Thirteen years ago, when he was just a real estate developer struggling to break into reality TV, Donald Trump dropped this line: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese to make American manufacturing uncompetitive." At the time, few paid attention to what was yet another provocation in a sea of exaggeration, and no one imagined that he would one day become president of the United States and capable of implementing climate measures according to his whims.
Since then, one piece of "good news" has followed another. Climate change no longer exists: It has been erased from US government documents with the stroke of a pen. Which only makes sense – after all, it's a "hoax." Fossil fuels are no longer a nuisance responsible for CO2 emissions, but heaven-sent, and their mining must be encouraged. Gone are the wind turbines and solar panels that Joe Biden promoted with his massive green economy investment plan, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). His mistake, according to Trump, was that he only wanted "to make China richer." The only departure from this "fossil first" program was Trump's purchase of a Tesla to give his fervent supporter Elon Musk's ailing business a boost.
In the same way that Vladimir Putin did not expect the US president to accede to most of his demands concerning the invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping must also take it as a divine surprise that the world's leading power should abandon the race for climate transition, which, like it or not, will structure the energy supply by the middle of the century.
China already controls 80% of the world's solar panel production (compared with 2% for the US), over 50% of the assembly of electric vehicles, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries, and much of the mining and refining of components essential to the energy transition. According to calculations by the International Energy Agency (IEA), China is six years ahead of schedule in its plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. As Beijing plans to accelerate, Washington is putting the brakes on.
You have 59.8% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.