On Sunday it was Sun Day — a nationwide climate-activist event, timed to the beginning of New York’s Climate Week, meant to celebrate the fact that, however gloomy or defeated you may be feeling about the future of the planet, solar power, at least, is absolutely booming.
It’s a theme I’ve highlighted, too, over the past few years, including in a recent essay on the state of climate geopolitics for The Times Magazine. Ten years since the landmark Paris Agreement seemed to promise a whole new era for climate politics, the rich world has mostly abandoned warming as a matter of political concern — and the spirit of global solidarity on which those climate goals were supposedly built.
But renewables are storming forward anyway, thanks in large part to the spectacular rise of China as a green-industrial behemoth. By any objective measure, the pace of the global transition remains woefully inadequate. But last year, renewables accounted for 93 percent of global power additions — and as of July, 74 percent of wind and solar projects worldwide were being built by China.
This isn’t just a story about climate action, of course, given that one global power now has control over several major sectors often casually described as the industries of the future. “The decarbonization agenda is not simply about reordering markets or industrial policies, but in fact represents the crucible for a new geopolitical order,” as Nils Gilman wrote suggestively this month in Foreign Policy. “The energy transition is likely to become the center of a new eco-ideological Cold War.” (More on the changing shape of that rivalry in a moment.)
But even as a matter of pure climate politics, the rise of China has been uncomfortable for some observers in the rich world, since it makes the United States and Europe look like secondary players in what they’d always assumed was a kind of morality-play test of Western leadership. It also seems to diminish the role of Western climate activists and inverts the longstanding arguments of energy realists, who long argued that, given the scale and trajectory of Chinese emissions, American action was somewhere between pointless and counterproductive. Now they are all forced to contemplate the possibility that the globally significant project of the energy transition could be driven primarily by a rival force operating largely outside the corridors of Western power.
How large is the project? In just the first six months of 2025, China installed more solar capacity than the United States has managed in its history through the end of last year and twice as much solar power as the rest of the world combined during those six months. It was almost 11 times as much as the country in second place, India. (The United States came in third.) Perhaps just as remarkable has been the flow of Chinese investment in green manufacturing abroad, documented in a recent report from the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins: more than $200 billion of overseas investment since 2022 — a sum larger than for the Marshall Plan in inflation-adjusted dollars.
The result has looked to many rooting for climate action like a kind of deliverance: If the rich world was failing to move fast enough, here came an upstart to take the reins. (To some on the climate left, this was probably ideologically gratifying, too — a kind of comeuppance for Western arrogance and indifference.)
But it all offers some uncomfortable implications for those most concerned about climate change, too. A year ago, in a column contemplating the awesome scale of China’s green industrial revolution, I asked, “What happens if China stops trying to save the world?”
The question was somewhat cheeky, then, since the Chinese trajectories were still moving in the right direction, toward ever-faster installation of renewable technology (and since it wasn’t as if Beijing was pursuing green industrial policy primarily out of magnanimity).
But even the Chinese story may be changing now, and though it doesn’t seem that Beijing is about to turn off the faucet on green manufacturing and renewable exports, it’s also not clear how fast the green flow will be. Those eye-popping six-month installation totals from this year are in part a reflection of developers rushing to complete their projects before a certain subsidy expired. Installations have fallen off significantly from their May peak, and a long slowdown is now expected. Overall, investment spending is in free fall.
About a year ago, top Chinese officials began publicly discussing a problem often called involution — that domestic companies were engaged in such ruthless price competition that (in producing more and more cheaper and cheaper solar panels, for instance) few of them were able to profit.
In the United States, we’ve tended to refer to this phenomenon as overcapacity. My colleague Thomas L. Friedman likes the phrase “fitness gym”: so many companies competing so ruthlessly with one another, it’s like an ambitious country pouring everything into producing world-class Olympic athletes, regardless of how many adolescent lives become collateral damage along the way. It’s also one big reason China has produced so much cheap green tech. And recently, President Xi Jinping declared that he wanted an end to involution and the beginning of a new industrial strategy focused on principles other than the race-to-the-bottom price competition that has helped flood the world with cheap green power.
The climate implications of all this aren’t yet clear — and neither are the geopolitical and geoeconomic ones. But the announcement comes at a time when things are shifting on the U.S. side of the rivalry, as well.
To most Americans, President Trump’s second term probably looks like an intensification of rivalry with China. Think of the blustery and turbulent trade war or that winner-take-all talk about the artificial intelligence race.
But in certain quarters a mood of competition has given way over the past year to something more like envy, with notes of awe struck in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance,” Dan Wang’s “Breakneck” and countless bits of commentary from Noah Smith, Adam Tooze (and, yes, me, too). On the “Sinica” podcast, Kaiser Kuo described it as a full-fledged American “vibe shift.” Last month Greg Ip of The Wall Street Journal suggested that the United States was drifting toward the Chinese model on economic policy — he called it “state capitalism with American characteristics.” And a draft of the new national defense strategy, Politico reported this month, has proposed a pivot away from Cold War-style confrontation with China and toward an American focus on regional dynamics and policing the “homeland.” This is a chilling turn, given the state of domestic politics and the seeming militarization of the culture war. It also amounts to a tacit admission of geopolitical weakness. After all, it’s been a very long time since the United States defined its interests abroad in terms of the Monroe Doctrine.
Again and again, Americans traveling to China come back awed and overwhelmed by the progress being made there — in solar power, battery technology and electric vehicles, especially — and how far behind that leaves anyone struggling to compete here. And while anecdotal despair is not geopolitical destiny, it’s also not exactly an encouraging sign about the state of great-power competition. “Venture capitalists in clean tech are starting to say out loud what they’ve suspected for a while: China’s dominance has left key sectors in the West uninvestable,” Alastair Marsh wrote in a representative report from Bloomberg. Visiting spectacular factory after spectacular factory, one investor told him, you “just realize that catching up to that is futile: It’s not going to happen.”
The conflict over high-end chips has produced an embarrassing comedown for the United States, too. It was barely two years ago that President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was describing such chips as among the most important technologies to keep out of Chinese hands. Over the past few years, an awful lot of policy energy went into designing export controls, with an awful lot of angst devoted to concerns that China was circumventing them and smuggling in some number of world-class chips.
Then, this summer, Trump announced that Nvidia could sell its H20 chips to China, as long as the company delivered a 15 percent kickback to the U.S. government — reasoning that it was better to have a rival power dependent on American technology, after all.
The Chinese response? No, thanks, basically. Last week The Financial Times reported that Chinese tech companies were now barred from buying Nvidia chips not simply because of U.S. national-security concerns but because Chinese authorities believed chips manufactured domestically were just as good. This may prove to be just competitive bluster, one shot across the bow in what has been a somewhat dizzying decade-long volley. Or perhaps we are moving from one stage of rivalry to another, with much of the future of the planet hanging in the balance.