Today, Explained - Can China save our climate?

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

While the Trump administration rolls back decades of climate regulation, the world’s biggest polluter is taking the lead on clean energy. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Devan Schwartz, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Wind turbines at a wind farm on East Lvhua Island in Zhejiang Province of China. Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The president of the United States went for a walk on the roof of the White House yesterday. You probably heard about it. Sir, why are you on the roof? It was all over everything. Social media. POTUS is on the roof of the White House. Asked why he's up there. He shouts back to us through his hands, quote, just taking a little walk. The New York Times.

Up on the roof, Trump surveys the home. He's making his own. Why was the president taking a walk on the roof of the White House? though, maybe to distract us from something, he certainly wasn't up there to reinstall Jimmy Carter's solar panels. This afternoon, I've arranged for this ceremony to be illuminated by solar power. Because this president hates green energy.

Wind is a disaster. This president is doing everything in his power to put the United States in reverse on climate. And we're going to talk about that instead of his big trip to the rooftop on today Explained from Vox. There's a story sailors used to tell of mysterious rogue waves rising out of nowhere in the middle of the ocean. But it was always just a story until New Year's Day, 1995.

The Droppner Deep Sea Oil platform had been weathering a miserable storm for hours. But then, suddenly, an 85-foot wave rose out of the sea. This wave was impossibly steep, a nearly vertical wall of water as tall as a seven-story building. The first rogue wave to ever be recorded. But how do giant walls of water spring out of the ocean, seemingly out of nowhere? This week on Unexplainable, the reality behind mythical rogue waves. Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Wednesday. Today explained here with Oliver Millman

Environment Correspondent for the Guardian U.S. Oliver, those who followed the first Trump term, 2017 to 2021, more or less, will recall that he was no friend of climate policy. How's it looking in Trump to Trump harder? Yeah, you're right to say that people weren't expecting some sort of climate champion to come into the White House following Joe Biden.

Trump, after all, did campaign on the mantra of... Drill, baby, drill. He talked incessantly about the need to extract more oil and gas, to supposedly reduce energy prices for Americans concerned about inflation. He talked about doing away with what he called the green new scam. It's a scam. This set of climate policies put in place by Biden to try and boost clean energy and cut pollution from power plants and cars. He was going to roll back all of that. So it was kind of little surprise when he did come in and said about doing that. You know, he withdrew the U.S.

from the Paris Climate Agreement again, which he did his first term. He opened up new areas for drilling, including the Arctic. Sir, this is an executive order relating to unleashing Alaska's potential as an energy reservoir for the entire nation. I think it's fair to say we're seeing a far more extreme iteration of Trump on climate this time around compared to his first time. And maybe the greatest example of this is revoking the EPA's endangerment finding, which just happened several days ago. Can you tell us what exactly that means for climate policy in the United States? Yeah, so essentially this is a kind of landmark 2009 finding by the EPA that greenhouse gases,

such as carbon dioxide and five others, that they pose a threat to the public health and therefore need to be regulated, there needs to be some kind of limit put upon them by the federal government to protect the American public from harm. And that stemmed from a 2007 Supreme Court case where the Supreme Court ruled that yes indeed. The act requires EPA to regulate whenever it forms a judgment that an air pollutant causes or contributes to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare. So essentially that finding, forms the basis. It's the kind of bedrock on which all climate regulations rest. So limits on pollution from power plants, from cars, from trucks, all kind of stem from this finding, essentially.

And kicking out the legs of this finding, which has long been a kind of goal, a kind of holy grail of climate deniers and skeptics and those who favor the fossil fuel industry, do it. so essentially cripples the US's ability, the federal government's ability to regulate greenhouse gases, to take serious action on the climate crisis, not just during Trump's administration, but future administration are going to find it a lot harder to do so, to act on climate change if this engagement of finding is scrapped, as Trump plans to do. But can future administrations just reverse it? Like we kind of see going from Obama to Trump

and Trump to Biden and Biden to Trump? So, you know, you could go through that process again to try and reestablish this endangerment. But it would take a lot of time. There would be legal challenges, just like there will be legal challenges to this Trump move. All of this is going to take years to unravel. It's years of time that we obviously don't have.

have really just waste time and helps prolong the age of fossil fuels, which seems to be a driving focus and a driving motivation for this administration. Okay. So another example of where you see this sort of topsy-turvy relationship with climate policy between administrations, Democratic and Republican, is in spending. Joe Biden was trying to do a lot of spending towards clean energy, et cetera. What is Trump doing in contrast, would say, his big spending bill, the so-called one big beautiful bill? Yeah, so I think one of the big differences to his first term is how Trump has kind of enacted

his animosity towards clean energy in quite a kind of vengeful way. When we go to Aberdeen, you'll see some of the ugliest windmills you've ever seen. They're the height of a 50-story building. And you can take a thousand times more energy out of a hole in the ground this big. And we don't want solar because they're a blight on our country. And he, his animosity seems to be a driving force behind the provisions of the big, beautiful spending bill in which Republicans gutted

the clean energy tax credits that Biden put in place through the Inflation Reduction Act that was spurring this boom in new solar and wind projects, in new battery factories, in new electric car facilities that were being set up across the US, but predominantly in rural and ex-urban areas of the country that were overwhelmingly represented by Republican members of Congress. So Republicans were essentially voting to get rid of billions of dollars, of investment and hundreds of thousands of jobs in their own districts and eliminating these subsidies and the impact is set to be quite stark by one estimate the amount of installed clean

energies is set to be halved over the next 10 years how true has he been to his promises to drill baby drill how good has this administration so far been to big oil a very strong ally to big oil. I mean, he's essentially allowed them to drill pretty much anywhere they want other than the Rose Garden of the White House. I mean, it's kind of pretty much open season. There's still three years left. I don't know. We'll see. It could happen. Next to the ballroom. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah, a nice oil well next to the ballroom. Who could quibble with that? But even in this big beautiful bill, which purportedly was cutting subsidies for clean energy in order to make things fairer and reduce government interference

in the energy market at the same time as doing that. He was offering new subsidies for fossil fuels. It's clear that this idea the Republicans previously had that all energy should be equal. We don't want to pick winners. That's out the window now. You know, Trump is very clearly picking a winner and it's fossil fuels. He calls it liquid gold. We will be a rich nation again and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it. He wants as much of it to be extracted as possible and he's removing kind of any barrier in order to do that.

He even set up a special email hotline if such a thing exists so that power plant operators could email him to ask for an exemption from pollution rules in emergency exemption so that they basically didn't have to follow the law and they can emit as much as they like and many have taken him up on that so he's pulling out all the stops for the oil and gas industry

the only complication of course is that oil executives may shock you to know like making money they're quite keen on money and if there's a glut of oil and gas in the US prices start to drop and so they don't really want to drill baby drill as much as Trump would maybe like them to. They're a little bit perturbed by his tariffs

too. If you want to build a new oil pipeline, for example, you're doing a lot like the idea of a tariff on steel, for example, that would make the project far more costly. So there are differences that the industry has with Trump and those are not insignificant. But overall, I think he's been a stronger friend to them as they could possibly hope. Amazing. So Trump wants to drill perhaps even more than oil executives do. And, of course, as you said, at the top of this conversation, Trump has withdrawn not just in the United States from, you know, climate-friendly policies, but globally, he once again has pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords.

Who's filling in for us while the U.S. is figuring itself out? you have the European Union is pressing ahead with emissions cuts the complication there of course being the Ukraine war and what happens to gas supply but I think there's a kind of strong push within Europe that this should accelerate the transition to clean energy not be so reliant on fossil fuels that are operated and influenced by foreign dictators. And in the clean energy space, China is just miles ahead now. I mean, it's absolutely, if this was an Olympic event, they would have lapped the rest of the world, maybe twice. So obviously China is the world's largest emitter still. They're still building a lot of coal. I'm not saying that it's a kind of clean energy paradise in any way.

Obviously, it helps having a one-party communist state to dictate direction of policy and all of those caveats. but certainly if you're thinking about who's leading when it comes to clean energy, it's quite clearly then. Oliver, I enjoyed speaking with you. Did the things you say depress me? Yes. Do I appreciate you sharing them with me all the same? Yes.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. I enjoyed depressing you. Thank you so much. Once again, that was Oliver Millman. You know him from The Guardian.com. I'm Sean Ramosferm, and we're going to hear more about how the world's biggest polluter is leading the way on green energy when today explained continues.

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My name is Ella Nilsson, and I'm a senior climate reporter for CNN. And Ella, we ended the first half of the show with the surprising news that with the United States stepping back from the fight against climate change from clean energy, China might be filling the void. China, famously a major polluter, but China leading the charge on climate? Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a strange dichotomy here. You're totally right. I mean, we all have these ideas of, you know, polluted air in cities like Beijing.

China obviously has a lot of coal and uses a lot of coal to make electricity, hence the haze and the smog. but China is also just going totally bananas on wind and solar. China is leading the global surge of renewables with an estimated 60% of all solar and wind projects. Dubbed the solar great wall, construction is underway on this massive energy project in the Bering Kabuki Desert of Inner Mongolia. This is Xinhua News. China's total installed capacity for new energy generation,

including wind, solar, and bio. mass power topped 1.27 billion kilowatts by the end of August, according to data from the China electricity console. Nearly half of the world's wind and solar capacity combined is in China. You know, they're basically building faster and building more than anywhere else on the globe. Very impressive. Why are they doing this? So essentially, you know, about a decade ago, China passed its own inflation reduction act. Come on, man. The climate law that former President Joe Biden passed in 2022.

And ever since then, there have been a host of, you know, government tax credits and subsidies for wind and solar developers. But China really, there's sort of this ethos behind this big push to renewable energy. And that is energy security. You know, China, they talk a lot about the need to solve climate change. And they are the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by far. So biggest polluter, but also might be biggest chance of us making progress on this front. Exactly. I mean, at this point, climate experts say that, like, if the world has any hope of, you know, essentially solving climate change, it has to come from China.

Because they are the world's biggest polluter, they also sort of hold the key to being the biggest country to reverse this trend. At this point, clean energy has become a huge business in China. I mean, essentially, it's a big integral part of the Chinese economy. Not only building, you know, vast solar farms or wind farms off the coast of China, that's part of it. But there's also a huge manufacturing push for clean tech. So Chinese companies are making the solar panels. They are building wind turbines. There is a huge growth in electric vehicle manufacturing in China, where China, you know, is

essentially starting to dominate the world's supply of electric vehicles. And electric vehicles domestically in China are becoming a huge booming business, and many more people are driving them as well. So not only does, you know, China see, like, the supply of cheap electricity as a big economic driver. It's also the building and manufacturing of these products that they see as an economic boon. They're also starting to ship a lot of these products around the world, which is a bit of a thorny economic issue and a thorny trade issue with countries like the European Union or other countries in the developing global south. They're kind of flooding the zone with cheap solar

panels, cheaper electric cars, and things like that. Okay, so China partly loves solar because it's so cheap. Why doesn't Donald Trump like solar? Doesn't he love cheap things? So Trump, I guess Trump maybe likes solar a little bit more than he likes wind. I think he likes wind, least of all. I've seen the most beautiful fields, farms, fields, most gorgeous things you've ever seen. And then you have these ugly things going up.

They're noisy. They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go. Take a look. A bird graveyard? You know, in California, they were killing the bald eagle. A windmill will kill many bald eagles.

Go under a windmill someday. You'll see more birds than you've ever seen ever in your life. The Massachusetts area with the whales, where they had two whales washer shore. The windmills are driving the whales crazy. But, yeah, you know, Trump and the Trump administration have basically put solar and wind at the very bottom of their energy priority list.

I don't know if you've seen the tweets of the Department of Energy lately, Sean, but we're back to loving coal. She's an icon. She's a legend. And she's the moment. And, you know, the Trump administration at this point really is promoting a lot of fossil energy. But that energy is more expensive to produce,

to use to burn electric. Right now, wind and solar in the U.S. are the cheapest and most available forms of electricity to get on the grid right now. However, I think those arguments have kind of fallen on deaf years within the Trump administration where there really does seem to be, you know, kind of a vendetta against wind and solar. Hmm. You were way back in November before Trump even took office for the second time that China was winning the race as a climate. tech leader, even after Joe Biden's efforts, I'm guessing. When did the United States fall behind China as a leader in this space? And can it ever catch up? I think that the U.S. started to fall behind China like a decade ago, if not more than that. I mean, you know, essentially China passed

its own version of the Inflation Reduction Act. Essentially, a decade ago, they had sort of a 10-year head start. They got kind of kicked off in 2015, which is still the Obama administration. And especially with the first Trump administration and now the second Trump administration very bent on unwinding everything that Biden was trying to do. Oh, come on man. The U.S. is falling further and further behind on clean energy. Whether we can ever catch up, I think that the answer is we can't, at least not in these kinds of technologies. China's famously not the freest country on Earth. This is why China can ramp up its clean energy so quickly.

But it's also, as you say here, the world leader in clean energy, in advancing clean energy initiatives. Is the world ready for China to take the lead on this front? Is there tension there between, I don't know, authoritarianism and green energy? I think there definitely is. And, you know, there has been a lot reported on, you know, the role of Uyghurs and labor camps and solar manufacturing. Britain has gone full net zero, net zany. They've got solar panels everywhere, all their farmlands, solar panels.

And you know where those solar panels come from, often from slavery? labor camps run in China where the poor Uyghurs are forced to work in slave labor conditions. When ethnic minorities, including the Uyghurs, are approached and encouraged to participate in such poverty alleviation programs, they're not really left with much room to say no. When it comes to China's position compared to the rest of the world on clean energy, I mean, they are so far out front. And China is really like leading the race with developing world nations to, you know, export its car manufacturing to countries like Brazil or, you know, to get solar panels to developing nations in Africa. And so it's going to be really interesting

to see sort of the geopolitical picture around clean energy because, you know, U.S. climate experts often talk about how the developing world and developing nations are really going to sort of right our future climate trajectory because the U.S. historically emitted the most greenhouse gases out of any nation during our big industrial age. But our emissions recently have gone down and how much they continue to go down is sort of open for debate and is very much being influenced by what the Trump administration is doing now. But the bigger picture is, what do countries that haven't yet piqued their economic development do. Do they do that on wind and solar energy and clean energy or do they do that using coal and gas and oil? And if they choose the latter,

then, you know, our climate fate is pretty much sealed. However, if China, you know, makes it cheaper for countries in the developing world to power using wind and solar and batteries and and other cleaner forms of technology. There's a lot of really thorny geopolitical issues that I don't think we can sort out in this podcast episode. But it will be better, at least, for climate emissions long term.

Ella Nilsson, we used to be colleagues. Now she's at CNN. Current colleagues, Devin Schwartz and Gabrielle Burbay, made the show with help from Amina Al-Sadi, Laura Bullard, Andrea Kristen's daughter, and Patrick Boyd. Goodbye for now from today, Explained. Thank you.