By Mel Gurtov
Avoiding Dependence but in Vastly Different Ways
When it comes to energy planning, China and the US are moving in opposite directions. As the New York Times reported on July 1:
“The Trump administration wants to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels like oil and gas . . . The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas, offering the potential for what Mr. Trump has called an era of American ‘energy dominance’ . . . China is racing in an altogether different direction. It’s banking on a world that runs on cheap electricity from the sun and wind, and that relies on China for affordable, high-tech solar panels and turbines. China leads the world in both.”
Unlike the United States, the Times goes on, “China doesn’t have much easily accessible oil or gas of its own relative to its huge population. So it is eager to eliminate dependence on imported fossil fuels and instead power more of its economy with renewables.”
It’s important to note that each country’s primary motivation is national security, not concern about climate change or protection of the environment. Trump wants US “energy dominance” to avoid dependence on foreign powers. Directly and indirectly subsidizing the fossil fuel industries has top priority. He’s willing to drill everywhere, most recently opening huge areas of the Tongass and other national forests while at the same time eliminating hundreds of environmental protection regulations.
Xi Jinping also wants to avoid dependence on foreign sources of energy, an aim underscored when Iran, a major source of oil for China, came under attack. But excessive reliance on coal harms public health and the environment, sometimes causing local protests. Still, Xi, like Trump, puts production ahead of environmental protection in the alternative energy field.
The breakneck speed of China’s production of clean energy technologies, from mining to factory, probably has come at considerable cost to worker safety and health. There is no free lunch, as Barry Commoner reminded us many years ago.
The Chinese Advantage
China now has a large and growing lead in energy technologies—the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles, among others. The Trump administration is busily cutting subsidies to all these industries.
The other day he again revealed his ignorance about the subject when he complained that China exports wind turbines but doesn’t use wind power. In fact, China is the world leader in wind farms. And it accounts for three times the wind energy as the US. Meantime, his budget bill will, in the estimate of The Rhodium Group, a research firm, put a stop to between 57 and 72 percent of new solar and wind projects.
China holds the hammer over the US and all other countries in its dominant position in the mining and processing of rare earth minerals. You can’t operate wind turbines, drive an EV, or produce any advanced technology without those minerals. Although China has promised to smooth applications for rare earth magnets, its commerce ministry is taking its time—and taking passports away from rare earth experts to prevent sharing of trade secrets.
Both countries are exporting their energy models—the US by trying to persuade customers (most recently, Japan and, yes, China) to buy American oil, China by winning over developing countries with green energy technologies (such as Saudi Arabia). For example, China leads the world by a large margin in exports of lithium-ion batteries, EVs, and solar panels, while the US is far ahead of China in exports of oil and natural gas. Guess in whose direction countries in the Global South are leaning.
Finally, China’s lead over the US is growing in nuclear power. China has 24 nuclear plants in operation and over 1,000 in various stages of construction, nearly as many as the rest of the world combined. Its nuclear power capacity puts China third behind the US and France, but not for long. Beijing has announced advances in next-generation nuclear technologies and also in fusion.
Riveted on Success
China’s energy advantage has been shaped by the organization of work. Robotics plays an increasingly important role in factories. “Cluster manufacturing” brings all the elements of production together. As one Chinese solar panel manufacturer says: “There are places where, within a three- to four-hour drive, you can have everything. The components, the manufacturer, the skilled workforce, everything. There’s nowhere else globally where you can have all that innovation clustered together.”
Michael Dunne, a former GM executive with many years in the auto business in Beijing, describes how EV manufacturer BYD has become the world leader by a combination of heavy government subsidies, vertical integration of production, innovation, and long-term planning. BYD models are so good, and so inexpensive, that if the US allowed them to be imported, they would shortly put competitors here out of business.
The scale of China’s green energy operations is staggering: huge solar power arrays and EV factories, for instance. Compare that with Trump’s budget cuts in renewable energy projects, which means “ghost factories” and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. North America’s Building Trades Unions slammed the budget as “the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country.” “Critical infrastructure projects essential to that future are being sacrificed at the altar of ideology,” the organization said in a statement.
And the Winner Is?
Is there any question about which country will dominate the energy future? “The U.S. will champion a fossil fuel economy, and China will become the leader of the low-carbon economy,” said Li Shuo, who heads the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The question for the US now is, where do you go from here?”
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s answer is that Trump’s budget bill will “make China great again.” “The Chinese simply can’t believe their luck: that at the dawn of the electricity-guzzling era of artificial intelligence, the US president and his party have decided to engage in one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm imaginable.”
The rational response to China’s challenge would be, “back to the future,” by defeating Trump’s drill-baby-drill agenda and restoring all the green energy and environmental protection programs that he has eviscerated. If opinion polls are correct, that answer has the American public’s strong support.
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University.