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.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has set to work unraveling hard-won clean-energy achievements in the US, snuffing out the gathering momentum to rebuild the nation’s energy sector in cleaner, more sustainable ways.
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 me 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.
The nation has installed nearly three times as many wind turbines as the US, and it generates more than twice as much solar power. It boasts five of the 10 largest EV companies in the world, and the three largest wind turbine manufacturers. China absolutely dominates the battery market, producing the vast majority of the anodes, cathodes, and battery cells that increasingly power the world’s vehicles, grids, and gadgets.
China harnessed the clean-energy transition to clean up its skies, upgrade its domestic industries, create jobs for its citizens, strengthen trade ties, and build new markets in emerging economies. In turn, it’s using those business links to accrue soft power and extend its influence—all while the US turns it back on global institutions.
These widening relationships increasingly insulate China from external pressures, including those threatened by Trump’s go-to tactic: igniting or inflaming trade wars.
But stiff tariffs and tough talk aren’t what built the world’s largest economy and established the US as the global force in technology for more than a century. What did was deep, sustained federal investment into education, science, and research and development—the very budget items that Trump and his party have been so eager to eliminate.
Another thing
Earlier this summer, the EPA announced plans to revoke the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” the legal foundation for regulating the nation’s greenhouse-gas pollution.
The agency’s argument leans heavily on a report that rehashes decades-old climate-denial talking points to assert that rising emissions haven’t produced the harms that scientists expected. It’s a wild, Orwellian plea for you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears in a summer that saw record heat waves in the Midwest and East and is now blanketing the West in wildfire smoke.
Over the weekend, more than 85 scientists sent a point-by-point, 459-page rebuttal to the federal government, highlighting myriad ways in which the report “is biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policy making,” as Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers, put it on Bluesky.
“The authors reached these flawed conclusions through selective filtering of evidence (‘cherry picking’), overemphasis of uncertainties, misquoting peer-reviewed research, and a general dismissal of the vast majority of decades of peer-reviewed research,” the dozens of reviewers found.
The Trump administration handpicked researchers who would write the report it wanted to support its quarrel with thermometers and justify its preordained decision to rescind the endangerment finding. But it’s legally bound to hear from others as well, notes Karen McKinnon, a climate researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Luckily, there is time to take action,” McKinnon said in a statement. “Comment on the report, and contact your representatives to let them know we need to take action to bring back the tolerable summers of years past.”
You can read the full report here, or NPR’s take here. And be sure to read Casey Crownhart’s earlier piece in The Spark on the endangerment finding.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.