Tariffs Won't Stop China's Clean Energy Dominance
- China is rapidly investing in and developing clean energy technologies, such as thorium reactors and nuclear fusion, positioning itself as a global leader.
Donald Trump’s tariffs are (as of now) set to go into effect on August 1. One of the primary targets of these tariffs is China, Trump’s primary political and economic rival. But not only will the tariffs – which have been negotiated down to 30 percent from Trump’s April threat of 145 percent – not have much of an adverse impact on China’s economy or trade volumes, it will likely provide a significant boost to both as countries around the world are incentivized to trade with Beijing rather than Washington.
Moreover, experts contend that Trump’s tariffs are targeting the wrong sectors altogether. “While President Trump is busy slapping tariffs on steel and copper, China is racing ahead in something far more powerful: cheap, clean energy,” reports The Hill.
China, the world’s second largest economy, has been demolishing the rest of the world in the clean energy race for years now. Clean energy technologies accounted for more than 10 percent of the country’s gross national product (GDP) in 2024. Meanwhile, the United States, the world’s largest economy, is headed steadfastly in the opposite direction. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. is taking a huge step back from clean energy development and back toward fossil fuels.
The gargantuan scale of China’s investment in clean energy is hard to overstate. While the world’s second-biggest economy cooled down on its clean energy growth in 2024, from a whiplash pace of 40 percent growth in 2023, they still managed to spend an almost unfathomable sum to expand their green energy might. The 13.6 trillion yuan($1.9 trillion) that China spent on clean energy in the past year was nearly equal to the amount of money that the entire rest of the world spent on fossil fuels over the same period, and is roughly equivalent to the size of Saudi Arabia’s entire economy.
Not only does this mean that China is dominating clean energy supply chains and expanding its clean energy influence in emerging economies around the globe, it also likely means that China will ultimately control global energy markets. The more that Beijing spends on clean technology research, and the most that Washington steps back from this pursuit, the more likely it becomes that China will unlock clean energy silver bullets that fossil fuels just can’t compete with.
For example, The Hill reports that China is edging ever closer to unlocking the secret to commercial thorium reactors, a veritable holy grail of clean energy. Thorium is several times more common in nature than uranium, and may be as much as 200 times more potent as a fuel source. And China has a whole lot of it. “Unlike the U.S., which sat on this potential for decades, China is sprinting ahead,” writes The Hill. “Chinese scientists recently achieved a historic first: refueling a molten salt reactor running on thorium without interrupting energy production.”
China is also pressing ahead with research on another potential source of near-infinite clean energy: nuclear fusion. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), China’s largest “artificial sun” nuclear fusion project, recently set a new world record by maintaining plasma for an impressive duration of 1,066 seconds. While the United States has also made critical breakthroughs in fusion research on a global scale, they can’t compete with China in terms of project timelines and research and development spending.
“Even if China is not ahead right now,” Decker Eveleth, an analyst at the national security research nonprofit CNA recently told IEEE Spectrum, “when you look at how quickly they build things, and the financial willpower to build these facilities at scale, the trajectory is not favorable for the U.S.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com