China strides into US-sized gap at climate talks

BELÉM, Brazil — The Trump administration slammed the door on clean energy. China is sending the message it’s open for business.

The signs are not hard to find in the sweltering, dimly lit convention center in the Amazon where delegates from nearly 200 countries are debating the Earth’s future.

China’s section of the United Nations climate summit’s main hall features 5-foot-tall poster boards boasting of the country’s battery and electrical projects, from Egypt to Indonesia to Brazil. Corporate “partners” listed on the back wall include CATL, the world’s largest manufacturer of electric car batteries. BYD, the crown jewel of China’s world-leading electric vehicle empire, is an official sponsor of the summit, as is fellow Chinese electric carmaker GWM.

Even Chinese President Xi Jinping’s personal brand is on display at the U.N. gathering, known as COP30, which is scheduled to end Friday. Visitors to the Chinese pavilion can find shrink-wrapped copies of books collecting his writings and speeches.

Meanwhile, the United States is absent from the summit for the first time ever, as President Donald Trump disavows any participation in addressing a climate crisis that he calls a “hoax.” That’s not just a setback for the planet, climate supporters say. They say it also symbolizes a self-inflicted economic threat, as the U.S. abandons the growing worldwide market for EVs, solar panels, wind turbines and other clean technologies — and cedes it to China.

“It’s not about electric power. This is about economic power,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of the few prominent American politicians at the summit, during a press conference here last week. He said Trump “simply doesn’t understand how enthusiastic President Xi is today that the Trump administration is nowhere to be found at COP30.”

China does not yet show any signs that it’s trying to fill the role the U.S. has sometimes played at the annual climate talks: joining with the EU in pushing for all countries to make more ambitious climate commitments. While it has publicly lamented the U.S. exit from the U.N. dialogue, China still describes itself as a developing country and has proposed only modestly ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals for its own economy.

The Chinese are an undeniably major presence in Belém, however — Beijing’s 789 delegates make up the second-largest national contingent at the summit, behind the 3,805 people representing the host country, Brazil, and just ahead of Nigeria, according to an independent analysis of U.N.records. The official U.S. delegation has consisted solely of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who said the State Department set up impediments to his two-day visit that ended Saturday.

Trump’s hostility to clean energy is a turnaround from former President Joe Biden’s administration, which pursued big-spending green policies — backed by protectionist tax rules that irked allies in Europe — in an attempt to compete with Chinese dominance.

Some developing countries had welcomed Biden’s assertiveness, saying it offered an alternative to the onerous conditions that often come from accepting Chinese infrastructure and energy assistance. But that option is rapidly fading after Trump signed a Republican-backed law stripping away Biden’s green energy subsidies.

“Most of the equipment, we are buying from China,” said an official from an East African government who was granted anonymity to avoid retribution from the Trump administration. “The market has been broken. Under Biden, people were motivated to buy things from the U.S.”

Others attending the summit said they believe Trump’s policies will eventually leave the U.S. itself dependent on China as the global energy market shifts to cleaner products. That trend could hollow out the U.S. industrial core, said Nigel Topping, chair of the Climate Change Committee that advises the U.K. government.

“It won’t be long before we have a queue of American governors begging BYD to set up electric car factories in the States,” Topping said.

Fossil fuels not dead yet

Trump is articulating a starkly different vision: supplying the world’s growing energy demands with U.S. fossil fuels. He has backed up his talk with action, including using trade threats to undermine international climate agreements and pressure countries to buy more American oil and natural gas.

The approach seizes on the fact that the U.S. is the world’s top oil and gas producer, a role it was already using for geopolitical advantage during the Biden era. Trump and his aides maintain that switching to green energy sources would only strengthen China’s stranglehold on wind, solar, battery, electric vehicle and rare earth supply chains.

“President Trump wasted no time reversing Joe Biden’s Green New Scam, which significantly contributed to the worst inflation crisis in modern American history, drove up energy prices across the country, and stifled economic growth,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “By unleashing American energy, we are strengthening our grid stability, making energy affordable for families and businesses, and protecting our national security.”

The White House’s stance contains an inherent bet — that the world is not on the verge of a dramatic pivot to clean energy.

“You will hear people go, ‘Well, the U.S. is peddling fossil fuels, and the Chinese are pushing renewables,’” said George David Banks, an international climate aide during Trump’s first term. “Well, yeah, that’s because that’s what we have, and that’s what they have.”

Trump’s vision of a future flush with fossil fuels got some validation last week from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, whose recent track record of projecting massive increases in green energy has made it a target of conservatives in Washington. The IEA’s newest forecast includes a much different scenario based on nations’ existing laws that predicts worldwide oil and gas consumption will keep growing through 2050.

But the IEA report also includes an alternative scenario — accounting for policies that countries plan to adopt — which envisions a future of rising renewable energy deployment, with fossil fuel use peaking before 2030.

The energy think tank Ember said Thursday that wind and solar power expanded quickly enough during the first three quarters of 2025 to meet all the world’s new power demands, and it projected that fossil fuel power generation will not increase this year for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic.

A pledge that countries made at the 2023 U.N. climate summit to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 appears within reach, Ember said.

Wagering the United States’ economic future on the continued dominance of fossil fuels is foolish, former Vice President Al Gore said in an interview in Belém.

“It’s a tragedy that Donald Trump has shot the U.S. economy in both feet and hobbled our ability to compete more effectively with China,” Gore said, pointing to Ember’s data showing that green technology exports from China exceed the value of all fossil fuel exports from the U.S. “One sector is an appreciating asset, the other is a diminishing asset, and the U.S. is on the wrong side of that equation.”

During the two days of world leaders’ speeches preceding this month’s summit, Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang took a veiled shot at Trump’s trade and clean energy policies.

“China is ready to work with all parties to unswervingly promote green and low-carbon development,” he said.

‘Large investments first’

The United States still has a big footprint at COP30, of course — even if the federal government doesn’t.

U.S. companies such as GE Vernova, Baker Hughes, Citibank and Bank of America attended the summit, noted Marty Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute. He said those businesses will pursue clean energy projects regardless of who occupies the White House or whether the president sends anyone to the talks.

“Are we winning in that race?” Durbin said before a slight pause. “We’re in the race. And we’re going to continue to be part of that.”

But others said they believe Trump’s policies will leave the U.S. in the lurch.

While some foreign clean energy companies have exited the U.S. as an immediate response to Trump’s policy reversals, they will avoid the country altogether in the medium and long terms “if you cannot trust in it,” said Anne Simonsen, climate policy head of the business group Danish Industry.

At the same time, China is going all in.

China has poured huge direct investments into building clean technology and electric vehicle factories in emerging economies. In Brazil, Chinese investment in the electricity sector last year spiked 115 percent to $1.43 billion, with 69 percent of total Chinese-backed projects consisting of green energy and sustainability, according to the Brazil-China Business Council. Rich and poor nations have benefited from Chinese oversupply to buy cut-rate gear to meet clean energy goals.

That approach and Chinese investments have transformed economies, said André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, president of the COP30 summit.

China “added the elements that I believe were missing” from the world’s green energy transition, Corrêa do Lago said Nov. 10 at a press conference. “One of them is scale. The other is technology. And the other is the fact that as a developing country, it needs to bring solutions that are affordable to more people.”

But he acknowledged in a separate interview with POLITICO that while China’s gusher of less-expensive technology could help address climate change more quickly, relying on one supplier creates other complications.

China is “indisputably” the leader in all green technology, much of which is high quality, said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy and chief negotiator. He said U.S. automakers are “shit-scared” that they won’t be able to catch up with Chinese models, a worry that Newsom also espoused in several public comments.

As an economist by trade, Monterrey Gómez said he too worries about the world relying so much on one supplier. Still, he said he sees no major alternative at the moment.

“They did fast investments, large investments first,” he said. “That’s why they’re benefiting from this.”

Sara Schonhardt contributed to this report from Belém, Brazil.