China has watched, no doubt with incredulous glee, a succession of bonehead, fossil fuel dominated Republican administrations, playing directly into its hands – whether Dubya Bush’s brutal war for Oil , to the current fossil corrupted Whitehouse’s decisive turn back to 19th century technology.
Now is their time.
As the United States torpedoes climate action and Europe struggles to realize its green ambitions, a surprising shift is taking hold in many large, fast-growing economies where a majority of the world’s people live.
Countries like Brazil, India, and Vietnam are rapidly expanding solar and wind power. Poorer countries like Ethiopia and Nepal are leapfrogging over gasoline-burning cars to battery-powered ones. Nigeria, a petrostate, plans to build its first solar-panel manufacturing plant. Morocco is creating a battery hub to supply European automakers. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has electrified more than half of its bus fleet in recent years.
Key to this shift is the world’s new renewable energy superpower: China.
Having saturated its own market with solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, Chinese companies are now exporting their wares to energy-hungry countries in the developing world. What’s more, they’re investing billions of dollars in factories that make things like solar panels in Vietnam and electric cars in Brazil.
In effect, Chinese industrial policy is shaping the development trajectory of some of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
“From a climate point of view, the developing countries are showing solutions,” said André Corrêa do Lago, the Brazilian diplomat shepherding this year’s international climate talks, known as COP30, in the Brazilian city of Belém.
“I think that emerging countries are appearing in this COP with a different role,” he added.
Is that completely fixing the problem of climate change? No. Most countries, including these big, growing economies, still get the majority of their energy from fossil fuels. Indonesia is still mining vast amounts of coal, the dirtiest energy source. India and China continue their coal-plant building spree. Brazil plans to expand oil production.
But these countries are increasingly meeting large portions of their energy needs with renewable power, both for the cost savings and for energy security reasons. Many are trying to reduce the amount of fossil fuels they import, to relieve pressure on their foreign currency reserves.
Rapidly falling prices of Chinese technology are enabling them to do that. Ani Dasgupta, head of the World Resources Institute, an environmental research and advocacy group, said it shows how economic development can go hand in hand with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Emerging economies are a very important part of the story,” he said. “The reason we should be paying attention is that they have the most people in the world, they have the largest number of poor people in the world, and their energy demands are growing. If these economies don’t change, there’s no chance for the world to get to a safer place.”
Ethiopia last year took the extraordinary step of banning the import of new gasoline-powered cars. Nepal reduced import duties on electric vehicles so much that they are now cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines. Brazil raised tariffs on all car imports to compel Chinese automakers like BYD and Great Wall Motors to set up plants inside Brazil.
Chinese manufacturing investments around the world have exceeded $225 billion in total since 2011, according to the Net Zero Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University, with three-fourths of that money going into what the report’s authors called countries in the global south, a collective term for low-income countries and emerging economies. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than the United States poured into the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Even India, wary of relying on imports from China, its neighbor and rival, has lifted a page from the Chinese industrial policy playbook. The government is using incentives to install huge amounts of solar power and make much more solar equipment at home.
In short, the center of gravity seems to be shifting.
Ten years ago, when the Paris Agreement was signed, it was the rich, industrialized countries like the United States and Europe that were leaning on developing countries to take faster action to reduce their planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. Developing countries responded that they, too, had the right to industrialize and that rich countries should help them finance the transition to cleaner fuels.
That financial help has mostly not materialized. The ire of developing-country leaders remains.
But the economics have changed.
“Ten years ago, you had the political commitment, but you didn’t have the markets,” said Kaysie Brown, the associate director for climate diplomacy and geopolitics at E3G, a European research and advocacy group. “Now I think we’re in an inflection point where in some cases, like renewables, you do have the markets. So there’s a question about where in this changing landscape you start to see political leadership come from.”
Brazil and China have jointly championed climate action in recent years, as part of a move to reduce their own climate vulnerability and raise their international profiles. With US President Donald Trump withdrawing from global cooperation and the world seeking new sources of leadership, their moment has come. Yet the two countries offer a different tone — emphasizing the Global South’s right to develop and putting the onus on richer nations to achieve tougher emissions cuts.
China, meanwhile, still the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by volume and once the pariah of climate ambition, is staking its claim to leadership, both as the steady and reliable partner in the global energy transition and the primary purveyor of the means to achieve it.
COP30 in Belém may well be remembered as the moment that the world accepted the leading role of China in addressing humanity’s most important challenge.
The behavior of the U.S. delegation at a recent meeting in London to finalize an agreement on limiting emissions from maritime traffic is a further warning to delegates in Belém. U.S. threats to other delegations in London reportedly succeeded in stalling the formal acceptance of a global treaty that had already been agreed, after 10 hard years of effort.
China will dominate that energy future. It’s arguable that this didn’t have to happen, and Europe may be able to keep some role in wind power. But under Donald Trump, America has taken itself out of the game, and even if sanity eventually returns to U.S. energy policy (and U.S. politics in general), by then we will almost surely be too far behind to catch up.
Nepal’s high altitude must make combustion engines less efficient. That, and it must cost a lot to ship fuel there.