The Daily - The Future of Energy Has Arrived — Just Not in the U.S.

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

For the first time in 30 years, the annual U.N. conference on climate change is taking place without top government representation from the United States. China has emerged as the top dog at the summit and is poised to become the world’s supplier of green energy technology.David Gelles and Brad Plumer explain the growing showdown between global superpowers over the future of energy.Guest:David Gelles, a reporter on the New York Times climate team who leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter.Brad Plumer, a New York Times reporter based in Washington, covering technology and policy efforts to address global warming.Background reading: There’s a race to power the future. China is pulling away.At a climate summit without the U.S., allies and rivals call for action.Photo: Gilles Sabrie for The New York TimesFor more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hey, it's Rachel. So we are working on another special bonus episode for subscribers, where we take you behind the scenes here at the New York Times. So far, we've talked to editors who make the game section. We've talked to composers who make our amazing music here at the Daily. And most recently, we talked to our new restaurant critics. And for this next bonus episode, we want to learn about a section of the paper that people don't talk about quite as much.

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either voice memos or just a plain old email to Daily Subscribers at NYTimes.com. Okay, that's it for the announcement. Here's today's episode. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Since Trump took office in January, his administration has torpedoed much of the Biden-era efforts to combat climate change, slowing the growth of renewable energy and promoting the expansion of oil and gas. And for the first time, in 30 years,

the annual UN Conference on Climate Change, known as COP, is taking place without representation from the United States. In its place, China has become the top dog at the conference, and it's poised to become the world supplier of green energy technology. Today, my colleagues David Gellis and Bradshaw, Plumer, explain the growing showdown between global superpowers over the future of energy. It's Tuesday, November 18th. David.

Hi. You just got back from cop. I did. 27 hours to get there? Yeah, I was only 14 to get back. Wow. Okay. Well, this is not your first time being a cop, but maybe it's the longest trip you've taken.

Definitely. And, in fact, you've been multiple times. So I'm curious just to start. Tell us what, if anything, was different about this time. Well, KAP is this giant United Nations climate summit that happens every year in a different city around the globe. And what does it stand for? The conference of the parties. And the parties are those countries that have signed up in this framework to address climate change.

Got it. And this year, it was in Belém, Brazil, which is a relatively small, relatively impoverished. city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. And so even at the outset, people understood there were going to be a lot of logistical challenges with this cop. And that all came true. People were sleeping on cruise ships. Wait, cruise ships instead of hotels or something?

Why cruise ships? Because there are like literally aren't enough hotel rooms in the city to accommodate an influx of nearly 100,000 people. Wow. Traffic was a mess. There was rain coming in through the convention center tent. Oh, dear. But the other thing that was new,

The big change since I've been attending cops was that for the first time, the United States government was simply absent. There was no one from the federal government attending this event. Not one person. Not one person. I mean, there must have been Americans there, but you're saying not in an official capacity representing the United States? Correct. The point of this event is to get all the countries of the world around the same table to address climate change and figure out how we as a, global community are going to reduce global warming, put an end to this. But the United States,

which is the world's largest economy and one of the biggest emitters in the world of planet warming gases was simply MIA. The Trump administration sent no one. What was the practical effect of the United States not being there? Well, on the one hand, it meant that whatever agreements might come out of this cop. And, We still don't know exactly what that's going to be, almost certainly won't be embraced by the United States. But that's not a surprise, because on his first day in office this year, President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. That was this agreement signed by almost every nation on earth, including the United States, 10 years ago, to try to limit global warming. Right.

So the United States is just not going to be a part of whatever agreements come out of this. The other big and very visible change this year was that instead of the U.S. sucking up a lot of the oxygen, as it often does at these events, China was the center of attention. And that's representative of a much bigger trend, which is that as the United States reembraces fossil fuels like coal and oil and gas, China is stepping up and filling the void, left by the United States when it comes to renewable energy. We've been writing all year about how China has become the leading producer of solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, and other renewable technologies. And what I saw very visibly in Brazil is that other countries are literally lining up to do deals with the Chinese because they want these technologies.

What does that mean? Like, you saw other countries lining up to do deals with them at COP, like that was on display? What exactly did you see and what were they actually trying to get? So there's so much happening at this event, but at the sort of the beating heart of it is called the Blue Zone. And inside the Blue Zone, it's basically like a trade show with every country on Earth having their own little booth. Except the China booth was very big, and it was right in the center of things. And so, if you will, picture in this sea of trade shows with like Thailand and Indonesia and Brazil all represented. the biggest space is occupied by China

and there are Chinese flags and there are pictures of President Xi and they're handing out his books and handing out Chinese souvenirs and there was so much demand most of the day that there were literally lines of people waiting to get in and hear what the Chinese had to say

and a lot of what they were talking about with their renewable energy policies. Which is really interesting because China is, I believe, the biggest polluter on Earth It sure is. It is, right? So, obviously, there's been a push for China to get into renewable energy for years now.

That's not new. But it does seem striking that China would nonetheless be the popular kid at a climate conference, right? Did that seem interesting at all to you? It's a total paradox. But this is the world we're living in right now. On the one hand, yes, you're absolutely right. China remains the biggest polluter on Earth when it comes to planet warming emissions. And a lot of that comes from their continued use at a he mass.

scale of coal. They're still building new coal plants. Right. And yet, what they have also done in recent years is ramp up to an unfathomable degree their adoption of solar panels and wind energy in particular. And if you look at these charts, which we write all these stories about, what they show is this graph that just goes up and to the right like a hockey stick when it shows China's own domestic renewable energy production. And that's fast on pace to start to meaningfully displace coal. But the other side of the story is that they're exporting these technologies to the rest of the world. I want to understand more about the technology that is attracting these countries that want technology from China.

You mentioned solar power, wind. What else are we talking about specifically? Sure. Sure. So I want to be clear. People aren't like lining up and buying a ticket and then walking out with a solar panel. With a solar panel. Or with a $50 million commitment to buy solar panels. Sure. Some of those deals are happening on the sidelines. Okay. But what we're seeing here is the world being really interested, really hungry to understand China's position, its technology, and how it has managed to put itself on a trajectory to go from. a massive polluter to a clean energy leader. So that's what people are lining up to understand. And the way they've done that and the technologies that other people are trying to get their head around and maybe their hands on, you named a couple of them. Solar panels, absolutely. Most of the world solar panels are made in China right now. And they are by far the biggest exporter of solar

panels. Same is true in many ways for wind. China is building tons of wind power and they're helping other countries build wind farms as well. But it doesn't end there. It's batteries. It's transmission. I'm actually working on a story right now about how China has helped build in Brazil these multi-thousand-mile lines that carry energy across the Amazon rainforest to the population centers. So China's a leader in transmission as well. And then the last one and the one you could really see on the streets of Bel in Brazil is electric vehicles. I can't tell you how many of the Ubers I took trying to get through the traffic clogged streets of this city were BYDs. BYD's?

BYD. What does that mean? Build your dreams. These amazing Chinese electric vehicles, which are incredibly cheap, way more advanced than the EVs we can buy here in the United States and are proliferating around the globe. I understand what you're saying that China is filling this vacuum in the environmental space that the U.S. has left. But a lot of the technology that you're talking about, it's not like we don't have that in the United States. We're not interested in that in the United States. So what is the gap, I guess, in reality between what the U.S. is able to do and what China has been able to manufacture and export?

The list of gobsmacking energy projects that China's building at home goes on forever. Take this new solar farm that they've built on the Tibetan Plateau. know, 10,000 feet high in the mountains, there are solar panels that cover an area larger than seven times the size of Manhattan and can power multiple cities. Or take, you know, I mentioned some power lines that China is building in Brazil, but it has built these ultra-high voltage transmission lines that stretch 2,000 miles across the country. And it hasn't just built one or two, or two, or three four of him. It has more than 40 of these lines, whereas I wrote a series of stories earlier this year about the challenge of building just one basic transmission line in the United States.

And then there's China's network of high-speed trains, which in recent years has just come to crisscross the country, and these are incredibly advanced trains, shuttling people around the country at hundreds of miles an hour, whereas, you know, Amtrak just tried to update its Northeast Corridor train, and it left a lot to be desired. I want to understand the scale of the interest in what China is offering to sell. Like, okay, so they can make all of these things, and they can make a multi-thousand-mile transmission line that you mentioned that crisscrosses Brazil. What is the appetite for that globally?

And how does that position China just on the world stage? Let me just put some of this in context. Take batteries. The United States exported about $3 billion worth of batteries last year. China exported $65 billion worth of batteries. The United States exported about $69 million worth of solar panels. China exported about $40 billion worth of solar panels. When it comes to electric cars, the United States exported about $12 billion.

Most of that was Tesla. China exported $38 billion, and that number is growing incredibly fast. So this isn't a hypothetical. China has already found markets for its technologies around the world, and it's building factories and transmission lines and all the rest of it in countries in South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. This is happening right now. One of the things we have not touched on yet is China's interest in soft power, right? So I understand you've explained that there's a market for what they are making, the economic advantages that they're trying. trying to gain. But beyond that, China obviously is trying to grow its influence on the world stage.

We've talked about that on the show many, many times. So can you just talk about what other advantages or influence doing deals with some of these smaller countries, as you mentioned, or maybe bigger countries? What does that give to them besides the economic advantages we've talked about? This has come up in so many of my conversations this year, as we've been reporting on sort of the diverging energy pathways through the United States and China. And because it's soft power, it can be sometimes hard to say,

oh, that's exactly how it showed up. Right. That's a tangible benefit. It's out there. Right. But setting a specific example aside, I think if you just understand that, say, a country in Central Africa

that might be buying more Chinese technology, inviting Chinese companies to come help but build out its energy grid, importing Chinese electrical vehicles. When you think about which countries are going to have influence on a nation like that, especially as the United States has pulled back its aid budget with the dismantling of something like USAID, it's easy to understand why this kind of big energy export is going to give China a major seat at the table at a lot of developing economies, especially at a moment when the United States is pulling back from the world stage in this way. Right. Teach a man to fish, but also

control all of his fishing poles, essentially. That's one way to say it. So in a way, that speaks to China's motivation, right? Because they're developing all of this clean energy technology, and it's not just about moving away from fossil fuels to save the climate. It is also very much rooted in what is geopolitically and economically beneficial for China. That's right. I mean, China is positioning itself as a climate leader at this moment, but that's not where this all came from. This story of China's embrace of clean technologies actually began in roughly like 2003 or so when a man named Wen Jaibo, who was China's premier, took a look around and understood that China was incredibly reliant on imported oil from the Middle East. And that made him very

uncomfortable. It did not give China energy independence, which is a buzzword we hear a lot. And it made him realize that it would be beneficial as China really looked to become this economic superpower for them to control their own story when it came to energy. And so at the time, China understood that because it didn't have giant reserves of oil and gas of its own that were easily accessible, the way to accomplish this was going to be. with green power, probably with wind and solar. And so they've been playing this long game for 20 years now. They've been investing in these technologies,

and it has really all started to bear fruit in the last couple of years because the cost of these technologies has plummeted. They finally achieve sort of economies of scale. And now solar power, Chinese solar panels, are literally the cheapest form of energy we have ever had on Earth. Wow. Something you mentioned earlier, I think, really kind of hit the nail on the head here, this idea that the U.S. is banking on fossil fuels and in a way banking on the past, that the past is the future. But China is banking on the future being the future, it sounds like, because they're investing in new technologies, renewable energy, things that have not yet been developed by the rest of the world. And in a way, I wonder whether this means that the U.S. is seeding the future in some way to China if the U.S.'s bet is wrong. A lot of people that we've talked to say that, and that comes from other diplomats, that comes from people at NGOs, that comes from people in the private sector.

But one thing that really surprised me at Kopp and Belem is that some people were okay with that. When I spoke with people and asked them, what did it mean that the United States wasn't there? what it meant that the Trump administration had sent zero people to represent the United States in this massive international forum. A lot of people said that they were relieved because the United States, under the Trump administration, is often meddling with agreements like this. They're often being obstructionist. And so what you heard was that in the absence of the distraction of the United States at this global communion, the rest of the world, which is largely unified in its understanding that climate change is a real threat and that we need to be investing heavily in clean technologies to address it,

they were free to sort of go about their work without being distracted by the U.S. And that's the kind of environment that left such a huge opening for China. And so that was a really surprising narrative that I encountered over the last week or so when I was there. But that is not, of course, how the Trump administration sees it. David, thank you so much. Thank you. When we come back, my colleague Brad Plumer explains what the United States is betting big on when it comes to domestic energy policy. Brad, before the break, David made it clear that the U.S. attitude toward renewable energy is very different from China's, so much so that we aren't even sending anybody to cop this year.

And instead, what we are essentially doing is ceding this space to China. at a moment when we are also in what feels like this larger battle with China for global dominance in a whole bunch of different industries and spheres and geopolitical arenas. So it feels a little bit counterintuitive that we therefore be seething the space. And I just want to start off with you explaining to us what is the current energy policy of the United States. So the Trump administration has been doing a lot to try to expand fossil fuel production as much as they can, expand oil and gas production. So that means opening up new lands for drilling. It means rolling back Biden era of regulations on air pollution, on restrictions on production and mining and

drilling. At the same time, they have also been canceling funding for a number of climate programs and particularly canceling funding for a lot of wind and solar projects. So the broader view is expanding oil and gas and fossil fuel production as much as they can. while limiting renewable energy. Okay, so it sounds like he's going all in on oil and gas, and one of the ways that he's doing that is basically by rolling back a lot of what Biden did with the Inflation Reduction Act. That's right.

There are a number of Biden administration policies. They were funding a lot of alternatives to fossil fuels, like wind and solar power. A lot of that has been rolled back. They were also doing a number of regulations intended to encourage people to buy electric vehicles or, you know, encourage electric utilities to build fewer gas-fired power plants. And the Trump administration has been rolling those back as well. Okay. I want to talk about natural gas to start off with. Can you just tell us a little bit

about what the state of natural gas is? Like, if we are going all in, what does that mean exactly? So the United States has been producing a lot more oil and gas over the last two decades. and it has really transformed the country's energy landscape. We have gone from a huge oil importer to a major oil exporter. We have a lot of natural gas that has now become the biggest source of energy in the country, and it is very inexpensive, which has helped keep energy prices down. It provides about 40% of our electricity. We use it for home heating.

We use it for a lot of industrial purposes. So it's been a real asset in a lot of ways to the United States. And so, you know, what the Trump administration wants to do is to continue expanding production as much as they can and selling as much oil and gas as they can abroad. So, in other words, we already have this enormous resource. And the thinking is that we should double down all the money we've already invested in building infrastructure around tapping it. Is that right? That's right. And a big part of that is that the administration genuinely does not see climate change as a problem we're thinking about at all.

So if you do not think climate change is worth worrying about, then you may as well try to drill and sell as much oil and gas as you possibly can. Brad, you mentioned that the United States is selling natural gas to other countries. And I wonder what the game plan is here, because obviously oil and gas is a finite resource. China and other countries are investing in renewable energy and renewable technology. So what is the time horizon for this? How long can the United States continue to bank on just selling cheap gas? overseas. I mean, by all estimates, the U.S. still has an enormous quantity of oil and gas that they can sell abroad. And in many ways, one of the biggest threats to the oil and gas market is if other

countries start adopting alternatives to it, whether that's, you know, buying more electric cars that don't rely on gasoline to run or building more wind and solar power that starts to cut into the market share for fossil fuels. So, you know, in some ways that, explains why the administration has been pressuring other countries to try to ease up on a lot of climate change and clean energy related policies. Right. It's not out of the realm of possibility that a lot of places are going to be switching to electric vehicles and renewable energy because that is literally happening as we speak. That's right. I do want to ask, though, is part of the reason why the Trump administration is so all in on fossil fuels because as an industry, oil and gas

pours money into U.S. elections. Like, that is an extremely powerful lobbying group. So they have been a big supporter of President Trump, but he has also been a big supporter of the fossil fuel industry for a long time. In his first term, he was a little more focused on coal. This time around, he's a lot more focused on oil and gas. But it's also combined with the fact that he, for a long time, has completely dismissed any concern about climate change.

He's called a hoax. He's called a scam. And he has also had a long-standing animosity toward wind and solar power. An economy based on wind. I never understood wind. And I know windmills very much. And especially wind. They litter our country.

They're littered all over our country like dropping paper, like dropping garbage. You know, he's talked about how windmills are ugly. They're not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. talked about how they don't work when the wind dies down. The wind doesn't blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad. The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously. He has been saying this for more than a decade.

Today, I'm playing the best course I think in the world, Turnbury. Even though I own it, it's probably the best course in the world, right? Ever since he was opposing wind turbines that were going to go up in view of one of his golf courses in Scotland. And I look over the horizon and I see nine windmills. It's like great at the end of the 18th. I said, isn't that a shame? What a shame. He has been very consistent about this for a long time.

Okay, so it sounds like a part of this energy policy kind of rests on the president's personal disdain. But I got to ask if we did invest as a country in windmills and solar panels and other types of renews. energy's that are on the table. Wouldn't that mean more manufacturing jobs? Like, at least spiritually, that seems to be quite in line with what a lot of the administration has talked about in the second term. So this was the Biden administration's big strategy. They wanted to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy technologies, whether it's solar farms, wind farms, factories that make solar panels, factories that make batteries and electric cars. And it really had started to create a pretty significant domestic manufacturing boom. You had

hundreds of projects around the country, you know, more than half a trillion dollars in announced investments. And it was really leading the way for a uptick in manufacturing. A lot of those investments were happening in Republican-controlled states. And they were pretty popular with a number of Republican politicians. But Trump was really against it. He called it the green new scam. He really wanted to undo Biden's legacy, and he pushed to repeal a lot of those policies. And we are now seeing billions of dollars worth of factories getting canceled and disappearing. Is it possible, though, that one part of this rationale for canceling a lot of these renewable energy projects or incentives is that there's this idea that the federal government

maybe doesn't need to incentivize it anymore? Like, these industries are well on their way? They have talked about that. At the same time, the administration has also moved to actively block wind and solar projects, particularly offshore wind projects in federal waters. And they have also tried to slow the growth of wind and solar projects on federal land. So, yes, they did say, you know, at various points that wind and solar power can stand at their own, but they have also taken pretty significant steps to try to slow the expansion. of these technologies. So what you're saying is basically that since they're canceling projects that are already underway, it suggests that they just don't want these projects to proliferate.

That's right. And there's also this other priority happening, which is they're really focused on winning the AI race against China, and that is a big part of their energy strategy. Explain that a little bit more. What does AI have to do with the energy strategy of the U.S.? So the administration sees AI as the most important industry of the future. They are currently in a race with China in trying to dominate this industry. But that also connects to energy.

Right now, tech companies are trying to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers for AI, but they need enormous amounts of electricity to try to power that. Now, the administration's view is that you can really only get there with things like natural gas, with things like nuclear power that run around the clock, and particularly natural gas can be relatively low cost. You know, in a lot of ways, they talk about how they don't believe that wind and solar power, which do not run all the time, can actually power these dayassers and be useful for the AI race. Now, there are a lot of tech companies that disagree with that, but that is something they have said a lot. But couldn't theoretically the United States do both? Like, couldn't we double down on the existing infrastructure in order to power our AI arms race, but also recognize that green energy is probably a big part of the future and try to invest in that as well?

So there are certainly a lot of people and a lot of tech companies that think you don't actually have to choose, that trying to expand the use of gas alongside the use of renewable energy would be the best strategy moving forward. That if we want as much energy as possible, if we want as much electricity as possible, and we want to keep it as cheap as possible, we should really be investing in everything. But that is really not the Trump administration's view. They are quite hostile to renewable energy, particularly wind and solar power. and just do not agree with the view that we should have in all of the above energy strategy. And, you know, Chris Wright, the Energy Secretary, has even said that.

The old Republican position on energy was that we should have an all-of-the-above energy policy. We should promote all energy sources and try to give as much of it as possible. And he has said, I am not for that. I am not in favor of wind and solar power. He sees them as unreliable and not worth supporting.

Are we to infer, then, that basically the administration has decided that the threat of losing the renewables arms race is just not as big as a deal as losing the AI arms race, right? That basically whatever costs we're going to pay in terms of climate change or ceding the manufacturing of solar panels to China, for instance, that that is worth stomacking in order to win that AI arms race. It certainly seems that way. And you see, China has explicitly talked about how they think things,

like solar power, wind power, electric vehicles are the industries of the future. And they have really positioned themselves to dominate in those industries. And I've asked Trump administration officials before, are you worried about losing the race for those industries, which are very fast-growing, which are, you know, at this point, the world is spending something like $2 trillion a year on clean energy technologies. And they have basically said, no, we think clean energy is still a very minor part of the total global energy system, and we are focused on winged this AI race, which is so much more important than anything else. So yes, that does seem to be their view. We already talked a little bit about how the ground that we are seating to China

seems antithetical to the idea of bringing manufacturing back to the United States, which has been a stated policy of the current Trump administration. It also feels like we are seeding a lot of future ground. The future of AI seems like it could be a future where a lot of of people who have certain jobs now do not have those jobs in the future. And so I wonder if we are also kind of compromising future manufacturing jobs in a way that feels a bit reminiscent of what we saw happen after NAFTA, right? Like it feels like we have seen this movie before. And I wonder whether we are repeating some of the same steps that are going to lead to the same kinds of job losses that we've already seen in this country. So I have talked to a number of people who have

had that concern that, you know, the U.S. invented technologies like the solar panel and the lithium ion battery. And we invented those things, but China got good at scaling them up, at manufacturing them, and they now dominate those industries. You know, there's a real concern that with the auto industry, if we don't embrace electric vehicles, we will cede the entire global market to China, because it seems like a lot of countries are headed that way. So there are real risks here to seeding some of these industries to a major competitor. But the next president, of course, could reverse course, right? And decide that renewable energy is something that the United States needs to prioritize and invest in.

But I guess the question is, by the time that happens, will the U.S. be so far behind China that it cannot even compete? Yeah. So I think, you know, if a new president came in and was not trying to restrict wind and solar power, you would still see a lot of wind farms and solar farms being built. I mean, even now there's enormous demand for those technologies, even with a lot of the Trump administration restrictions. The problem is it would be very difficult to reestablish U.S. domestic manufacturing because China is so far ahead at this point,

and they're so good at making these technologies that I think it would be extremely difficult for the U.S. to get back into the game. So essentially, the Trump administration is setting us on a course that is hard to reverse. That's correct. Red, thank you so much. Thank you. Here's what else you need to know today. The UN Security Council on Monday approved President Trump's peace plan for Gaza,

bringing the administration one step closer to fulfilling its vision for how to rebuild the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. The council's vote was also a major diplomatic victory for the United States, which has been increasingly isolated at the UN over its support for Israel. The resolution calls for an international stabilization force to enter, demilitarize, and govern the enclave, where tens of thousands of Palestinians, including both combatants and civilians, have been killed since the war began. And a federal magistrate judge said the criminal case against James Comey, the former FBI director, could be in trouble because of, quote, government misconduct.

The judge accused Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced prosecutor picked by President Trump to to oversee the case of making at least two, quote, fundamental and highly prejudicial misstatements of the law when she spoke in front of the grand jury in September. The judge also pointed out that grand jury materials he ordered Halligan to produce for his review appeared to be incomplete and, quote, likely do not reflect the full proceedings. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson, and Eric Kruppke, with help from Nina Feldman and Caitlin O'Keefe. It was edited by Chris Haxell and Paige Cowett.

Contains music by Will Reed, Marion Lazzano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.