Tim’s view
China’s energy transition continues to defy a simple narrative.
There’s no shortage of mind-boggling statistics about the country’s energy sector: It consumes one-third of global electricity, manufactures far more solar panels in a year than the US has installed in total, etc. But a new one that stood out to me recently was the finding by Australian economists that since 2023, Chinese firms have directly invested more than $180 billion in green tech projects and factories outside the country, mostly in the global south.
This number tells a story about how China is finding new ways of leveraging its energy resources to project geopolitical power. Although Chinese officials have savvily picked up on the Trump administration’s withdrawal from global climate politics as a chance to position themselves as environmental power brokers, the country’s race to dominate clean tech supply chains was never really about emissions. It’s about breaking free of US-controlled fossil fuels, while borrowing some pages from the petrostate playbook in service of China’s own overseas ambitions. As Heatmap’s Rob Meyer observed, “how [any] country approaches its near-term decarbonization goals depends on how it understands and relates to the Chinese government and Chinese companies.”
Ultimately, a focus on decarbonization when it comes to the energy transition misses the point — countries want cheaper and more predictable electricity, and increasingly find China the only viable supplier for the means of producing it. It’s not only climate policy that’s inextricably linked to China, but increasingly energy security policy as a whole. Whether this happens to add up to a benefit for the climate remains uncertain; the Breakthrough Institute argued last week that China’s self-presentation as a cutting-edge green “electrostate” is a mirage that conceals its ongoing deep reliance on cheap, dirty coal. That view is shared in the White House; Richard Goldberg, until recently a senior White House energy adviser, told me recently that the Trump administration views China’s green claims “more like an information op, trying to throw us off of the actual types of power sources that we need to compete and win.”
Yet, there’s another new stat worth noticing: Coal and gas-fired electricity generation in China fell for the first time this year since 2015. So Beijing’s efforts may not be just greenwashing after all. At the scale China operates, small changes in the energy trendline amount to huge volumes of emissions and money changing direction, globally. Just look at the progress China is making on nuclear fusion, an area Trump is also keen to control.
So whatever’s really driving China’s green push, no one can afford to ignore it.
Notable
- While many Western nations have taken an approach to clean energy that has focused mostly on international agreements and pledges, by contrast, China is “driven by deep, internal imperatives to address chronic pollution, improve public health, and upgrade its industrial base,” Modern Diplomacy argued.