Trump Is Turning the US Into the Planet's Rogue Nation

Tuesday was one of those days when you can feel the world shifting. The think tank Ember reported that for the first half of 2025 renewable energy produced more electricity than coal. More to the point, solar and wind grew so fast that they covered all the growth in demand for electricity so far this year, with room to spare.

That means that fossil fuel emissions for producing electricity plateaued—even fell slightly—over the first half of the year. It’s an epochal moment: It demonstrates that the clean energy transition is not destined to be the slow, dragged-out affair that most analysts would have predicted even five years ago.

“The fall overall of fossil may be small, but it is significant,” said one of the Ember researchers. “This is a turning point when we see emissions plateauing.” Fossil fuel use for electric generation fell 2% in China, and dipped in India as well.

We are allowed to celebrate good news—indeed, in the shadow of our disintegrating democracy it’s necessary that we celebrate what we can when we can. But not because this is a fait accompli—instead, because celebrations along the way give us new strength to push harder for faster change. Which we desperately need to do.

The bewildering disgrace of America’s conduct in the world—a disgrace due entirely to the Trump administration, which continues to dismember the Biden-era efforts to compete with China in the clean energy field—is outweighed by the good news from the rest of the world.

Because we we got new data about the Earth this week too, and it’s epochal as well. And also bad. A study in Nature looked at four of the largest systems on Earth—the Greenland ice sheet, the Atlantic currents, the South Asian monsoon, and the Amazon rainforest—and found that in each case “the stability of these four tipping elements has declined in recent decades, suggesting that they have moved towards their critical thresholds, which may be crossed within the range of unmitigated anthropogenic warming.”

Another way of saying this is: The damage from the carbon and methane trapping heat in our atmosphere has now reached the most critical systems for supporting life on our planet. We have very little time, if any.

And the other caveat to today’s good news is that it didn’t apply to the US—growth in electric demand outpaced new renewable supply in this country, meaning that we poured more, not less, carbon into the air in the first half of the year. Which is hardly surprising, given the Trump administration’s all out war on clean energy. We are quickly emerging as the planet’s rogue nation, determined to deny climate and slow the energy transition as best we can, all in the name of selling more fossil fuel. As Mitchell Beer writes:

“The forecast for the United States is revised down by almost 50%” from a year ago, the report states, after the Trump administration phased out federal renewable energy tax credits ahead of schedule, imposed severe import restrictions on renewables industries, suspended new offshore wind leasing, and curtailed wind and solar leasing on federal lands.

That sets up the third piece of epochal news, this one more about economics and hence politics. Though not many people paid too much attention, new data this week showed that China is now exporting more clean energy than the US is exporting dirty energy:

The US, which has positioned itself as a major fossil fuel exporter, sold $80 billion in oil and gas abroad through July, the last month with data available. China exported $120 billion in green technology over the same period.

With that number, you can feel world leadership passing from Washington to Beijing. It’s even more remarkable because the thing that China is mostly exporting—solar panels—keeps getting cheaper and cheaper:

Dollars only tell part of the story. The price of solar panels is falling, which means that China is exporting more of them per dollar earned. August’s solar export revenue was nowhere near the high set in March 2023. But the 46,000 megawatts of power capacity shipped abroad set a record.

As Edward White writes in the Financial Times:

While US President Donald Trump calls climate change a con, China is offering new technology and products to countries to develop green energy and to prepare for increasingly frequent and intense storms, floods, and droughts.

Two days after our Changsha trip I attended a meeting in Beijing of Chinese officials and representatives of climate-vulnerable nations, a group that includes 74 nations with more than 1.8bn people.

Liz Thompson, a former UN assistant secretary-general and now climate change ambassador for Barbados, said just as climate-vulnerable states are hit by more disasters, they are hampered in their response because of a lack of access to technology and financing. “These challenges provide compelling reasons to work more closely with China,” she said.

Chinese officials and business leaders are keen to oblige. Zhang Shiguo, executive director of China New Energy International Alliance, an organisation backed by government associations and renewable companies, said the country’s green products had already reached 170 countries. “The reason China’s new energy sector has done well is the determination to act,” Zhang added.

The bewildering disgrace of America’s conduct in the world—a disgrace due entirely to the Trump administration, which continues to dismember the Biden-era efforts to compete with China in the clean energy field—is outweighed by the good news from the rest of the world: The atmosphere doesn’t care which nation the carbon dioxide comes from. But it should be one more spur—alongside the sickening pictures from Chicago—for all of us to do what we can to restore the rule of reason in our country. No Kings Day is October 18. Here’s a guide that we at Third Act have put together for finding the demonstration near you.