Is the U.S. Surrendering the Clean Energy Future to China?

For decades, the United States was the global engine of industrial innovation. But today, that leadership is under a self-imposed threat. As the Trump administration moves to dismantle clean energy projects and eliminate the electric vehicle (EV) market, we aren’t just rolling back environmental progress—we are handing a multi-trillion dollar economic victory to China and harming our global competitiveness.

By choosing to stay stuck in the dirty, costly past, the U.S. is trading a future of lower costs and clean energy jobs for 19th-century fossil fuel technologies. Here is the reality of the global energy race and why the current administration’s claims don’t hold water.

The Economic Risk of Choosing Outdated Technology

By favoring Big Oil and coal, and canceling offshore wind and solar projects and grinding their permitting to a halt, the Trump administration is moving us backward at a critical turning point. We cannot afford to let the Chinese government sit in the driver’s seat of the global economy.

• Failing to Lower Consumer Costs: Clean energy is now the cheapest form of power on Earth. A new analysis found that nearly all states with a higher-than-average amount of wind and solar power are paying lower-than-average electric bills. Innovation, scale, and good policy brought costs for solar and onshore wind down 75% and 62% respectively from 10 years ago.
• Killing the Clean Energy Boom: The Inflation Reduction Act sparked a massive wave of domestic manufacturing. Trump and Congressional Republicans have pulled the plug on clean energy projects, including cancelling projects that were already under construction, trading long-term, family-sustaining union careers for a short-term reliance on outdated, failing industries. With over one hundred thousand jobs already lost or delayed.
• Abandoning Global Markets: The world is moving toward high-tech electrification with or without us. By ceding this ground, we are effectively telling the rest of the planet: “Go buy from China” at a time when, until recently, we were in the middle of bringing manufacturing back to the states.

Why Ceding Leadership Weakens America

In the 21st century, energy leadership equals political power. When the U.S. stops supporting the clean cars, trucks and wind and solar power, we face three major risks:

• Loss of Diplomatic Influence: If China builds the world’s power and cars, they gain the “soft power” that used to belong to the United States, which allowed us to bring the rest of the world together to do bring the world together to tackle our biggest challenges
• Grid Vulnerability: True energy independence comes from modernizing our domestic power, not clinging to foreign oil markets prone to price shocks.
• The “Brain Drain”: When we stop innovating and building new, cleaner technologies, our best engineers and startups take their talents and patents to countries that actually want to build the future.

The American Advantage: Better Products, Cleaner Communities

Democrats and Republicans can all agree that bringing clean energy manufacturing back to U.S. soil raises the bar for how things are made.

• Superior Working Conditions: American plants can be built with good, family-sustaining union jobs. Unlike the opaque labor practices seen in some overseas manufacturing hubs like China, U.S. leadership ensures the transition is built with the rights, safety, and prosperity of workers and their families front and center.
• Environmental Integrity: When the U.S. is enforcing environmental safeguards (admittedly a less of a priority for the current administration), we can ensure that “clean energy” is actually clean—keeping toxic pollution out of our air and water.
• Healthier Families: Moving away from fossil fuels means less asthma in our children and fewer “frontline” communities burdened by toxic pollution. A strong economy should never come at the cost of our health.

Fact Check: The Myths About China that lead Trump to Surrender

Trump has liked to claim recently that China builds clean energy technology strictly for export to “weaken” the West while relying solely on coal at home. This is demonstrably false.

While China is a leading exporter, they are also the world’s largest consumer of their own clean tech. Wind and solar are the largest sources of new power in China and they produce fully a third of the world’s electricity capacity. Furthermore, electric vehicles make up more than half of car sales in China while Chinese EVs account for just over half of all sales worldwide. This should be the story of the United States, not China or any other competitor.

Trump has also criticized Europe for buying batteries made in China, but it’s Trump himself who has surrendered the market instead of maintaining the policies that were bringing factories to the U.S.

We cannot afford to let the industries of the future be built everywhere but here. LCV remains committed to fighting for policies that keep American workers at the forefront of innovation. We believe in an America that leads the world in clean technology—not one that gets left behind.

The U.S. was positioning itself to lead the clean energy transition, and it can do so again. Trump and his allies in Congress need to stop being so quick to surrender. They see China’s head start in the clean energy market and say “why bother trying?” Instead we should be saying “We must and can do it better.”

What You Can Do

The momentum of the global market is clear, but the Trump administration and its allies in Congress is currently pulling the U.S. in the wrong direction. We need to tell our elected leaders that choosing obsolescence is an economic surrender. Call your members of Congress and tell them to stop ceding clean energy to China and restore the clean energy policies that can put the U.S. back on top.