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SUNDAY SCIENCE: TRUMP’S GLOBAL WAR ON DECARBONIZATION  
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Mark Blyth, Daniel Driscoll
August 21, 2025
Project Syndicate
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_ The Trump administration is doing everything it can to ensure that
fossil fuels remain dominant in the energy mix of the twenty-first
century. If it succeeds, the short-term returns to the US will be
huge; but the long-term damage to the planet will _

, Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images

 

PROVIDENCE – There are multiple competing theories about what drives
the anti-green policies embraced by US President Donald Trump. Perhaps
they reflect the influence of carbon-heavy industries in
Republican-controlled states. Or perhaps they channel ideological
hostility to the notion that the state should play any kind of
planning role in the economy.

Whatever the case, it is increasingly apparent that the Trump
administration wants to halt decarbonization not only in the United
States but globally. Viewed from this perspective, much of the recent
US policy incoherence starts to make more sense – albeit in a
dangerously regressive way.

The US sits atop vast reserves of fossil fuels, which have underpinned
its national prosperity for decades. They have lit cities, powered
factories, stimulated postwar job growth, and forged broad regional
political coalitions
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labor, agriculture, and corporations. They are also highly profitable
commodities, with exports creating global dependence on US supplies
(which is especially true for liquefied natural gas following
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine). Fossil fuels are a core
component of the country’s political economy
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domestic and foreign policymaking.

The Trump administration recognizes this. It includes
ideological realists
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understand that energy transitions make hegemons – that energy is
power. Just as coal drove the industrial revolution in England, oil
and gas fueled America’s postwar dominance. Whoever controls energy
controls the future.

Unfortunately for the US, if the next energy transition is a green
one, the future surely belongs to China, whose green-tech dominance is
so firmly established that it does not really matter which metric you
look at. In terms of the critical minerals used for such technologies,
China supplies the majority
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the world’s refined lithium (70%), cobalt (78%), graphite (95%),
rare earths (91%), and manganese (91%). In terms of green-tech
manufacturing, China accounts for 80% of solar panel
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50-70% of the wind turbine
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half of electric vehicles
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And in terms of deployment, it is undertaking three-quarters
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the world’s renewable-energy projects.

This is all good news for those who care about decarbonization; but it
is bad news for those hoping to extend US hegemony. If the US wants to
preserve its global primacy, then realist logic dictates that it needs
China to fail. And the US can engineer that outcome by continuing to
do exactly what it is doing.

Since Trump returned to office, his administration has been reshaping
American consumption by imposing massive import tariffs and abandoning
the previous administration’s program of domestic decarbonization
incentives and investments. The Inflation Reduction Act was an
explicit attempt to compete with China in green tech. But now
Americans are being weaned off the renewables that they were just
beginning to enjoy.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill spells disaster
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investment, and his administration is further deregulating fossil
fuels
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adding more hurdles
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clean-energy projects. While the Environmental Protection Agency works
to extinguish
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own ability to regulate carbon emissions, NASA satellites that track
US emissions are being targeted for self-destruction
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All these moves, coupled with 30% tariffs
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imports from China, signal to green-tech producers that the world’s
top consumer no longer wants their wares.1

Moreover, the US is trying to undercut global demand for Chinese green
tech by compelling its largest trading partners to import US fossil
fuels instead. China’s own top trading partner, the European Union,
just committed to purchase $750 billion
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US oil and gas by 2028 – an amount that far exceeds current US
output. And the rest of China’s top trading partners are following
suit. Japan
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agreed to invest billions in US LNG, and South Korea
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poised to join them.1

These moves come straight from the US postwar playbook: By ensuring
that European markets would be dependent on US oil, the Marshall
Plan prevented
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Soviet Union from wielding its own energy influence over the
continent.

The current US government is not just trying to rebalance trade. It is
obstructing global decarbonization as a matter of policy. Cratering
American demand for green technologies decreases global demand by a
non-trivial amount. And manipulating the terms of bilateral trade
deals to favor US fossil fuels abroad further undercuts demand for
green tech, impeding the clean-energy transition in key blocs like the
EU and East Asia.

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to ensure that
fossil fuels remain dominant in the energy mix of the twenty-first
century. If it succeeds, the short-term returns to the US will be
huge. But the long-term damage to the planet will be orders of
magnitude larger.

MARK BLYTH, Professor of International Economics and Director of the
Rhodes Centre for International Economics and Finance at the Watson
Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, is
the co-author (with Nicolò Fraccaroli), most recently,
of _Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers_
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2025).

DANIEL DRISCOLL is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University
of Virginia and a nonresident fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

_PROJECT SYNDICATE_ produces and delivers original, high-quality
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Subscribe to Project Syndicate
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RFK Jr Demanded a Vaccine Study Be Retracted — the Journal Said NO
Rachel Fieldhouse
Nature Magazine
In a rare move for a US public official, health secretary Robert F.
Kennedy Jr called for a Danish paper finding no link between
Aluminium in vaccines and disease to be retracted.
August 22,  2025

* fossil fuels
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* big oil
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* United States
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* global climate change
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* liquid natural gas
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* Economy
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* green energy
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* China
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* decarbonization
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