economic and national security concerns, as opposed to the climate crisis. Entire industries are at stake, along with the economic and geopolitical alliances that shape the modern world.
The Trump administration wants to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels like oil and gas, which have powered cars and factories, warmed homes and fueled empires for more than a century. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas, offering the potential for what Mr. Trump has called an era of American “energy dominance” that eliminates dependence on foreign countries, particularly rival powers like China.
China is racing in an altogether different direction. It’s banking on a world that runs on cheap electricity from the sun and wind, and that relies on China for affordable, high-tech solar panels and turbines. China, unlike the United States, doesn’t have much easily accessible oil or gas of its own, so it is eager to eliminate dependence on imported fossil fuels and instead power more of its economy with renewables.
The dangers for China of relying on politically unstable regions for energy were underscored recently when Israel attacked Iran, which sells practically all its oil exports to China.
While China still burns more coal than the rest of the world and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe combined, its pivot to cleaner alternatives is happening at breakneck speed. Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead.
China’s biggest automaker, its biggest battery maker and its biggest electronics company have each introduced systems that can recharge electric cars in just five minutes, all but erasing one of the most annoying hassles of E.V.s, the long charging times. China has nearly 700,000 clean energy patents, more than half of the world's total. Beijing’s rise as a clean power behemoth is altering economies and shifting alliances in emerging countries as far afield as Pakistan and Brazil.
The country is also taking steps that could make it hard for other countries, particularly the United States, to catch up. In April, Beijing restricted the export of powerful “rare earth” magnets, a business China dominates, unless they’re already inside fully assembled products like electric vehicles or wind turbines. While China recently started issuing some export licenses for the magnets, the moves signal that the world may face a choice: Buy China’s green energy technology, or do without.
China has also begun to dominate nuclear power, a highly technical field once indisputably led by the United States. China not only has 31 reactors under construction, nearly as many as the rest of the world combined, but has announced advances in next-generation nuclear technologies and also in fusion, the long-promised source of all-but-limitless clean energy that has bedeviled science for years.
“China is huge,” said Praveer Sinha, chief executive of Tata Power, an Indian conglomerate that makes solar panels in a high-tech factory near the southern tip of the country but relies almost entirely on Chinese-made silicon to make those panels. “Huge means huge. No one in the world can compete with that.”
While China is dominating clean energy industries, from patented technologies to essential raw materials, the Trump administration is using the formidable clout of the world’s biggest economy to keep American oil and gas flowing.
In a full reversal from the Biden administration’s effort to pivot the American economy away from fossil fuels, the Trump White House is opening up public lands and federal waters for new drilling, fast-tracking permits for pipelines and pressuring other countries to buy American fuels as a way of avoiding tariffs.
Washington is essentially pursuing a strong-arm energy strategy, both at home and abroad with allies and friends. It’s premised on the idea that the modern world is already designed around these fuels, and the United States has them in abundance, so exporting them benefits the American economy even if solar energy is cleaner and often cheaper.
The competition between the United States and China to sell the world their wares has serious consequences for the health of the planet.
Burning fossil fuels for more than 200 years has helped create the modern world while delivering great prosperity to developed countries such as the United States, which ranks historically as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But it has also led to what scientists now say is a growing crisis. The carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of oil, gas and coal acts as a heat-trapping blanket, leading to rapid global warming.
Cheap Chinese-made solar, batteries and E.V.s have made the pivot to cleaner technologies possible for many large economies including Brazil, South Africa and even India, a regional rival to Beijing. That affordability is crucial for bringing down global emissions.
The scientific consensus is that warming, if unchecked, will continue to cause increasingly severe droughts and storms, potentially alter ocean currents and global weather patterns, disrupt food production, deepen a biodiversity crisis and inundate some of the world’s biggest cities as sea levels rise, among other risks.
The Trump administration has dismissed those concerns. The United States energy secretary, Chris Wright, a former natural gas executive, has described climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world.”
Asked about the diverging energy pathways of China and the United States, Ben Dietderich, a Department of Energy spokesman, said, “The United States is blessed with an abundant supply of energy resources and the Trump administration is committed to fully utilizing them to meet the growing energy needs of the American people.” Past efforts to encourage cleaner energy like solar or wind, he said, “harmed America’s energy security.”
Amanda Eversole, executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for fossil fuel companies, said her organization monitored Chinese advances and that she was downplaying their strategic threat. “We continue to keep a very close eye on what the Chinese are doing, because we believe it’s in our national security interests and our economic interest to continue to dominate from an American energy perspective,” she said.
The White House declined to comment on energy strategy and China’s advances.
Most of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels. Yet as countries try to address the perils of climate change, they’ve been steadily adopting cleaner alternatives. By 2035, solar and wind power are expected to become the two largest sources of electricity production, surpassing coal and natural gas, according to the International Energy Agency.
As the cost of renewables keeps falling, the U.S. strategy may leave China poised to capitalize on the world’s growing appetite for not only cleaner but cheaper power.
“The U.S. will champion a fossil fuel economy, and China will become the leader of the low-carbon economy,” said Li Shuo, who heads the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The question for the U.S. now is, where do you go from here?”
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