Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
At a recent White House lunch President Trump hosted for the chief executives of Big Tech companies, the mantra pronounced around the table was that America must dominate AI or China will. Yet, the administration seems perfectly willing to hand an even more fundamental “thermodynamic advantage” to the Middle Kingdom by abandoning the climate policies championed by the U.S. for decades.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, that Chinese advantage is benefiting them even as America recedes from the green scene.
As Bentley Allan writes in Noema, “Green technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles have major thermodynamic advantages over fossil fuels, the drilling, extraction, refining and transportation of which result in expensive energy losses at every distribution and conversion point. Sunlight and wind, on the other hand, produce power with little ongoing cost and are available nearly everywhere. And manufacturing these technologies is scalable and repeatable, which means that producers can learn and improve iteratively.
“Clean technologies aren’t just better for the environment — they’re increasingly more affordable and accessible in the long run, giving more countries a chance to achieve energy security and geopolitical autonomy. That is what’s driving clean energy’s adoption around the world, even in nations without strong climate agendas.”
China Is The Engine
At the forefront of this transition is China, which is changing the planetary dynamic by applying its signature industrial strategy of vertical integration to battery, EV, solar panel and wind technologies. In this way, it has rapidly achieved massive scale through controlling the entire supply chain from raw materials to finished products.
Indeed, just last week, the Ember research group, which tracks the move away from fossil fuels, released a new study that reported that “China’s clean energy transition is fundamentally reshaping the economics of energy across the world. Accelerating deployment of renewables, grids and storage in China, combined with electrification of transport, buildings and industry, are rapidly bringing China itself towards a peak in energy-related fossil fuel use, while also reducing costs and accelerating uptake of clean electro-technologies in other countries. These twin trends are creating the conditions for energy-related fossil fuel use globally to peak and decline.”
Despite the still not insignificant use of legacy coal-fired plants, Ember reports that “clean generation growth led by solar and wind met 84% of China’s electricity demand growth in 2024. In 2025, it exceeded demand growth, cutting fossil fuel use by 2%.” Further, “cheap Chinese tech has enabled 25% of emerging markets to leapfrog the U.S. in end-use electrification (the switch from fossil fuels). 63% have leapfrogged it on solar generation share.”
Overall, according to the report, the scaling up of renewables in China since 2010 has driven the price of these technologies down by 60 to 90%.
“China is the engine,” Richard Black, editor of the Ember report, told the New York Times. “And it is changing the energy landscape not just domestically but in countries across the world.”
From Idealistic Pleas To Hard-Headed Geopolitics
In Noema, Allan argues that China’s example marks a new orientation in the way the international community has sought to curb climate change, shifting from idealistic appeals to planetary conscience at endless summits to a more hard-headed green realpolitik.
“Science and advocacy awakened people to the threat of fossil-fuel-driven environmental catastrophe, creating a powerful global web of carbon accounting, decarbonization policy, diplomatic bargaining and technological advance,” he writes, “Yet it was naive to believe that this alone could transform a global energy system forged over centuries by war and empire.
“The existing framework of legal and scientific imperatives, focused on precise emissions reduction targets, is not enough to sustain meaningful progress because it misses the true forces behind climate action today. Lasting change is more likely to come from strategies that directly confront international competition and try to channel it in productive directions.”
As Allan sees it, “The thermodynamic advantages of renewables and electric technologies are reconfiguring the global landscape of geopolitical power in three ways: through a competition to seize the economic opportunities in the energy transition, through a need for energy security and geopolitical autonomy in a more dangerous world, and through the effort to diversify economies to make them more resilient.”
A Green Spiral
For Allan, market competition combined with collaboration through “carbon clubs” of the willing that coordinate industrial policies, “could lead to a ‘green spiral” through which technological and policy innovations create the self-sustaining processes of decarbonization.
“If competition between states can drive down the costs of net-zero steel or cement, these industries could follow the trajectories of renewables, electric vehicles, heat pumps and industrial heat, with firms and households adopting them simply because they make economic sense. Economic success would help to forge the political coalitions of policymakers, firms and citizens necessary to support deep decarbonization.”
A Partnership Of Rivals
All this raises the conundrum of whether China should be regarded primarily as a geopolitical threat to the liberal world order or as a Green Giant that is the best friend of the planet; the enemy in a new Cold War or the vanguard in the battle against the existential challenge of a warming biosphere? Or both?
As we have written in Noema, a wise policy would split the difference and drop the zero-sum calculus of less complex times. The West will inevitably clash and fortify defenses where national interests diverge, but must align, if not cooperate, where planetary interests converge. In other words, a “partnership of rivals” — the pragmatic expression of “planetary realism” that recognizes the collective imperative of self-preservation.
