Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The U.S. has launched a long-overdue effort to reclaim control of the mineral supply chains that underpin our economy and national security. Years of working around the edges of the problem have been replaced by forceful action. The Trump administration has fundamentally changed Washington’s approach to American mining. But whether the promise of this effort becomes a new era of domestic production and mineral security will depend on follow-through. Passing permitting reform is the ultimate test.
Happy Labor Day USA patriotic, yellow hard hat construction helmet USA flag over wooden deck table background.
The U.S. has launched a long-overdue effort to reclaim control of the mineral supply chains that underpin our economy and national security. Years of working around the edges of the problem have been replaced by forceful action. The Trump administration has fundamentally changed Washington’s approach to American mining. But whether the promise of this effort becomes a new era of domestic production and mineral security will depend on follow-through. Passing permitting reform is the ultimate test.
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act gives Congress the opportunity to deliver. We are undeniably in the minerals age. From semiconductors and batteries to cutting-edge defense systems, minerals — and an increasingly wide array of them — have never been more important to our economic and national security. As demand surges for these irreplaceable materials, our ability to supply them must catch up to their mounting importance.
China understands the stakes. It has spent decades investing in mines and processing facilities, using state support to dominate markets and export controls to squeeze industries essential to our defense and manufacturing base. Breaking that grip requires a sustained commitment to rebuilding American productive capacity. The resources are here. The political will to transform them into secure supply chains has been glaringly missing. That, thanks to the Trump administration, is changing.
The administration has greatly expanded the tools available to counter China’s mineral dominance. Financing, stockpiling and measures to counter predatory market practices are helping level a deeply uneven playing field. Better coordination through the FAST-41 permitting program is also encouraging. But these efforts need durable congressional permitting reforms to deliver the sweeping change American mining requires. Clear rules must endure beyond any single administration or election.
Consider the obstacles we face. A recent study found that bringing a U.S. mine from discovery to production takes an average of 29 years, the second longest timeline in the world. Permitting delays, obstructive litigation and the uncertainty they have created are the tallest barriers along that unnecessarily long road. We cannot rebuild supply chains and counter China’s supply chain weaponization on a timetable that consumes a generation.
This bipartisan permitting deal reflects the urgency of the moment. Notably, it removes duplication and unnecessary delays and tightens review deadlines, improving transparency and clarifying access to lands needed for activities that support mining operations. The agreement also offers much-needed litigation reform. Too often, litigation becomes a tool to delay production for years, even when a challenge has little prospect of succeeding. Clearer limits on legal challenges and greater certainty around issued permits would help ensure that completing the review process actually means something. This is the transparency and certainty mining needs.
Americans understand why action matters. In national polling conducted by The Harris Poll this September, 85% of Americans said increasing domestic mining is important to economic and national security given China’s mineral export restrictions. I can’t recall the last policy issue on which nine in 10 American voters agreed.
Now is the time to recognize the status quo cannot continue. The stakes, of course, reach well beyond mining. It is hard to find a key challenge in America — housing and energy affordability or the eroding state of our infrastructure — that isn’t in some way shaped by the urgent need for reform.
This is the moment to rebuild American mining and break China’s grip on the supply chains so essential to our economic and national security. Passing the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act can turn the promise of America’s vast mineral resources into the productive capacity we so urgently need. This is an opportunity we can’t let slip through our fingers.
On September 23, the autumnal equinox, villagers in Dongjiao, a farming community on the edge of Xiangyang in central China, set out crayfish, peaches, and banquet bowls for the country’s ninth Farmers’ Harvest Festival. They had earned the feast.
But where are the headlines? Had the harvest fallen by a few percentage points, a dozen stories would have linked the decline to a “climate breakdown.”
A harvest of such unprecedented size by the world’s most populous grain producer does not fit the fable of a dying planet. Crisis merchants dominating the media have invested decades in a story of scorched fields and starving millions. A nation of farmers celebrating abundance is an embarrassment. Here’s the truth:
On September 23, the autumnal equinox, villagers in Dongjiao, a farming community on the edge of Xiangyang in central China, set out crayfish, peaches, and banquet bowls for the country’s ninth Farmers’ Harvest Festival. They had earned the feast.
With more than a fifth of the autumn crop area already harvested, Agriculture Minister Zhang Zhu said the country was on track for another bumper harvest for the full year. In 2025, annual grain production exceeded 700 million tons for a second straight year, giving every Chinese citizen more than 500 kilograms of grain, well above a benchmark for food security.
The science behind the harvest is not mysterious. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the raw material of photosynthesis. Wheat and rice, the staples of China, respond positively to elevated CO2.NASA reports that up to half of Earth’s vegetated lands greened significantly over a 35-year period, with 70% of that greening attributed to rising atmospheric CO2 acting as a plant fertilizer. Another NASA analysis showed that China and India dominate this planetary greening. China alone accounts for a quarter of the global increase in leaf area despite covering but a fraction of the world’s vegetated land.
Warmth has helped, too. Longer frost-free seasons in the northeast have allowed rice and corn to spread across Heilongjiang, China’s largest grain-producing province. It is fitting that three driverless harvesters opened this year’s festival in Harbin, the provincial capital. China saw more flooding than drought this year, with the worst confined to local pockets, but overall conditions favored farming.
But where are the headlines? Had the harvest fallen by a few percentage points, a dozen stories would have linked the decline to a “climate breakdown.” Positive reports get a shrug. The industrial emissions of carbon dioxide elevating the gas’s atmospheric concentration are producing undeniable benefits that those demonizing CO2 refuse to acknowledge.
The human consequence of this agricultural ascent should end claims of a planet in terminal decline. China’s per capita food supply rose from 2,328 kilocalories a day in 1980 to 3,029 in 2000, a 30% jump, with average intake near 2,830 kilocalories by the early 2010s. Meat consumption quadrupled between 1980 and 2009, from 14.6 kilograms to 58.2 kilograms per person.
Behind those rising calories stands affordable energy. About 70% of the ammonia produced from natural gas and coal is used to make fertilizers that help to make possible China’s crop yields. Tractors, pumps, and combines run on diesel. This is the production chain the net-zero lobby and crisis propagandists pretend does not exist.
Western lenders and diplomats addled by climate dogma are urging governments of developing nations to reduce the use of fertilizers and fossil fuels. Sri Lanka tried a version of this when it banned synthetic fertilizers in 2021. Rice output collapsed within a season, and the country slid into economic crisis. China took the opposite road and now celebrates record harvests.
The media’s silent treatment of these facts is a necessary tactic of keeping alive the apocalyptic climate narrative. Every acre of global greening, every rising calorie, every record harvest chips away at the claim that humanity faces a climate emergency requiring the surrender of affordable energy and industrial agriculture.
The climate industrial complex depends on the specter of a failing biosphere and is threatened by grain-production records and thriving ecosystems. So, editors skip the hopeful stories and gin up ones about receding glaciers that have been melting since the end of the last great glacial advance more than 10,000 years ago.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at theCO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
In June 2026, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany was meant to prepare the ground for COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, this November 9th -20th. Instead, it exposed how far the world remains from a unified path toward decarbonization.
That admission of paralysis sits awkwardly alongside COP30’s own record. In Belém, Brazil delegates logged 317 private-jet landings, producing an estimated 1,541 tons of CO₂ by Eurocontrol’s Small Emitters Tool — private jets emit up to 14 times more CO₂ per passenger than commercial flights. “You-first-ism,” it turns out, extends beyond negotiating positions to how attendees themselves choose to travel.
Bonn made one thing clear: the world is not moving toward decarbonization as a single bloc. COP31 will only make these divisions more visible.
In June 2026, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany was meant to prepare the ground for COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, this November 9th -20th. Instead, it exposed how far the world remains from a unified path toward decarbonization.
Negotiators could not agree on the Mitigation Work Programme, the mechanism meant to push countries toward deeper emissions cuts. The EU pressed for stronger commitments; many other nations insisted the forum was meant only for exchanging information, not setting new obligations. No resolution was reached — the question was simply deferred to COP31.
The dispute over the 1.5°C target was sharper still. The EU and Switzerland accused several countries — Saudi Arabia, China, India, and Russia among them — of undermining climate science to protect fossil-fuel demands and interests.
Beneath that accusation lies a question international discourse rarely confronts directly: whether the 1.5°C target itself remains achievable, and whether energy security and realistic adaptation deserve more weight than adherence to a number as COP31 attendees remain OBLIVIOUS to REALITY that the worldwide economies run on transportation fuels.
In addition, raw crude oil, once processed through refineries provides the molecules that are the basis of more than 6,000 products that modern life depends on, made from those oil derivatives — products that did not exist just a few centuries ago.
In addition, electricity can charge an iPhone, but neither wind turbines nor solar panels can make an iPhone — everything that needs electricity is itself made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. Without crude oil, there would be no iPhones, X-ray machines, or computers that need electricity in the first place.
For the first time, delegates also held formal talks on climate policy and trade — centered almost entirely on the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The EU frames CBAM as environmental necessity. Developing nations call it something else: protectionism exercised through market power, dressed in the language of climate responsibility.
Closing the conference, UN climate chief Simon Stiell lamented a “you-first-ism” — each nation waiting for others to act before committing itself. It was a candid admission of paralysis. But it missed a simpler explanation: nations are not failing to cooperate out of stubbornness. They are prioritizing their own industries, electricity security, supply chain security for transportation fuels and the 6,000 products made from processed crude oil, and citizens — because no government can responsibly do otherwise.
That admission of paralysis sits awkwardly alongside COP30’s own record. In Belém, Brazil delegates logged 317 private-jet landings, producing an estimated 1,541 tons of CO₂ by Eurocontrol’s Small Emitters Tool — private jets emit up to 14 times more CO₂ per passenger than commercial flights. “You-first-ism,” it turns out, extends beyond negotiating positions to how attendees themselves choose to travel.
Bonn made one thing clear: the world is not moving toward decarbonization as a single bloc. COP31 will only make these divisions more visible.
II. The Iran War: Opportunity, or Confusion of Categories?
Weeks earlier, at a COP31 preparatory meeting in Paris, Stiell had already previewed this framing. He suggested the Iran war was “rapidly accelerating” the world’s shift to the generation of electricity by wind turbines and solar panels, arguing that those who had tried to sustain fossil-fuel dependence were inadvertently fueling a boom of wind and solar — because wind and solar, he said, are safer, cheaper, and immune to the disruption of narrow straits or global conflict.
It is worth pausing on who was really being described here. The nations and industries he characterized as clinging to fossil fuels are not simply nostalgic for the past. Coal, natural gas, and crude oil have been the foundation of industrial civilization since the Industrial Revolution — not only as energy sources but as the raw material for steel, cement, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, and plastics. Wind and solar can substitute for some electricity generation and a portion of transport fuel. No technology yet substitutes for hydrocarbons as chemical feedstock. Electricity from wind and solar are not a necessary condition for manufacturing civilization’s material goods; hydrocarbon molecules are, as they are the basis for transportation fuels and more than 6,000 products that modern life depends on, made from those oil derivatives — products that did not exist just a few centuries ago.
When oil and gas supplies are disrupted by war, what people need is stable, reliable, affordable electricity, transportation fuels, and all the oil-based products modern life depends on — not an accelerated bet on intermittent electricity. Solar panels do not generate electricity at night. Wind turbines stop when the wind does. In a geopolitical crisis, these are not abstract inconveniences; they are life-and-death vulnerabilities for hospitals, military infrastructure, and food supply chains.
There is also a cost distinction Stiell’s framing glosses over. LCOE — the standard metric for “cheap wind and solar” — reflects only the generation asset itself. It excludes the backup capacity, storage, transmission buildout, and balancing costs that intermittent power requires at grid scale. Measured on a fully-loaded basis (FCOE), the “wind and solar are cheap” claim loses much of its force — particularly in developing nations, where the grid to absorb intermittent power often doesn’t yet exist, and where the buildout cost lands hardest on those least able to absorb it.
III. Who Actually Puts Net Zero First?
Strip away the summit rhetoric, and a narrower reality emerges: full-throated net-zero-by-date commitments are, in practice, sustained by a subset of the EU. Most of the world’s major emitters are pursuing electricity policy on other terms entirely — national interest, industrial competitiveness, and energy security first.
China illustrates this most starkly. It is the world’s largest annual emitter, with recent estimates placing its output at roughly 11.7 billion tons — about 31% of global fossil CO₂ emissions. China has publicly committed to peaking emissions by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. Yet in 2023–2024 it approved new coal-fired power construction at the fastest pace in nearly a decade — construction of plants representing an estimated 94.5 GW, the highest level of new or resumed coal projects since 2015. The gap between China’s stated targets and its infrastructure investment is not a footnote; it is the central fact of global climate arithmetic. No amount of sacrifice by developed-nation citizens can offset it.
China represents the clearest evidence that the world is not moving toward decarbonization as a single bloc — and that the loudest net-zero rhetoric often comes from those least exposed to its economic cost.
IV. What the Conference Host Itself Chooses to Do
COP31’s own host makes the same point in miniature. Turkey holds the COP31 presidency this November in Antalya. Rather than pursuing wind and solar exclusively, Turkey has confirmed that bringing the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant — a Russian-built, Rosatom-operated facility — online in 2026 remains a top energy priority. Turkey’s own environment minister has put it plainly: the country uses both wind and solar and fossil fuels, because it needs to meet demand and remain self-sufficient.
This is not a contradiction to be pointed out with irony. It is a rational energy-mix strategy — one that stands in instructive contrast to the uniform message Turkey simultaneously delivers as COP31 president. Electricity security through diversification, not purity through a single source, is what every capable government actually practices when the stakes are real. Fossil fuels, wind and solar, and nuclear power each have comparative advantages that differ by geography, resource endowment, and economic development stage; sound policy lets countries choose accordingly rather than mandating a single path.
V. The Anchor Point COP Discourse Keeps Missing
Raw crude oil, once processed through refineries, is the basis of more than 6,000 products that modern life depends on — products that did not exist a few centuries ago. Jet fuel for roughly 35,550 commercial aircraft and 100,000–150,000 daily flights. Diesel for trucks, trains, and construction equipment. Gasoline for roughly 1.7 billion vehicles. Bunker fuel for the 116,000 commercial ships that carry approximately 90% of world trade. Feedstock for fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and synthetic fiber — including the materials used to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels themselves.
Wind and solar can generate electricity. They cannot supply transportation fuels. That distinction is not a detail; it is the foundation of the entire debate, and it is the one COP discourse — fixated on electricity and emissions — consistently overlooks.
Carbon symbiosis, not carbon elimination, is the framework that matches the complexity of the world we actually live in, because carbon is an element foundational to both biological life (over 6,000 products and transportation fuels) and industrial civilization (energy), not merely the molecule, CO₂, that climate policy targets for elimination. Energy mix answers “how do we generate power”; Carbon Symbiosis answers the deeper question underneath it — “why can civilization not simply subtract carbon,” at the elemental level.
VI. Conclusion
An electricity policy made in the heat of geopolitical crisis, dressed in the language of climate urgency, deserves the same scrutiny applied to any other form of crisis opportunism.
Bonn, and the Iran war before it, have reminded the world how fragile the supply chains for electricity and hydrocarbon-based products really are. The right response is resilience through diversity — energy mixes suited to each nation’s resources and needs — not acceleration toward a monoculture of intermittent electricity that cannot, by itself, power civilization or supply the products modern life depends on.
“AI” is too broad to regulate as one thing. None of those everyday AI systems are actually what people are arguing about when they call for regulation, so just saying “AI” is way off the mark.
Because we “literally do not know what we are talking about,” policies passed in panic could be highly destructive.
Protest against ai technology robot holding no ai sign amidst determined crowd in urban setting
Debating policies in a rational manner requires a clear specification of the thing under consideration for regulation. The AI debate has nothing like that.
The AI debate does not even name the thing under discussion, as it is certainly not AI per se. Not being able to name the thing you are talking about is impossibly vague when it comes to policy making.
The field of AI is over 70 years old, and it has spawned a lot of different technologies, which are not part of the policy issue, so simply talking about AI is way off the mark.
Chess-playing machines that can beat grandmasters are an early example. There are now lots of AI game systems. My favorite is the blackjack program that saved me a lot of money by showing me I was no good at that gambling game.
In the late 1980s, expert systems became prominent. More recently, we got things like automated customer service systems and GPS routing systems. Now we have automated cars and military fighter drones. None of these are part of the AI policy discussion, nor are countless other AI systems in everyday use.
The AI issue mostly started with chatbots, which are typically called large language models (LLMs), so these are a good starting point. But there are lots of LLMs, some of which seem pretty harmless. The little AI summary that comes with each Google search, for example.
Plus, there are other AI systems besides LLMs that may be of concern. Examples include generative AI, diffusion models, and the interesting-sounding generative adversarial networks.
Then, too, there are AI agents that use models to perform instructed tasks. Concern about agents recently arose when a bunch started working together without being instructed to do so. We have no idea how many such systems exist.
The first thing a policy, law, or regulation must do is make clear who or what is covered and not covered. This is why regulations often have lengthy definition sections. They often create their own language in order to clearly specify the rules they state.
The AI policy debate has no such specificity. The things under discussion are not even named in many cases. As a Chinese philosopher friend of mine used to say, “We are talking in a vacuum.” Specifically, a cognitive vacuum which lacks needed substance.
Absent a clear specification of what we mean, any rules passed are likely to simply create destructive paralysis and confusion.
For example, people are talking about a pause in AI development. Which AI development? For that matter, what counts as AI development? This is another empty concept.
Let’s take Google. Last year, its R&D spending was over $60 billion. How much is AI related such that it would be paused? Some of it is labeled as AI development, but a lot of it is directly related to developments that have AI aspects, such as AI data centers.
It all depends on how AI is defined for the purposes of the pause, and there is not a shadow of a definition at this point. The potential for destructive confusion is immense. AI-related industry could run to trillions of dollars.
At the same time, there is much talk about an AI race, especially between America and China. I have yet to see this race defined or explained. Race to do what? What does winning look like? How are we doing?
It is not like there is going to be just one AI system, rendering all others obsolete. AI is a huge industrial domain with a vast number of diverse products. What then is this race?
The whole AI policy debate borders on being incoherent because we literally do not know what we are talking about. This is very dangerous because incoherent policies passed in panic can be highly destructive.
Strip away the self-congratulation and the case is this. The world’s third- and fourth-largest economies have become a climate vanguard. Berlin has pledged, for the first time, to end fossil fuel use by 2045.
Mr Newsom says California has run on 100% clean electricity on nine days out of 10 this year. What the Nation never asks is whom this performance serves.
California, once a great oil state, now sources 61% of its crude from abroad, led by Brazil and Iraq. The closure of Phillips 66’s Los Angeles refinery and Valero’s Benicia plant has stripped the state of 17% of its refining capacity and gasoline imports in 2025 exceeded the total for any year since at least 2004.
No wonder Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, a former Hamburg environment senator, told Apollo News this week that Germany’s Energiewende is “not a transition, but a retreat”.
Satire has become redundant. The Nation, an old abolitionist publication founded in 1865 and now proudly the flagship of the Left, has just anointed Germany and California an “environmental superpower”. The author, Mark Hertsgaard, is the magazine’s Environment Correspondent and also Executive Director of Covering Climate Now, a foundation-funded media campaign that the Nation itself co-founded. His two showpiece claims are an interview that Gavin Newsom gave to Covering Climate Now and a poll-based crusade, the 89% Project, run by, naturally, Covering Climate Now and endorsed, in the AP story the piece cites, by an oat-milk company. A perfectly closed loop, which is more than can be said for the energy systems it celebrates.
Strip away the self-congratulation and the case is this. The world’s third- and fourth-largest economies have become a climate vanguard. Berlin has pledged, for the first time, to end fossil fuel use by 2045. It is not clear whether this is on a ‘Net Zero’ basis or if it actually means no fossil fuel use at all. Mr Newsom says California has run on 100% clean electricity on nine days out of 10 this year. What the Nation never asks is whom this performance serves.
Germany and California, it seems, are perfect complements to China. Beijing’s road to global supremacy in manufacturing and technology, artificial intelligence included, runs through cheap, dependable power and control of the supply chains. The two self-appointed climate leaders have made power dear, hobbled their own industries and handed the supply chains to Beijing. Lenin is said to have called such people useful idiots. Patricia Adams put the same point to Western greens in the Financial Post, and at greater length in her Global Warming Policy Foundation paper the Road from Paris. The pattern was already plain when Beijing was being cast as climate saviour: sign the green communiqué, collect the praise, keep building coal power plants as if there is no tomorrow.
In terms of realpolitik, in contrast to public posturing, China has little time for decarbonisation’s urgency. In this it is not alone. The US under Trump, India and Russia — representing over 40% of global emissions — reject the climate crisis narrative. These countries are intent on prioritising economic growth over climate alarmism and debilitating Net Zero policies. They share China’s pragmatism: aspirations for economic progress trumps unproven predictions of climate catastrophe. The first order imperative of Russia, China, India and their counterparts in the developing countries are regime and national security, dependent ultimately on improving the general welfare of their citizens.
A superpower that imports its energy
Germany has the highest household electricity prices in the EU, €0.38 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in the first half of 2025. A Verivox comparison for the second quarter of 2026 put the German household tariff at €0.36, more than five times the €0.07 paid in China. California’s residential price reached US$0.35 in April, against a national average of US$0.18 per kWh. Industrial users tell the same story. A steel mill in Germany can pay an order of magnitude more for power than a smelter in the Persian Gulf. More than 60% of the German household bill is taxes, levies and network charges – the cost of integrating weather-dependent generation and of paying for backup that must stand idle.
Germany sits on shale gas that its federal geological institute puts at 320 to 2,030 billion cubic metres of technically recoverable resource, far exceeding its conventional reserves, yet a 2016 ban keeps the frackers out while Berlin imported some 684 terawatt-hours of gas in 2025. That import dependence is a policy choice, and a bad one. Germany’s answer to the 2022 gas shock, after it sanctioned Russian gas imports to itself, was to lean harder on lignite while its last nuclear plants closed on schedule and were demolished with fanfare. Dunkelflaute, the cold, still, dark spells northern Europe undergoes, cannot be bridged by batteries at any price an economy could bear. Brussels, whose energy policy takes its cues from Berlin, is no better. Norway, outside the EU, ignores Brussels: it brought the Johan Castberg field onstream last year and its gas already covers about 30% of EU consumption. The Norwegians are not saving the planet; they are selling German’s heat.
When I worked in a major American oil company headquartered in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, there was an “all-hands” meeting on political risk for the corporate assets from Venezuela to Indonesia. A senior vice-president told the room not to forget the political risks of the “People’s Republic of California”. I never forgot it. The state is an energy island by choice, barely tied into the continental crude network, and it has spent two decades making its own hydrocarbons inaccessible.
Mr Newsom, expected to run for president in 2028, has every incentive to dress up the numbers and his “100%” boast deserves scrutiny. His office’s earlier version of the claim defined the feat as clean power “for at least some part of the day”, which in 2025 meant an average of seven hours daily, the equivalent of about 52 full days or nearly 30% of the year to that point. Nine days out of 10; 30% of the hours. Only a fully ordained member of the climate priesthood could present such statistics as a triumph and only a credulous press corps could print it. The US Department of Energy has put the point without ornament: about 15% of California’s primary energy comes from renewables and more than 75% from oil and natural gas. The California Policy Center has called the Governor’s clean-energy claims “transparently false”. He also says the “markets are moving his way” because the Iran war has made gasoline and diesel dearer. A state that imports most of its crude oil is, to put it kindly, an odd champion of that particular claim.
No wonder Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, a former Hamburg environment senator, told Apollo News this week that Germany’s Energiewende is “not a transition, but a retreat”. German chemical turnover is down about 22% from its 2022 peak. The DIHK energy-transition barometer finds industrial firms postponing core investment and shifting production abroad. Berlin’s answer is another subsidy – an admission that the Energiewende price is incompatible with manufacturing.
Lenin’s idiots, Beijing’s beneficiaries
Now to the beneficiary. The IEA reports that China’s share of every stage of solar panel manufacturing exceeds 80%, and that coal supplies more than 60% of the electricity used to make the world’s solar panels. Western virtue is manufactured in Chinese factories fired by Chinese coal. Beijing commissioned 78 gigawatts of new coal power in 2025, the most in a decade, with proposals for a further 161 gigawatts at a record. BloombergNEF finds mainland China holding over 70% of global capacity in every major clean-tech segment it tracks, and China has shipped on the order of a trillion dollars of batteries, solar equipment, electric vehicles and wind components since 2018. The panel on a German roof or the Baidu EV in the streets of Los Angeles is the clean end of a dirty chain.
China also processes some 90% of the world’s rare earth magnets and when it throttled exports in 2025 Germany’s auto lobby warned that car production could be halted. Professor Vahrenholt’s “retreat” has a human face: Volkswagen now plans to cut 50,000 German jobs by 2030, its profit at the lowest since 2016, as it struggles against Chinese competitors. Nor is the retreat confined to Wolfsburg. Last December the European Commission, bowing to the carmakers, dropped its hard 2035 cut-off for new combustion-engine cars – a tacit admission that an industry cannot be legislated into a technology that China has already cornered.
Then comes the prize. Artificial intelligence is, at bottom, a contest over electrons. China already generates more than twice the electricity of the United States, and BloombergNEF expects it to add more than six times as much generating capacity over the next five years. Where do you suppose the data-centre builders will go: to places that treat cheap, dependable power as a strategic asset, or to the two climate champions that treat it as a moral failing? Vahrenholt’s complaint is precisely that Germany shut its reactors while China and America race for AI leadership.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
In September last year, images from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi smiling, arms linked — told Brussels and London more than any communiqué about where two decades of energy self-harm had led.
The result, as the shuttered ammonia lines at Ludwigshafen attest, is not the low-carbon prosperity promised by the architects of the European Green Deal but a slow, voluntary surrender of manufacturing capacity. This has migrated to jurisdictions unburdened by carbon pricing, renewables mandates and the regulatory thicket of the EU’s “sustainability disclosure” regime.
The EU’s Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 projects high-intensity war as a near-term likelihood. It sets 2030 as the date by which Europe must be able to deter Russian aggression.
In September last year, images from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi smiling, arms linked — told Brussels and London more than any communiqué about where two decades of energy self-harm had led. On the sidelines, Gazprom and CNPC signed a “memorandum” on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline through Mongolia. This was a political signal, not a priced gas contract. I set out at the time, in How the West Snookered Itself in Energy Geopolitics, how the obsession with Net Zero had handed Moscow and Beijing a strategic gift while leaving Germany, once Europe’s industrial powerhouse, prostrate.
A year on, the diagnosis has not changed. What has changed is the prescription. Having wrecked their own economies through the fantasy of decarbonisation, the EU and UK’s governing liberal-left establishment — stagnant, unpopular, and facing the electoral rise of AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France — has settled on a time-honoured remedy for domestic failure: warnings of the threat of war.
The Wages of Self-Sabotage
I have written at length about the irrationality of EU and UK energy policy (here and here among others). America pursued a radically different trajectory during President Trump’s second term. Washington’s November 2025 National Security Strategy openly abandoned the pretence that Europe remains a serious partner. It described a continent that has traded its classical liberal inheritance — free speech, open inquiry, democratic accountability — for the utopian triad of Net Zero, mass immigration (consisting largely of young unskilled men from the Middle East, North Africa and West and South Asia) and an ever-expanding regulatory, growth-killing state.
Mario Draghi’s competitiveness report found that the EU’s total real output, measured at 2015 prices, had slipped from a little more than 15% below the United States in 2002 to 30% below by 2023. At market exchange rates the EU’s share of world GDP has fallen from roughly 29% in 1980 to about 17% in 2024. China’s surged over the same span while the US maintained it leading position.
Chemical and industrial firms have voted with their capital: for example, BASF’s Ludwigshafen closures of its ammonia and fertiliser lines, and the relocation of production to the United States and Asia. This reflects the industrial logic of policy-inflated energy costs working itself out. Heavy and energy-intensive industries, from automotive to steelmaking and oil refineries, have moved to where energy is cheap and abundant — to the US and above all to China, now the world’s dominant industrial power by far. The US under President Trump is increasingly incentivising a “reshoring” of industrial capacity. To give momentum to the reshoring of industry, America has ditched the Paris Agreement and, as of January this year, formally withdrew America from the IPCC and UNFCCC along with dozens of other multilateral bodies judged contrary to American interests.
None of this need have happened. Europe possessed impressive endowments — a skilled workforce, deep capital markets, an educated population, robust economic growth arising out of the ashes of World War II. It could and did ably compete with the United States and China. What it lacked was the political will to resist a green industrial policy conceived by activists and bureaucrats rather than engineers and economists.
In Britain that policy has a name and a face: former Energy Secretary (and now Foreign Minister) Ed Miliband, whose economic and energy illiteracy has been widely remarked upon. The result, as the shuttered ammonia lines at Ludwigshafen attest, is not the low-carbon prosperity promised by the architects of the European Green Deal but a slow, voluntary surrender of manufacturing capacity. This has migrated to jurisdictions unburdened by carbon pricing, renewables mandates and the regulatory thicket of the EU’s “sustainability disclosure” regime.
From Climate Alarmism to War Fever
The climate consensus that sustained two decades of European energy policies is collapsing under its own contradictions. US support for the globalist green agenda is gone, the IPCC’s alarmist scenario modelling has been retracted and ESG finance is in retreat. The EU and UK political establishments that built their legitimacy on the alarmist climate consensus need a new organising threat. The rhetoric of imminent war with Russia, barely audible eighteen months ago, has become the dominant note of European public life, displacing the language of climate emergency that had until recently served much the same unifying, mobilising function.
The pattern will be familiar to students of political history: a governing class unable or unwilling to reverse policies that have visibly impoverished its own population reaches for an external threat large enough to make domestic failure feel secondary. What is unusual about the present European episode is the speed of the transition and the transparency of the motive. One season the enemy is carbon dioxide; the next, it is Vladimir Putin. The rhetorical machinery — moral urgency, the demand for public sacrifice, the casting of suspicion on dissenters — barely needs repackaging.
Manufacturing an Enemy
The EU’s Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 projects high-intensity war as a near-term likelihood. It sets 2030 as the date by which Europe must be able to deter Russian aggression. Military planning deadlines of this kind are how governments convince their citizens to prepare for war. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has said Russia could be “ready” to use military force by 2030. Even while insisting President Putin “is in a bad place” and is “not winning the war” in Ukraine, he simultaneously urges NATO members toward heightened readiness against a Russian attack. This characterization of Russia as both weak and a dangerous threat is an odd combination of confidence and alarm that only makes sense as political theatre.
Britain’s Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, has told households to keep cash, bottled water and tinned food at home, warning that the country faces a “greater risk of war” with Russia than at any point in his lifetime. Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski told reporters that he keeps rice, a hand pump and home-made preserves against the day Russia attacks. Germany’s Bundeswehr has gamed out scenarios in which up to 1,000 wounded soldiers a day would arrive from a NATO-Russia front. It is reopening a Cold War-era underground medical bunker in Ulm. The Somerset squire Jacob Rees-Mogg has taken to informing viewers that in the next few years the country may face a war, and that people may have to die to save it, as they did in the world wars. Unsurprisingly, this invitation to send other people’s sons to someone else’s war declared by the British government was met with disgust. More remarkable still was the television exchange in which former Labour adviser Paul Richards proposed that Britain would need to “lock a few people up”, namely, “pro-Russian voices” who doubt the threat is real. This is the language not of deterrence but of pre-emptive mobilisation of opinion, a rehearsal for wartime censorship before a single shot on NATO soil has been fired.
Sergei Lavrov’s rejoinder at the UN General Assembly last month was bald and direct. Russia’s calls for calm, he told reporters in New York, were being met by a European arms build-up that risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy — investment in weapons production that, sooner or later, risk nuclear war. He dismissed talk of a planned Russian assault on Europe as nonsense, and posed the obvious question that Western commentary studiously avoids: why would a Russia, a “full-spectrum commodity superpower” spanning eleven time zones, covet territory in a culturally exhausted, economically stagnant Western Europe bereft of natural resources?
The Ministry of Truth Comes to Britain and Brussels
The war rhetoric has been accompanied, entirely predictably, by a parallel tightening of the permissible bounds of debate. Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his address to the UN General Assembly this September to announce a new “National Centre for Information Defence”. He will task this quango with detecting and disrupting “hostile information attacks” working alongside intelligence agencies and social media platforms to police what counts as a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain”.
Brussels, meanwhile, presses ahead with an EU-wide digital age-verification and identity wallet regime that, whatever its stated purpose, builds the infrastructure through which online access is conditioned on identity disclosure. This creeping authoritarianism, with profound irony, has led the EU and UK to increasingly resemble the late Soviet Union in institutional architecture, ideological rigidity and lack of free-speech protections. Britain’s own Ministry of Truth apparatus of government, police and media monitoring reflects a government obsessed with suppressing anti-immigration sentiment on social media.
None of this is coincidental. Vice President JD Vance in his seismic speech last year told the assembled dignitaries of the Munich Security Conference that the threat he worried about most vis-à-vis Europe was neither Russia nor China but the retreat of European elites from their own foundational liberal values. These include the suppression of dissent and the restriction of speech deemed unhelpful to the official line, and the importation, without public consent, of mass immigration of mostly young men from the Middle East, Africa and West and South Asia that is steadily replacing the historic populations of the countries in question. President Trump has made much the same point: that the two most self-destructive policies pursued by the EU and UK establishment are green energy fanaticism and open-borders migration. He wants none of it for an America grounded in Christian values, the Bill of Rights and Enlightenment constitutionalism.
Whose War, Exactly?
The final irony deserves stating plainly. The European establishment’s newfound zeal for confronting Russia has been consistently deployed to frustrate any diplomatic off-ramp. When Ukrainian and Russian negotiators reached the outlines of a framework agreement in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, Boris Johnson’s unscheduled visit to Kyiv days later is remembered by Ukraine’s own chief negotiator, David Arakhamia, as the moment London counselled Kyiv to “sign nothing… and just fight.” Mr. Johnson, of course, denies exerting decisive pressure but the timeline is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that Ukraine, the supposed frontline democracy in whose name the West is being asked to countenance war with a nuclear power, has held no national election since 2019. A regime installed by a US-led coup in 2014 which displaced an elected government is now asked to stand as the vindication of Western democratic principle. Ukraine’s own reputation for endemic corruption was a persistent feature of independent rankings for years before the war. Western commentary treats any mention of the fact as tantamount to Kremlin sympathy. The moral capture of the debate has become totalizing with the charge of “Putin stooge” being the classic put-down line to all criticism of the NATO-led expansion since 1991, leading Ukraine down the primrose path to catastrophe.
An Old Story, Retold
As the saying goes, when all else fails, start a war. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that this old and cynical political logic — familiar episodes of governing-class failure across history — is precisely what is now in play across Western Europe and Britain. The region’s political elites presided over two decades of self-inflicted energy poverty, deindustrialisation and demographic upheaval. They now face electorates increasingly inclined to reward the populist parties that promise to reverse course. A governing establishment that built its legitimacy on Net Zero and open borders has discovered that a foreign enemy, real or embellished, is a more reliable route to continued power than an honest reckoning with its own record.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia makes an unusually convenient target: distant enough to be safely feared, weak enough (on Mr Rutte’s own telling) to be safely provoked, and useful enough, as an organising threat, to justify the curtailments of speech and dissent that a discredited establishment now finds it needs. Europeans and Britons alike would do well to ask, before this logic runs its course, who exactly is being asked to do the dying, and in whose interest.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is an energy economist and the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes.
Potentially, fifty years from now people may look back and marvel at how easily (and cheaply) China could wind up the Western liberals, and how they got away with it.
And so it is that China somehow ends up being in bed with Western lefties who say they hate carbon emissions but admire China.
Then these Western institutions, PhDs, and NGOs tell the world how wonderful and advanced China is in renewables. This third-party endorsement is also handy as a much more convincing than a press release from the CCP. In effect, donating to a Green fund in the West would be one way of laundering propaganda, wouldn’t it?
Potentially, fifty years from now people may look back and marvel at how easily (and cheaply) China could wind up the Western liberals, and how they got away with it.
We may wonder how it was not obvious that the world was caught in a covert Cold War. We don’t have all the receipts to say that now, and may never get them, but we have the method, the motive, and the opportunity.
As I keep saying, there are so many advantages to China it would be crazy if it weren’t manipulating the West to sabotage our own success. But Peter Doran and Brenda Shaffer have taken that further and written a very classy feature in Tablet.
They followed the money as far as they could, but many of the dollars vanish in a swamp of collected philanthropic funds which earnestly profess their angst and indignation against Western carbon emitters but somehow cheer on China even though it accounts for 93% of all new coal constructions on Earth. A funny coincidence…
And so it is that China somehow ends up being in bed with Western lefties who say they hate carbon emissions but admire China. Then these Western institutions, PhDs, and NGOs tell the world how wonderful and advanced China is in renewables. This third-party endorsement is also handy as a much more convincing than a press release from the CCP. In effect, donating to a Green fund in the West would be one way of laundering propaganda, wouldn’t it?
Potentially, fifty years from now people may look back and marvel at how easily (and cheaply) China could wind up the Western liberals, and how they got away with it.
We may wonder how it was not obvious that the world was caught in a covert Cold War. We don’t have all the receipts to say that now, and may never get them, but we have the method, the motive, and the opportunity.
As I keep saying, there are so many advantages to China it would be crazy if it weren’t manipulating the West to sabotage our own success. But Peter Doran and Brenda Shaffer have taken that further and written a very classy feature in Tablet.
They followed the money as far as they could, but many of the dollars vanish in a swamp of collected philanthropic funds which earnestly profess their angst and indignation against Western carbon emitters but somehow cheer on China even though it accounts for 93% of all new coal constructions on Earth. A funny coincidence…
And so it is that China somehow ends up being in bed with Western lefties who say they hate carbon emissions but admire China. Then these Western institutions, PhDs, and NGOs tell the world how wonderful and advanced China is in renewables. This third-party endorsement is also handy as a much more convincing than a press release from the CCP. In effect, donating to a Green fund in the West would be one way of laundering propaganda, wouldn’t it?
We know China already sends some money to Western charities to ‘help’ us clean up our environment. (It’s so sweet of a developing nation to care about rich world pollution, don’t you think?) But the end result of that donation could easily be viewed as an economic investment that damages the West and boosts Chinese trade.
The sums of money that can be traced back to China are in the hundreds of thousands or low million per individual. But if a foreign entity was sending many millions of dollars to influence an adversary’s policies, they wouldn’t want to advertise that would they?
We would have to be pretty stupid to not even ask the question, just how much of the climate obsession in the West is driven by China?China has already been caught funding eco-lawfare suits in the U.S. to sabotage American energy dominance — thanks to Steve Milloy and Ballyboruma.
In its competition with China, the United States holds a natural advantage: abundant oil and cheap natural gas. Reliable energy powers factories, data centers, transportation networks, and military operations. It lets the United States combine technological innovation with industrial scale, an advantage that China, dependent on imported oil and gas, cannot easily reproduce.
But China has found a partial answer: the net-zero movement.
Over the past two decades, therefore, an alliance in all but name has taken shape.
On the surface, it looks like a relationship of strange bedfellows. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the largest producer and consumer of coal. Its power system still runs mainly on coal, and it burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. By the climate movement’s own stated goal, the reduction of emissions, China should be its principal target. It is not.
Guess who was behind Code Pink?
Several well-publicized cases suggest that one reason China appears to be above net zero criticism is that Beijing is playing a major role in funding the climate movement. For example, Neville Roy Singham, an American technology entrepreneur, has reportedly been the subject of a federal grand jury inquiry in New York. Singham sold his consulting firm Thoughtworks in 2017 for $785 million, moved his operations to Shanghai, and began financing a global network of nonprofits and media outlets. In August 2023, TheNew York Timesreported that Singham, working closely with the Chinese government’s media apparatus, financed the spread of its messaging worldwide through nonprofits and shell companies. Singham denied receiving funds or instructions from any government or party, including the Chinese Communist Party.
One recipient of his philanthropy has been Code Pink, the antiwar group cofounded by Jodie Evans, whom Singham married in 2017.
According to Sen. Tom Cotton, $1.4 million moved from groups associated with Singham and found its way to Code Pink. Whereupon Code Pink stopped criticizing the Uighur treatment in China and stopped worrying about the fate of human rights workers in China. A few years later they started saying things like “China is not the enemy”.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union cultivated Western peace and antinuclear movements that constrained Western governments and left Soviet power untouched. It also sponsored the campaign that produced the U.N. resolution equating Zionism with racism — a line crafted in Moscow and carried at the United Nations by Soviet and Arab clients, then taken up by parts of the Western left. Beijing is the heir to this tradition, working now from inside the world economy rather than from outside it.
The costs fall almost entirely on America and its allies.
British and European industrial electricity is among the most expensive in the world. When the price of power rises, manufacturing contracts, plants close, and the jobs and the tax base move. China keeps adding supply and selling electricity to its factories at prices the West cannot match. Climate policy, as practiced, is a transfer of industrial advantage to China.
The replacement systems are Chinese. China dominates every stage of solar and wind manufacturing, battery cells and their materials, and the processing of critical minerals—and, increasingly, electric vehicles themselves. A transition mandated by Western governments therefore transfers consumer demand to Chinese factories and hands control of supply to Chinese planners. With the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Europe learned from Russian gas the cost of a single choke point. Renewable-energy supply chains have more of them.
For some reason China wants to help Americans breathe the cleanest air?
Energy Foundation China has written checks, for example, to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which in 2022 published the gas-stove asthma paper that Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm helped turn into a national fight over gas in the home. Destroying the much-deserved reputation of natural gas, which is abundant in the United States, as a low-polluting source of cheap energy has obvious national-security advantages for China.
There’s no document that shows the China instigated this research, but the conflict of interest “deserves some scrutiny” as they say.
They also present vulnerabilities pipelines never did. According to the International Energy Agency, China accounted for about 80% of global manufacturing capacity for solar and battery inverters in 2025. These devices convert solar or battery output into grid power. Western operators have found undocumented communications hardware in some Chinese-made equipment. Chinese military writing treats an adversary’s energy system as an early target. The easiest way to stop a fighter-bomber is not to shoot it down. It is to deny it electricity before it takes off.
Friendly agencies in the West help to launder CCP propaganda:
Beijing cannot manufacture Western credibility. A Chinese state outlet can call China a climate leader indefinitely without moving a single Western legislature, because the audience knows who is speaking. The same claim advanced by an American foundation president, a European research institute, or an international agency carries the authority of institutions trusted precisely because they are not Chinese. The arrangement solves the propagandist’s problem. It separates the message from the messenger.
There is a lot more detail to the story at Tablet magazine. China didn’t start the Climate Change movement, and we know the big Bankers, the renewables industry, and those who want Big Government have a trillion reasons to push the Climate Change barrow. But it’s easy to imagine how China could have been pulled into the slip-stream and taken advantage of it. The question today is how much influence does China have now?
“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.”
I will simply note that this would not be the first time that China used our “experts” against us. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the “coronavirus experts” implemented a great deal of destructive policy under the banners of science and safety.
Late last week, I argued that America cannot afford to let environmental- lawfare campaigns, spy-generated social media influence, and intellectual- property theft hand the Chinese Communist Party a substantial strategic advantage in developing artificial intelligence (AI).
The appropriate response to China’s meddling in US AI business is absolutely not naïve “cooperation,” but a serious commitment to securing our research, expanding reliable energy and data-center capacity, and treating China’s AI ambitions as the highly complex national-security challenge they plainly are.
President Trump dismissed a rare bipartisan call from the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development, telling reporters Sunday that the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind China.
“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump said. “We can put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
Trump’s comments were his first public response to a joint moment Saturday when Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI publicly backed a call to reduce the pace at which AI companies build more powerful models. The CEOs’ statements came just days after Anthropic revealed that its chatbot, Claude, was being used to attempt to create bioweapons, spy on Ukraine and scam dating-app users.
I will simply note that this would not be the first time that China used our “experts” against us. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the “coronavirus experts” implemented a great deal of destructive policy under the banners of science and safety.
🚨 Breaking: Xi Jinping just announced that China fully supports Dario's proposal to slow down America's AI research pic.twitter.com/DgMgitnpJa
But more fiscally astute observers suggest an alternative explanation. Perhaps AI companies are facing slowing model gains, soaring compute and infrastructure costs, and growing public resistance to the data centers needed to sustain the race. Calls to slow development may therefore be as much about managing expectations, cutting spending, and rebuilding public support as about protecting humanity.
Let’s call this one the “Save the IPO” hypothesis.
An alternative hypothesis: – model performance is plateauing – compute is getting much more expensive – AI data centers are massively unpopular – slowing down AI development is a way to explain slowing progress, reduce spending, and try to regain some goodwill. – This is an… https://t.co/H6gVTZtb0F
Anthropic is on the frontline of AI development, as is OpenAI. New regulations can be tailored to hinder the success of other firms that are a little less far along in development. And I will also note that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one of Anthropic’s biggest customers, paying a $1.25 billion monthly fee for exclusive use of its Colossus cluster.
SpaceX just landed a mystery AI compute customer worth $1.11 BILLION per month.
The contract starts December 1 and joins reported deals worth $1.25B a month with Anthropic and $920M a month with Google.
That’s potentially $3.28B in monthly revenue from just three compute…
Billions are on the line in being among the first “winners” in the AI race. Reuters reported that Anthropic projected as much as $18 billion in 2026 revenue and $55 billion in 2027 revenue. By comparison, OpenAI had passed a $25 billion annualized revenue rate by early 2026 but remained heavily investment-intensive, underscoring that immense sales do not automatically equal profits in an industry with substantial computing and infrastructure costs.
Fun fact #1: They both want to IPO. They both need to slash model training costs to show a path to profitability. An AI development slowdown serves exactly that purpose.
Fun fact #2: China has bridged the gap with the US. Any US slowdown would hand AI supremacy to China. _ pic.twitter.com/kxEwZ4vH8s
Meanwhile, the White House AI Czar David Sacks says Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman already dominate frontier AI and therefore can voluntarily slow development if they believe their unreleased systems pose serious risks. He argues they should not use safety concerns to seek exemptions from antitrust rules, preemptive regulatory approval, or industry-controlled evaluation regimes, which he portrays as potential mechanisms for regulatory capture.
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
…So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier…
It is clear Trump will not allow a small group of well-connected AI “experts” to convert speculative fears into a Washington-designed moat around their own market share.
A competitive free market paired with strong enforcement against Chinese espionage and theft will produce better technology and more resilient national security than regulatory capture masquerading as “safety.”
China benefits when America’s innovators are tied down by bureaucrats; the U.S. benefits when entrepreneurs remain free to compete, build, and win.
I am glad to see the current administration applying the lessons learned from COVID to protect American AI development.
The stark reality: in China, 55% of power is produced by coal and the cost of household electricity is 8 cents per kWh.
Electricity is the sine qua non of modern society.
Coal-based electricity brought the U.S. to the center of the world’s economic stage and China has followed that same pathway to modernity and societal progress.
The stark reality: in China, 55% of power is produced by coal and the cost of household electricity is 8 cents per kWh. In the UK, coal’s percentage of electricity was 30% in 2010 but that has declined to less than 1%. Consequently, the cost of electricity for families has increased 250% — from 16 cents to over 40 cents per kWh — and is still on the rise. No wonder 37% of England’s families pay over 10% of their income on energy.
In the U.S., the closing of coal plants for political reasons has led to coal’s role declining from 45% in 2010 to just 15% today. Accordingly, the cost of electricity increased 70% to 19 cents per kWh and is projected to keep rising: “Retail electricity prices have increased faster than the rate of inflation since 2022, and we expect them to continue increasing” — U.S. Department of Energy.
Moreover, after the closure of over 300 coal plants, reliability is at serious risk in the U.S.: “coal-fired generator retirements… have caused a sharp decline in anticipated resources … new generation is insufficient to make up for generator retirements and load growth.” — North American Electricity Reliability Corporation (NERC)
Electricity is the sine qua non of modern society.
In 2000, the National Academy of Engineering identified electrification as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th Century.
Coal- based electricity brought the U.S. to the center of the world’s economic stage and China has followed that same pathway to modernity and societal progress. In 2000, coal produced about 990 Terawatt Hours (TWh) of electricity in China. By 2025, coal produced upwards of 6,000 TWh.
This dramatic rise in coal power stimulated massive improvements in the quality of life of the population. In 2000, the Infant Mortality Rate in China was 30, it is now 5. Access to clean cooking fuels increased from 41% of the population to well over 90%. Availability of clean water grew from 45% of households to 99%.
Life expectancy rose from 72 to 78, and the Food Production Index grew from 63 to over 112.
No wonder the International Energy Agency (IEA) declared: “Coal has underpinned China’s massive and unprecedented growth in output, fueling an economic miracle.”
The growth of the middle class in China is the largest the world has ever seen, increasing from 39 million people in 2000 to almost 1 billion today. The middle class is the backbone of any society and coal-
based electricity was the material foundation for this progress in China. In 2000, electricity use per capita was 993 kWh, it is now over 7,400 — far more than Germany. In essence, through the benefits of coal-based electricity, China, with over 1.4 billion people, became a modern nation in a little more than two decades. Since 2000, over 70% of humans lifted out of poverty were Chinese.
Coal made the difference and propelled China to ever higher in the World’s socio- economic hierarchy.
China imports about 550 million metric tons of coal per year. These imports, along with its own substantial supply, have provided the energy to make China the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter.
China produces over one billion tons of steel — 54% of global production, of which over 90% is produced using coal. China provides 52% of cement, 97% of which uses coal energy. China produces 80% of the world’s solar panels and coal provides at least 75% of the electricity for their manufacture.
By 2030, China’s coal to gas capacity will grow from 9.4 billion cubic meters to 28 billion. The world’s policymakers need to be mindful of their dependence on China’s use of coal and the benefits that have spread across the globe.
And now China has built an electricity system for the next leap forward. The PRC is basing its electric supply on a foundation of coal — a fuel that has demonstrated abundance, availability, affordability and reliability. By 2030, China will have over 1,500 GW of coal-based electricity compared to the DOE projection of a mere 88 GW in the U.S.
The idea that intermittent wind and solar will replace coal power in generation or manufacturing in China is wishful thinking indeed. Over 500 GW of coal capacity is already under development compared to an insignificant 4 GW in the U.S.
And these are not your grandfather’s coal plants. Rather, China is building advanced stations that produce significantly lower emissions. As Clare Richardson of the National Bureau of Asian Research pointed out: “China is rapidly deploying ultra-supercritical and supercritical coal technology, which can operate at higher temperatures and pressures to improve thermal efficiency.”
The country has also pursued widespread adoption of flue gas desulfurization and selective catalytic reduction systems to cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.
Consider, for example, Pingshan Phase II in Anhui Province, a cutting-edge 1.35-GW ultra-supercritical coal-fired unit with a net efficiency of about 50% — making it the world’s most efficient coal-fired power plant and a continuing model for the ongoing wave of plants under construction not only in China but also India and the rest of the world. China is the architect of 21St Century coal power.
There is widespread recognition that progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will determine a large part of a nation’s future. RAND Corporation projects countries will see their influence rise or fall depending on how they manage the development of AI.
Scholars at the University of Miami School of Law concluded: “The global race for AI dominance is shaping the future of economies, governance, and national security.” Finally, this cogent comment from Arab News: “Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a technological breakthrough: it is quickly becoming a linchpin of global power.”
Thus, the race is on and now we consider the realities: The U.S. aspires to global dominance in AI. In July of last year, the White House published: Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan as well as three executive orders designed to promote and maintain leadership in AI. But China has the same aspiration. Through a series of Five-Year Plans, China has become a formidable technological competitor of the U.S.
As The New York Timesput it: China Is Spending Billions to Become an A.I. Superpower.
The competition between the U.S. and China is intense and China is steadily eroding the initial gap. In 2023, the Stanford AI Index reported the performance gap between U.S. and Chinese model benchmarks was about 25%. By 2026, that gap has narrowed to 3% and is closing further. Daniel Hook, CEO at Digital Science, found that China is now ahead in the development of large language models with an AI talent pool that dwarfs its rivals — 30,000 active AI researchers and a massive graduate student and postdoctoral population.
China has filed at least 70% of all global AI related patents and leads on research article volume with 23 % of all global AI publications versus 13 % for the U.S. And the American talent pool is diminishing. The number of AI researchers moving to the U.S. has dropped 89% since 2017. The U.S. is ahead today, but the momentum belongs to China.
No country will meet its AI goals without reliable and affordable electricity. The U.S. is increasingly falling behind on both fronts. Consider the PJM Interconnection with 67 million customers in the East. Due to the closure of coal generating capacity, the reserve margin for the system will continue to fall from 23% in 2020 to a risky 14% in 2027. Incredibly, utilities in the PJM system are planning to retire over 11 more GW of coal. Hard to believe.
The U.S. has been closing coal plants willy-nilly for over a decade with nary a thought to the implications. Yet the consequences of higher rates and reduced reliability are real and meaningful to the competition between China and the U.S. — and will be even more so as India’s 1.5 billion coal-based population enters the AI picture — India’s electricity is 70% coal.
“The difference in the cost of energy around the world is going to become really quite extreme,” Michael Brown, global investment strategist at Franklin Templeton, told CNBC. “If you’re making energy-intensive investments, then you’re going to go to where the cheapest energy is.”
In terms of rates, U.S. household power prices have risen nearly 25% in just four years. In 2025-26 a total of 47 states endured electricity price increases and dozens of additional rate increase requests are still pending.
The American people are increasingly victims of an array of poor energy policy decisions at both the Federal and state level — and even utilities themselves have failed to think ahead, closing productive coal plants to get in on the government dole of “renewables” like expensive wind and solar.
Families suffer, businesses suffer and the next generation of Americans will pay a heavy price with a diminishing role on the world’s economic stage.
Note: Coal is the Cornerstone seeks to give a voice to supporters of coal in its many dimensions and contributions. But we need help and ask like-minded individuals and companies to help support the effort at http://www.coaliscornerstone.com. Access to our previous articles is available on this site.
Fred Palmer Esq. has served as CEO of Western Fuels and Peabody Energy’s Senior Vice President for Government Affairs. He chaired the World Coal Association Board and was a member of the National Coal Council. He received the American Institute of Mining Award for “Distinguished Achievement in Coal Technology.” He also was awarded a Statement of Appreciation from the National Coal Council in 2015 with a plaque for “Guidance since 1990”
Frank Clemente PhD. specializes in the socio-economic impact of energy policy and is author of The Global Value of Coal published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) as well as numerous articles in energy journals and reports for the National Coal Council. Professor Clemente has served on the faculty at the University of Kentucky, the University of Wisconsin and Penn State. His work is presented independently from any University affiliation.
Ed. note: This letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and key members of Congress from Consumer Action for a Strong Economy and other free market energy groups is reproduced below. At issue is a legal loophole allowing Chinese-owned battery component manufacturers to receive taxpayer funded incentives. More information can be found here.
“American taxpayers should not finance the expansion of Chinese-controlled battery companies inside the United States.”
Dear Secretary Bessent:
Consumer Action for a Strong Economy and the undersigned organizations urge the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service to fully enforce the foreign-entity restrictions enacted through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and prevent Chinese-controlled battery companies from accessing American manufacturing and energy tax incentives, including the Section 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit and the Section 48E Clean Electricity Investment Credit, through U.S. subsidiaries, contractual arrangements, or nominally domestic operations.
Congress established these safeguards for a clear reason: federal tax policy should build independent American industrial capacity, support American workers, and reduce our reliance on supply chains controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Congress has already recognized this danger in the battery sector. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has pressed Treasury over whether Gotion should receive U.S. taxpayer support and urged federal action concerning forced-labor risks in the supply chains of both Gotion and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited, or CATL. Those warnings rest on a straightforward principle: American taxpayers should not finance the expansion of Chinese-controlled battery companies inside the United States.
SEMCORP and Green New Energy Materials present that same concern in a more immediate form. Chinese parent companies are establishing U.S. subsidiaries and domestic facilities that could position them to benefit from federal incentives while preserving Chinese ownership, technology, management, personnel, and supply-chain influence. Emerging cases in Ohio and North Carolina demonstrate how a Chinese parent company can establish a nominally American operation, obtain favorable public treatment, and maintain dependence on Chinese ownership, technology, management, and personnel.
SEMCORP, a major Chinese producer of lithium-ion battery separator film, established SEMCORP Manufacturing USA LLC to develop a facility in Sidney, Ohio. The project was promoted as a nearly $916 million investment that would create as many as 1,199 jobs. Recent reporting now raises serious questions about whether SEMCORP is building the American workforce and independent industrial capacity used to sell the project. After promising as many as 1,199 jobs, the company reduced its commitment to 300 and reports employing just over 120 people. SEMCORP has acknowledged bringing workers to Ohio through L-1 visas, advertised positions identifying Mandarin as a preferred qualification, and reportedly transported foreign personnel between local hotels and the plant at unusual hours. Ohio ultimately canceled a proposed state Job Creation Tax Credit because SEMCORP never executed the agreement. The company nevertheless continues to benefit from an active local Community Reinvestment Area agreement, while a separate Enterprise Zone agreement for another parcel may be terminated for non-performance.
SEMCORP’s leadership history provides additional reason for scrutiny. When the Ohio project was announced, SEMCORP’s international division was led by Jeff Liu, the former president and CEO of Fuyao Group North America. That connection is newly relevant. On July 23, 2026, the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party launched an investigation, supported in a bipartisan fashion, into Fuyao’s American operations, seeking information concerning its ownership, decision-making in China and the United States, labor practices, government subsidies, regulatory compliance, and relationships with the PRC government and Chinese Communist Party.
The former Fuyao executive deploying the same strategies used in Fuyao gives Treasury additional reason to examine SEMCORP. Reporting suggests it is following a familiar model: establish an American subsidiary, obtain public support, rely on Chinese management and technical personnel, and promise that genuine American independence will come later.
A similar pattern is developing in North Carolina. Green New Energy Materials is the U.S. manufacturing vehicle of Shenzhen Senior Technology Material Co., another Chinese battery-separator producer. The company plans to establish its first U.S. manufacturing operation in North Carolina with state and local incentive support. Its hiring materials have also identified Mandarin or Chinese-language ability as a preferred qualification for certain positions.
SEMCORP and Green New Energy Materials therefore present the same policy concern Congress identified with CATL and Gotion, but in a more immediate and concrete form. SEMCORP is already operating in Ohio, already using personnel transferred from China, already benefiting from favorable local tax treatment, and already embedded within the American battery-component market. The company denies that is seeking 45X tax credits presently but that seems certain to change when final guidance is issued, since eligibility would appear to be a key justification for its domestic investment in the first place.
These companies may point to American incorporation papers, domestic factory walls, and some American employees. Those formalities do not answer the question Congress directed Treasury to resolve: who ultimately controls the company, its technology, intellectual property, financing, equipment, key personnel, supplier relationships, profits, and strategic decisions?
That is the Chinese battery loophole Treasury must close.
The OBBBA’s foreign-entity provisions were intended to prevent companies tied to China and other adversarial nations from capturing federal benefits through corporate restructuring, U.S. based subsidiaries, licensing arrangements, supplier contracts, or other formalities that conceal continued foreign control.
A Chinese parent company should not become eligible for American tax incentives merely because it creates a Delaware, Ohio, or North Carolina subsidiary. Nor should a facility qualify as independent American production when it remains dependent upon a prohibited foreign entity for its technology, intellectual property, equipment, components, financing, executives, engineers, or operational personnel. Treasury’s Notice 2026-15 is an important first step, but its Certification Safe Harbor creates a significant enforcement vulnerability. The notice permits taxpayers to rely on supplier certifications unless they know or have reason to know that a certification is inaccurate.
That approach may be appropriate for ordinary suppliers. It is inadequate where a claimant, direct supplier, parent company, affiliate, technology licensor, equipment provider, or key contractor is owned or influenced by a prohibited foreign entity. In those cases, Treasury should require independent substantiation of ownership, contracts, payment flows, intellectual-property rights, equipment arrangements, personnel assignments, and upstream sourcing.
We therefore urge Treasury and the IRS to:
Strengthen consequences for false certifications. Treasury should require full recapture of any improperly claimed credit, impose all available accuracy-related penalties, and refer knowing misrepresentations for civil or criminal enforcement.
Apply rigorous prohibited-foreign-entity review to claims under Section 45X and Section 48E. Treasury should ensure that Chinese-controlled companies cannot claim the Section 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit for battery components, or benefit from the Section 48E Clean Electricity Investment Credit through grid-scale battery projects, merely by operating through a U.S.-incorporated subsidiary or nominally domestic project company.
Publicly clarify that domestic incorporation, final assembly in the United States, or partial domestic hiring does not by itself establish eligibility where meaningful control or material assistance remains tied to China.
Treasury should not wait until billions of taxpayer dollars have been claimed and Chinese controlled supply chains have become entrenched before addressing these structures. Congress has already sounded the alarm over CATL and Gotion. The developing investigation into Fuyao demonstrates why PRC investment structures must be examined before American communities and industries become dependent upon them. SEMCORP and Green New Energy Materials are now a direct test of whether Treasury will apply those lessons in time.
A factory does not become American merely because it stands in Ohio or North Carolina. A Chinese company does not become independent merely because it creates a Delaware subsidiary. And Chinese technology, executives, engineers, equipment, and supply chains do not become domestic merely because the finished component leaves an American loading dock. The OBBBA drew a clear line. American tax incentives must build American-owned, American controlled, and genuinely independent industrial capacity, not subsidize Beijing’s industrial strategy through nominally domestic corporations.
We respectfully urge Treasury to strengthen its forthcoming guidance and explain clearly how it will prevent SEMCORP, Green New Energy Materials, and similarly structured companies from using American subsidiaries, contracts, or corporate formalities to circumvent the foreign-entity restrictions Congress enacted.
Sincerely,
Gerard Scimeca, Chairman Consumer Action for a Strong Economy Matthew Kandrach, President Consumer Action for a Strong Economy; Tom Pyle, President, American Energy Alliance; Jeffrey Mazzella, President, Center for Individual Freedom; Daniel Turner, CEO, Power the Future; Ryan Ellis, President, Center for a Free Economy; George Landrith, President, Frontiers of Freedom; Eric Ventimiglia, Executive Director, Pinpoint Policy Institute; John Droz Jr., Physicist and Founder, Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED); Roslyn Layton, PhD, Senior Fellow, National Security Institute; Gregory A. Schroeder, Executive Vice President, Southwest Public Policy Institute; Saulius “Saul” Anuzis, President, 60 Plus Association, American Association of Senior Citizens; Gabriella Hoffman, Director, Center for Energy and Conservation, Independent Women; Kristen Walker, Senior Policy Analyst and Manager for Energy and Transportation, American Consumer Institute
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