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The United Nations’ annual climate conference kicked off on Monday in Brazil with a very notable absence. In a historic political statement, the United States did not send any high-level representation to the flagship COP30 conference in Belem, the biggest and more important international event of its kind. This omission comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s decision to pull the country out of the Paris climate agreement. But while the world’s largest economy is taking a step back from decarbonization and clean energy initiatives, the rest of the world is carrying on full-steam ahead. Many experts have noted that the United States’ high-profile pivot away from clean energy expansion has opened up a major opportunity for competitors, and particularly China. Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, won’t be in attendance at COP30, but Chinese presence and influence will still be strong. “While China’s leader also isn’t attending, COP will showcase the inroads Beijing’s clean-tech industry has made in Latin America,” reads a recent Semafor report. “Brazil chose Chinese EVs to shuttle attendees, a signal that ‘the world is moving on, even without US political and technological leadership,’” an expert told the news outlet. This assertion is well founded. Globally, we are continuing to make major and historic gains in renewable deployment and electrification efforts, with renewables overtaking coal as the world’s biggest source of electricity earlier this year in a historic milestone achievement. China alone added 300 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity since just the beginning of this year, nearly five times the entire renewable capacity of the United Kingdom. And it’s not just China, Europe, and other deep-pocketed countries driving the charge toward renewable energy expansion. In fact, some of the leading nations pushing clean energy numbers may surprise you. An increasing number of developing countries, including countries across South America, Africa, southeast Asia and the Middle East, are joining the ranks of the fastest-growing clean energy adopters in the world. This is all thanks to the changing economics of renewable energy, and especially the affordability and abundance of solar power technologies. Buoyed by a flood of cheap solar panels and turbine components coming out of China, countries including Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Morocco, Kenya, and Namibia have now overtaken the United States in their clean energy trajectories. According to Yale Environment 360, approximately 63 percent of emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are sourcing more of their power generation from solar power than the United States. “Some countries are pulling off stunningly fast energy transitions, adding solar so rapidly, it’s become a major source of electricity over the course of years — not decades,” reports CNN. One such example is Pakistan, which became “one of the world's largest new adopters” of solar power practically overnight. "The scale of solar being deployed in such a short period of time has not been seen, I think, anywhere ever before,” Jan Rosenow, who leads the Environmental Change Institute’s energy program at the University of Oxford, told NPR earlier this year. This stunning transition would not be possible without the plummeting costs of wind and solar technologies, which, in turn, would not be possible without mass-scale Chinese manufacturing. “We’ve seen the world starting to benefit from that scale, enabling these emerging economies to seize the opportunity to really leap-frog into the next energy era,” Lars Nitter Havro, leader of energy macro research at Rystad Energy, told CNN. The scale and affordability of China’s clean energy manufacturing has shored up China’s near-total dominance of global clean energy supply chains and energy influence in emerging economies across the globe. It’s also the only thing keeping decarbonization in reach for many nations, as other plans for making the energy transition affordable – such as the broken promise of climate finance – have been massive failures. By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Oil Prices Dip As Oversupply Concerns Mount Oil Prices Plunge 2.5% as OPEC, IEA Outlooks Point to Softer Market China Looks to Expand Renewable Energy Use Beyond Electricity
