How Trump is helping China extend its massive lead in clean energy

On a spring day in 1954, Bell Labs researchers showed off the first practical solar panels at a press conference in Murray Hill, New Jersey, using sunlight to spin a toy Ferris wheel before a stunned crowd.

The solar future looked bright. But in the race to commercialize the technology it invented, the US would lose resoundingly. Last year, China exported $40 billion worth of solar panels and modules, while America shipped just $69 million, according to the New York Times. It was a stunning forfeit of a huge technological lead.

And now the US seems determined to repeat the mistake. In its quest to prop up aging fossil-fuel industries, the Trump administration has slashed federal support for the emerging cleantech sector, handing his nation’s chief economic rival the most generous of gifts: an unobstructed path to locking in its control of emerging energy technologies, and a leg up in inventing the industries of the future.

China’s dominance of solar was no accident. In the late 2000s, the government simply determined that the sector was a national priority. Then it leveraged deep subsidies, targeted policies, and price wars to scale up production, drive product improvements, and slash costs. It’s made similar moves in batteries, electric vehicles, and wind turbines. 

The tax and spending bill that Trump signed into law in early July wound down the subsidies for solar and wind power contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The legislation also cut off federal support for cleantech projects that rely too heavily on Chinese materials—a hamfisted bid to punish Chinese industries that will instead make many US projects financially unworkable.  Meanwhile, the administration has slashed federal funding for science and attacked the financial foundations of premier research universities, pulling up the roots of future energy innovations and industries.

A driving motivation for many of these policies is the quest to protect the legacy energy industry based on coal, oil, and natural gas, all of which the US is geologically blessed with. But this strategy amounts to the innovator’s dilemma playing out at a national scale—a country clinging to its declining industries rather than investing in the ones that will define the future.

It does not particularly matter whether Trump believes in or cares about climate change. The economic and international security imperatives to invest in modern, sustainable industries are every bit as indisputable as the chemistry of greenhouse gases.

Without sustained industrial policies that reward innovation, American entrepreneurs and investors won’t risk money and time creating new businesses, developing new products, or building first-of-a-kind projects here. Indeed, venture capitalists have told the author that numerous US climate-tech companies are already looking overseas, seeking markets where they can count on government support. Some fear that many other companies will fail in the coming months as subsidies disappear, developments stall, and funding flags. 

All of which will help China extend an already massive lead.

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