China’s two-fold climate advantage over the West is unraveling. The Trump administration’s revocation of the 2009 climate endangerment finding, the UN’s COP30 failure in Brazil, the reappraisals of Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates, and the frank admissions by some in Europe all point to an overdue shift in the West’s position. Beijing must be devastated because China has benefited absolutely from selling the West green energy technology and benefitted relatively as this technology has reduced the competitiveness of Western nations.
On February 12, the Trump administration revoked the EPA’s 2009 climate “endangerment finding” that classified CO-2 and five other greenhouse gases as public health threats. In contrast to his second-term’s first-day withdrawal (for the second time) from the 2015 Paris Agreement, this action had real teeth. The 2009 finding underpins a host of administration regulations (on vehicles, power facilities, and oil and gas operations). With the finding revoked, the regulations that relied on it could come down as well. Lawsuits are certain to follow from blue states and environmental groups.
The Trump administration called the revocation: “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. In this final rule, EPA is saving American taxpayers over $1.3 trillion…” Climate groups were apoplectic: The Union of Concerned Scientists’ CEO, Dr. Gretchen Goldman, said it was "an obvious example of what happens when a corrupt administration and fossil fuel interests are allowed to run amok."
The “endangerment finding” revocation comes on the heels of 2025’s failed COP30 summit in Brazil, which ended as Nature wrote: without “a roadmap to cut fossil fuels” that left many participants “dismayed and disappointed.”
No one is probably more “dismayed and disappointed” from these outcomes than China.
No country has benefited more from the sentiment to move to “green energy” than China. Not because China has made that move itself, mind you. On the contrary, China is the world’s biggest polluter, with over twice the CO2 emissions of the U.S. the second largest emitter.
No, China has benefited from the sentiment to move to “green energy” because it has been able to sell it both figuratively (that it too supports the climate agenda and will very soon, oh so very soon, embrace it too) and literally—and not just sell it, but sell it from a monopoly position.
China has not earned either of these “sells” on its own. Instead, the West has collectively gifted both to China.
The first figurative “sell” is a present of the West’s collective gullibility that China will one day practice what they preach—only not today. Or yesterday. Or tomorrow, when it has come every day after today thus far. But the lure ever remains for the West: to hear their platitudes of anti-pollution preached back to them and to hope that the world’s second-largest economy and the world’s largest polluter will one day join them.
China’s literal “sell” is a present that the West collectively presented to the CCP by giving them all the “dirty” jobs that “clean” energy requires to be undertaken to make it. Unwilling to soil either their hands or their consciences, the West got themselves out of the business of mining or making so-called “rare earth” minerals. That foisting abroad these “dirty” endeavors when the “problem” they are facing is global (as in “warming”)—and that they were shunting them aside to a country with laxer or no environmental regulations, thus making for an outcome that was even “dirtier”—made no sense also made no difference.
So, China was given a virtual monopoly on extracting these substances. And with a virtual monopoly at the origin of the product chain, why not move that monopoly vertically further up and sell “green energy” goods to a West happy to pay any price to make its principles real?
So, China did. It essentially became a monopoly supplier of “green” technology from solar panels to wind turbines to electric batteries. The position that the West gifted to China was one of twofold advantage. China could sell with almost absolute market leverage and reap outsized profits, profits that China could hold back in the short run to drive out other competitors and further enhance its monopoly and profits in the long run. Such a philosophy perfectly matched the mercantilist approach China has taken since the West took it into the global trading system—and was taken in, in turn, by the idea that, by taking China in, China would change.
Further, China benefited from the West’s use of more expensive and less efficient energy technology, which raised the West’s cost of production and the cost of its goods in the global market. China therefore, became relatively more competitive.
China won on both sides of the West’s “green” shift. Handsomely. It reaped outsized rewards from the direct sale of “green” technology and then reaped the relative reward from the West’s implementation of the more costly and less efficient energy technology it sold them.
You couldn’t make this up; nor could China have ever obtained such a one-sided relationship on its own. Instead, China was given it. On a silver platter—or rather, a lithium one. And to boot this relationship also gave China geopolitical leverage whenever it threatens to withhold its “green” products from the West.
Now, though China is seeing its twofold advantage unwinding. The evidence is not just in the Trump administration’s unilateral actions or COP30’s multilateral inaction, but in the concerted actions of the West to circumvent China’s “green” monopoly. Just this month, the U.S. joined 54 nations and the European Commission in a ministerial summit to take “action to build secure and resilient critical mineral supply chains.”
While environmentalists want to write the Trump administration’s revocation to Trump alone and COP30 to an unwieldy process, the steps back from “green energy” alarmism have been noticeable for some time. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently warned Europe: “Europe has gone from 90% of U.S. GDP to 65% over 10 or 15 years. That’s not good.” It’s worth noting that Dimon’s timetable of EU decline sits squarely in the period since 2015’s Paris Agreement.
Just ahead of COP30, Bill Gates spoke sanity to the sanctimonious holding a “doomsday view of climate change”: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.”
Even European leaders have been echoing these as Europeans have suffered the fallout of their diminished competitiveness. Said Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever recently: “The EU’s green energy policies make it impossible to provide for our own energy needs, make it impossible to mine for rare minerals in Europe…..we’ve made dogmatic choices against nuclear energy which was the stupidity of the century…The de-carbonisation of Europe risks becoming synonymous with the de-industrialisation of Europe.”
China could not have said it better…though of course, China never would admit it.
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.
