US President Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations last month will be seen as the watershed moment when America’s and China’s energy paths irreversibly diverged. As China leads the world in the green energy transition, the United States risks being left chained to fossil fuels.

In the last five years, annual renewable energy additions have more than doubled from under 300 gigawatts (GW) in 2020 to over 700GW in 2024. Electricity generation from fossil fuels will plateau within a decade before declining, overtaken by solar and wind by 2035. This green revolution is achieving in a few decades what took the Industrial Revolution more than a century to accomplish.

In his first administration, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord. In his second administration, Trump swiftly reversed most of the groundwork laid by the Biden administration towards America’s green transition.

Boosted by incentives, clean energy installations in the US surged under the Biden administration. Even with steady annual growth, though, solar net additions in the US reached only 15 per cent of China’s installations in 2024. Now, the green energy sector faces grave uncertainties under Trump.

Trump could well be speaking from the perspective of a petrostate. The US was the world’s top producer of both oil and natural gas in 2023, generating billions of dollars in energy exports. At the same time, the country is generating a larger share of its electricity from fossil fuels than China.

The US is also shirking its responsibility as one of the planet’s leading carbon emitters. While China emitted the most total greenhouse gases in 2023, on a per capita basis the US was a far worse polluter, with emissions around 50 per cent higher than China’s.