There is positive buzz around the COP30 climate negotiations in Belem, Brazil, but it has nothing do with the summit itself. The conferences began in 1992, and at that summit, world leaders laid the groundwork for the first international treaty to combat climate change. But these days, the UN-led summits are overrun with fossil-fuel lobbyists, and many of the largest industrial nations just ignore it. This year, the US is boycotting, and whatever emerges from it is not expected to meaningfully curb global emissions. 

Rather, the source of relief in Belem was the cumulative recognition—summed up in a widely circulated report by Ember, a global energy think tank—that China is streaking past the United States and European Union in its clean-energy technology and industries. China is rolling out more than twice as much renewable capacity (solar and wind) than the rest of the world combined. As a result, China’s carbon emissions were flat last year, and this year they should fall—while those worldwide climbed to record highs. 

China’s success is not attributable to international summits or moralistic browbeatings but to hard-boiled self-interest. Clean energy from the sun and wind is the cheapest energy anywhere, and clean tech produced in mass is affordable everywhere. 

“China recognizes that the whole system has to be reconfigured,” Muyi Yang, an analyst at Ember, a global energy think tank, told me. “China has broken with the fossil-fuel model of development even though its economy is full of challenges too, like many in the world right now. But it sees a new kind of development based on environmental stability.”

Over the last decade, China has cut emissions at home andabroad through its export of clean-energy technology thus enabling other countries to adopt cleaner energy solutions more quickly, reports the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CRECA), a Helsinki-based think tank. China’s current renewables’ numbers are outpacing many of its own targets, and will leave the EU, long the global valedictorian in climate protection, behind. Its secret is the same kind of incentives and policies that Germany and other Europeans put into law in the aughts, when they led the world in innovation and renewables growth.

“China is the reason why the battle against global warming appears more winnable than ever before,” opines Jonas Waack of the Tageszeitung, a German daily. “At the center of the world’s decarbonization now stands China, and not because ever more governments want to protect the climate but rather because there is no more secure route to prosperity.”

China’s solar production has increased a 14-fold in a decade and now dominates the global market. It installsthe wind-and-solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week. In 2024, China added four times as much solar generation to its supply than the EU, and six times as much wind power. China raced past its own 2030 targets six years ahead of time by installing a ginormous 1,200 GW of wind and solar capacity in 2024, as well as exceeding other expectations, such as in sustainable forest management. By 2030, non-fossil fuels will constitute 25 percent of its energy consumption: a league beyond the US, which is moving in reverse, but still behind the EU, which has already surpassed 25 percent.

China’s still depends on fossil fuels—it leads the world in coal consumption—but its demand for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel leveled out last year. China’s reliance on these fuels was actually 2.5 percent below 2021 levels, according the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA attributes this phenomenon to “structural shifts” such as electrification: China’s electrification rate of about 30 percent of final energy use is significantly higher than the United States and European Union. Today about half of car sales in China are electric, a result of domestic policies ranging from incentives to trade-in deals. 

Moreover, and not least, China’s clean technology is capturing a market that Europe had hoped to rule. China owns 86 percent of worldwide module production and controls virtually the entire supply chain for certain essential components. 

On the EV market, it is only slightly less dominant: It controls three quarters of the sector, having surpassed Tesla in 2023. With its wealth of rare earth metals, an important component of battery storage, it is also out in front there, as well as in technology for producing low-emission hydrogen. Moreover, China invests heavily in clean-energy projects in more than 50 countries, bringing the energy transition to the rest of the world.

China’s advances are especially good news, because China is the world’s biggest emitter of carbon gases—and by a longshot: The country is responsible for 90 percent of the growth in CO2 emissions since 2015. Today, its share of total emissions is 32 percent, far ahead of the US (13 percent), India (8 percent), and the EU at 6 percent. 

China’s investment in a future with renewables at its center has more than one motivation, according to Belinda Schäpe of CRECA. Yes, the financials are very important, she admits: Ten percent of China’s GDP stems from its clean tech sector, and this could double soon. But energy security plays a role. China is still a big-time importer of fossil fuels, including crude oil, coal, and natural gas. Russia is among its top oil suppliers. But she argues the environmental calculations aren’t just window dressing: Heatwaves and floods are battering China and its urban centers drowning in air pollution. 

China, though out in front, could act more like the “defender of international cooperation on climate change” that it recently boasted to be. It is still investing heavily in coal. Its oil demand for petrochemicals (not for combustion purposes) is increasing, too. Its emissions are more than twice that of the United States’. It has not abandoned a growth-oriented economic model. And the 2035 targets of the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases are ridicuously conservative, just 7 to 10 percent reduction from peak emissions when a 30 percent drop is called for to meet the Paris goals. Beijing’s 2060 net-zero goal, for example, is unambitious and uninspiring (Germany’s is 2045), and it falls far short of what is required to avert climate catastrophe.

Nevertheless, it is responsible for maintaining the global momentum that exists at a moment when climate protection is on the backfoot. China’s accomplishments and future-oriented thinking humble Europe and North America.  The numerous benefits of a clean-energy transformation have been documented for more than a decade, their advantages outlined and tested by experts around the world. To his credit, President Joe Biden understood this and acted upon it, pushing the United States to the forefront of climate protection globally. Most top-level European politicos also know it but have been outplayed by the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries together with right-wing populists. It is a damning indictment of the likes of Germany’s Angela Merkel and Friedrich Merz who can know that a sweeping energy transition is both imperative and profitable but are too timid to speak it aloud. In the European Parliament, German Christian Democrats are teaming up with far-right factions to roll back the European Green Deal—in the name of the free market. 

China, in many ways, is not a country that deserves emulation. But it has obviously considered the now vast research and experience available and concluded that it has more to gain than lose in the transformation of its economy. Europe and the United States have forfeited the lead in reshaping the world’s energy supply. It augurs ill for the future of liberal democracy.