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Why China’s slowdown is ominous for the West’s climate policy

Would it be easier to fight climate change if America was China’s ally, or even a neutral third party, rather than its growing rival?
For the past few years, this has been one of the great what-ifs of global climate policy. It’s also been somewhat moot because, well, America isn’t China’s ally. The United States would never have passed the Inflation Reduction Act if not for China’s perceived technological leadership (even if China also emits far more carbon pollution than America does).
But the question has persisted, and it has hinted at a larger one: How should a given country approach the energy transition? Should it try to assert itself by making some input to decarbonization, some necessary technology? Or should it simply allow China, the world’s factory, to sell it everything it needs to decarbonize?
For years, many countries — especially in Europe — have tried to walk a line between these two approaches, promising that decarbonization could lead to good jobs at home while avoiding outright protectionism. But recent events have rendered this dilemma less and less theoretical. As the Chinese economy slows, the world will have to decide how to handle its climate-friendly industries.
A brief backgrounder. China dominates the global clean-energy manufacturing industry. It makes 60% of the world’s electric car batteries and wind turbines. It manufactures 80% of its solar panels. By one measure, the Chinese automaker BYD became the world’s largest electric vehicle maker this year, outselling Tesla. Chinese companies are also able to make many of these products more cheaply and at a greater scale than those of other countries.
China also finds itself in an increasingly troublesome economic slowdown. Its working-age population has peaked, home prices have fallen, and consumer activity is moribund. Even as the rest of the world combats stubborn inflation, China has slipped into deflation.
Although China’s slowdown is being driven by a few factors, its core problem is structural. For the past few decades, China has grown its economy by juicing production on the supply side — the construction firms, steelmakers, real-estate developers, and (more recently) manufacturing sector. It invested heavily in infrastructure projects, laying more cement in three years than the United States made in the entire 20th century. This type of infrastructure spending is key to how local Chinese leaders generate economic growth on paper, meeting the national government’s GDP targets. It also helps them stay in power and sometimes enrich themselves.
This arrangement has suppressed worker wages and dampened consumer spending. China’s capital controls have also forced Chinese families to save in the places where the government wants them to. As Paul Krugman writes, that led first to a surge in global goods exports, then to a real-estate bubble, which popped a few years ago.
Faced with such a conundrum, most Western economists would recommend that the national government offer support directly to consumers and households — much like the American government did during the pandemic. That would help families repair their finances, which were damaged by the real-estate bubble, and give them the money and security to buy the products that Chinese factories manufacture. It would, in essence, continue the process of turning China into a consumer economy.
But China doesn’t seem to want to do that. Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that President Xi Jinping does not believe that China should provide direct fiscal support to consumers. Instead, he appears to believe that China should recover through austerity, fiscal discipline, and by increasing its support of its manufacturing and industrial sectors.
Xi and the men around him seem to hold a set of ideas that, in a Western context, we would see as an odd mix of the right and left. On the one hand, Xi is suspicious of “welfarism” and warns that China must avoid the mistakes of Latin America (as he understands them). On the other hand, Xi dislikes entrepreneurs — see here his treatment of Jack Ma — and is suspicious of what we would call the software industry.
China’s leaders also don’t want to give consumers more power in their economy for fear of disempowering the Communist Party, which is able to use its power over banks to shape the domestic economy. Private consumption makes up about 60% of the average country’s GDP. (In the U.S., it’s closer to 70%.) But in China, households consume less than 40% of GDP. But according to the Journal, Xi believes “China should address ‘insufficient effective supply capacity’ — in essence, build more factories and industry — so as not to become overly dependent on ‘overseas shopping’ for goods supplied by the West.”
One domestic industry that China’s leaders do like is the clean-energy industry, the hundreds of firms that make electric cars, batteries, renewables, and their constituent parts and ingredients. These companies not only generate a ton of exports — China became the world’s top car exporter this year, driven in part by the success of the electric-car maker BYD — but they are strategically useful, placing China at the center of the global energy transition while relieving it of its dependence on seaborne fossil-fuel imports.
And that is what concerns me. The Chinese government is planning a new burst of infrastructure and factory spending, according to the Journal, and it may also make it easier for certain government-favored firms and projects to borrow money. These measures don’t even need to directly target the clean-energy industry to help it: There are so many constraints on how and where investment happens in China that the money could flow into these green-energy firms anyway.
But that could set up an unstable dynamic in the world economy — and one that will matter profoundly for the politics of decarbonization.
Deluged with cash, those EV and clean-energy firms would expand production, flooding the market with even more vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and the rest. But Chinese consumers won’t have the money to buy that stuff, so it will get exported abroad, driving down global prices even further.
And that brings us back to the Chinese decarbonization paradox. Would a global glut of Chinese climate tech be good for the planet? In the short term, probably yes. (My colleague Jeremy Wallace recently argued that it could be a very good thing.) Chinese firms already make some of the world’s cheapest electric vehicles and batteries. Expanding production further would allow China to keep learning by doing, driving down their cost even further. If the yuan were to lose value against the dollar or Euro (something that, to be clear, the Chinese government hopes to avoid), then that technology would get even cheaper. And cheaper EVs are a good thing, because more drivers would be able to buy them, cutting global oil demand.
But such a glut would be politically complicated in the medium and long term. Across developed democracies, politicians have promised that the energy transition will create good jobs at home. President Joe Biden’s mantra — “When I hear climate, I think jobs” — is just the most recent of many similar promises issued in Asia and Europe.
And a sudden global export glut of Chinese clean tech could be catastrophic for those promises, especially in Europe and North America, where inflation is higher and interest rates are tighter. When Chinese firms flooded the world with cheap solar panels in the early 2010s, they inadvertently killed a crop of companies abroad working on advanced or experimental solar technology — including Solyndra, the American startup whose failure became synonymous with President Barack Obama’s aborted green industrial policy.
Now, to some degree, the United States may have insulated itself from a glut this time by passing the Inflation Reduction Act, whose subsidies will ensure that America maintains at least a minimal base of solar panel, battery, and electric vehicle production. The Biden administration has also shown itself to be more willing to raise tariffs to fight sudden shifts in the market. But if American companies want to export what they make in the U.S. — and they should, given that making globally competitive products is essential for maintaining an edge — then they will have to compete with bargain-basement prices.
Where a deluge of Chinese EVs would be really catastrophic is Europe, where BYD and other Chinese automakers have already made a beachhead. Volkswagen and other European manufacturers are switching to an all-electric fleet slower than their Chinese counterparts; their vehicles are also more expensive than Chinese imports.
To be sure, there’s no guarantee that China’s slowdown will automatically lead to a global green glut; Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me that he doesn’t think it’s the most likely scenario. But I’m worried anyway. The EU has been slow to react to the Inflation Reduction Act; its trade negotiators have clung to the ideal of free global trade even as the continent’s major trading partners have modified their approaches. (Even when it does engage in quasi-protectionism — such as with its carbon border adjustment mechanism — it has chosen methods with a veneer of fairness and impartiality.) In the European democracies, meanwhile, the far right is gaining steam. Will the EU bureaucracy adjust its stance in time?
For the past few decades, the decarbonization story has been a sideshow on the world stage. Diplomats gathered once a year to discuss climate change, then they got on with the major set pieces of geopolitics: trade, economics, war, peace. But Bidenomics and the Chinese slowdown show that that act has ended. Those of us who care about climate change — who have devoted our time, money, or careers to slowing it — can no longer pretend our issue exists solely in a domestic or environmental context. We insisted for years that climate change was the world’s most important story, and the world, in all its terrible power, has finally listened.
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The state formerly led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum does not have a history of rejecting wind farms – which makes some recent difficulties especially noteworthy.
A wind farm in North Dakota – the former home of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum – is becoming a bellwether for the future of the sector in one of the most popular states for wind development.
At issue is Allete’s Longspur project, which would see 45 turbines span hundreds of acres in Morton County, west of Bismarck, the rural state’s most populous city.
Sited amid two already operating wind farms, the project will feed power not only to North Dakotans but also to Minnesotans, who, in the view of Allete, lack the style of open plains perfect for wind farms found in the Dakotas. Allete subsidiary Minnesota Power announced Longspur in August and is aiming to build and operate it by 2027, in time to qualify for clean electricity tax benefits under a hastened phase-out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
On paper, this sounds achievable. North Dakota is one of the nation’s largest producers of wind-generated power and not uncoincidentally boasts some of cheapest electricity in the country at a time when energy prices have become a potent political issue. Wind project rejections have happened, but they’ve been rare.
Yet last week, zoning officials in Morton County bucked the state’s wind-friendly reputation and voted to reject Longspur after more than an hour of testimony from rural residents who said they’d had enough wind development – and that officials should finish the job Donald Trump and Doug Burgum started.
Across the board, people who spoke were neighbors of existing wind projects and, if built, Longspur. It wasn’t that they didn’t want any wind turbines – or “windmills,” as they called them, echoing Trump’s nomenclature. But they didn’t want more of them. After hearing from the residents, zoning commission chair Jesse Kist came out against the project and suggested the county may have had enough wind development for now.
“I look at the area on this map and it is plum full of wind turbines, at this point,” Kist said, referencing a map where the project would be situated. “And we have a room full of people and we heard only from landowners, homeowners in opposition. Nobody in favor.”
This was a first for the county, zoning staff said, as public comment periods weren’t previously even considered necessary for a wind project. Opposition had never shown up like this before. This wasn’t lost on Andy Zachmeier, a county commissioner who also sits on the zoning panel, who confessed during the hearing that the county was approaching the point of overcrowding. “Sooner or later, when is too many enough?” he asked.
Zachmeier was ultimately one of the two officials on the commission to vote against rejecting Longspur. He told me he was looking to Burgum for a signal.
“The Green New Deal – I don’t have to like it but it’s there,” he said. “Governor Burgum is now our interior secretary. There’s been no press conferences by him telling the president to change the Green New Deal.” Zachmeier said it was not the county’s place to stop the project, but rather that it was up to the state government, a body Burgum once led. “That’s probably going to have to be a legislative question. There’s been nothing brought forward where the county can say, We’ve been inundated and we’ve had enough,” he told me.
The county commission oversees the zoning body, and on Wednesday, Zachmeier and his colleagues voted to deny Longspur’s rejection and requested that zoning officials reconsider whether the denial was a good idea, or even legally possible. Unlike at the hearing last week, landowners whose property includes the wind project area called for it to proceed, pointing to the monetary benefits its construction would provide them.
“We appreciate the strong support demonstrated by landowners at the recent Commission meeting,” Allete’s corporate communications director Amy Rutledge told me in an email. “This region of North Dakota combines exceptional wind resources, reliable electric transmission infrastructure, and a strong tradition of coexisting seamlessly with farming and ranching activities.”
I personally doubt that will be the end of Longspur’s problems before the zoning board, and I suspect this county will eventually restrict or even ban future wind projects. Morton County’s profile for renewables development is difficult, to say the least; Heatmap Pro’s modeling gives the county an opposition risk score of 92 because it’s a relatively affluent agricultural community with a proclivity for cultural conservatism – precisely the kind of bent that can be easily swayed by rhetoric from Trump and his appointees.
Morton County also has a proclivity for targeting advanced tech-focused industrial development. Not only have county officials instituted a moratorium on direct air capture facilities, they’ve also banned future data center and cryptocurrency mining projects.
Neighboring counties have also restricted some forms of wind energy infrastructure. McClean County to the north, for example, has instituted a mandatory wind turbine setback from the Missouri River, and Stark County to the west has a 2,000-foot property setback from homes and public buildings.
In other words, so goes Burgum, may go North Dakota? I suppose we’ll find out.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Staten Island, New York – New York’s largest battery project, Swiftsure, is dead after fervent opposition from locals in what would’ve been its host community, Staten Island.
2. Barren County, Kentucky – Do you remember Wood Duck, the solar farm being fought by the National Park Service? Geenex, the solar developer, claims the Park Service has actually given it the all-clear.
3. Near Moss Landing, California – Two different communities near the now-infamous Moss Landing battery site are pressing for more restrictions on storage projects.
4. Navajo County, Arizona – If good news is what you’re seeking, this Arizona county just approved a large solar project, indicating this state still has sunny prospects for utility-scale development depending on where you go.
5. Gillespie County, Texas – Meanwhile out in Texas, this county is getting aggressive in its attempts to kill a battery storage project.
6. Clinton County, Iowa – This county just extended its moratorium on wind development until at least the end of the year as it drafts a restrictive ordinance.
A chat with with Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank that handles energy issues. This week, the Institute released a report calling for a “public option” to solve the offshore wind industry’s woes – literally. As in, the group believes an ombudsman agency akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority that takes equity stakes or at least partial ownership of offshore wind projects would mitigate investment risk, should a future Democratic president open the oceans back up for wind farms.
While I certainly found the idea novel and interesting, I had some questions about how a public office standing up wind farms would function, and how to get federal support for such an effort post-Trump. So I phoned up Johanna, who cowrote the document, to talk about it.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How did we get here? What’s the impetus for this specific idea – an authority to handle building out offshore wind?
As you have covered very closely, [the Trump administration is] stymying huge manufacturing opportunities for union workers, and obviously putting [decarbonization] way off course. Even though it’s an odd time to talk about a federally-focused offshore wind agenda, I think because the administration is scaring off investment in this sector, increasingly our only option in a more amenable administration may be to just do it ourselves.
From my perspective, we can’t just abdicate this critical decarb sector. It’s so close to coastal population centers, so close to where people live in high-density urban areas that need electricity. So we need to be preparing for how we make up for this massive amount of lost time. We’re also trying to break through some of the longer term coordination problems the offshore wind sector has run into.
Your report outlines past examples of authorities like the Tennessee Valley Authority – help me understand what this would look like for offshore wind.
There are definitely examples of what we’re discussing here, and we evoke the moonshot as one of these examples where the government got behind a major technological jump and used industrial policy to make that happen — doing some of the planning, investing in companies directly via equity stakes, developing its own public enterprises or departments within the government to drive towards a common goal.
Then, of course, there was the rural electrification administration and the TVA development. The federal government has used more of its planning muscle to drive toward a critical goal, and from our perspective, a critical goal is decarbonizing the electricity sector. Yet at the same time, we’re seeing massive electricity cost spikes, so we’re trying to ponder how an authority like this could actually do that.
There are three areas where we’d imagine this authority to be involved. The first is actual development of offshore wind projects – a stable baseline for offshore wind by always being the bidder of last resort, actively bidding on projects along the coast. This also creates a baseline for the supply chain generally.
We also see an opportunity here in offshore transmission grids, because I’m sure you’re well aware how mired those grids have become. There are opportunities for increased planning around the grid to ensure a higher level of coordination. And by having a federal authority, it will lower the cost to other offshore wind developers.
The third piece is the supply chain manufacturing — more so a coordination role, sure, but also an opportunity for the federal government to leverage its large-scale procurement power. It would help provide security for a lot of the components in this moment of uncertainty.
On one hand, the benefit of the public option is a birch rod for the private sector. If the public entity is providing things at lower cost and with potentially higher commitments to higher wages, with more people wanting to work for the public entity, it can bring the entirety of the industry up because they’d have to compete with the agency.
On the other hand, I think there’s pieces of this that actually draw down costs, like the transmission and supply chain pieces.
What do you say to the percentage of the public that is opposed to offshore wind development?
I think there has been a very effective disinformation campaign. We also see a benefit in planning because we can limit overbuild and be strategic about where it’s deployed to limit permitting snags and other turmoil.
Okay, but the big question hovering over this is how it gets done. You’re going to need to convince the public to create this authority. And this is such an ambitious idea. How do you reckon with that?
Because so much has been lost during this administration, in terms of public planning and the DOGE cuts, there will be this need on a grand scale to supercharge and re-double efforts in a wide range of areas. My feeling is that we have to build toward a political appetite.
We have to think about big, ambitious solutions like this. Is this actually an opportunity to lower costs, not just decarb? Are there ways to think about that to build an enduring political coalition?
We’re seeing the Trump administration use some of these policy levers much more stridently than former Democratic presidents have used — like with equity stakes. We could do that kind of thing, too.
The truth is we have three years to build the political opportunities and coalition to do this.