World Moving On Without USA As It Declines – CleanTechnica

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For the past eight years, the United States has been missing in action in climate leadership globally. Biden’s climate policy experiments, aimed as much at attempting to deal with the root causes of working class and middle class grievance as at useful emissions reductions, will persist in some diminished form. The USA will lean into its status as the world’s leading petrostate, even as historical petrostates like Saudi Arabia plough vast sums into the energy of the future, renewables.

And it won’t make much difference. Obama’s leadership with John Kerry around the Paris Agreement was the last time the USA was at the forefront of global political action on climate change. There is a broad coalition of countries moving rapidly forward, even as the USA falters yet again.

The USA ceded manufacturing of the technologies required for fighting climate change — solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, transformers, and more — to other countries, mostly China, over the past 40 years. Under Biden, the Sinophobic bipartisan consensus threw up massive and unprecedented tariffs to protect the weed-filled garden left over, working to keep American money at home. Trump will, according to everything he and Republicans have said over the past year, increase tariffs, including on all imports from even long-standing free-trade neighbors like Canada and Mexico.

America’s products of all types will simply get more expensive and less competitive on global markets. The USA may or may not build and deploy its own solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric cars, but the world won’t be buying them regardless. The world, especially the three-quarters of it that’s in China’s Belt & Road Initiative, will buy China’s much less expensive, higher quality, more reliable products, just as it’s been increasingly doing for years.

Trump is in line with the current isolationist swing in the United States. The only good thing that could be said of his first administration is that he didn’t send the US military into any other countries, and, in fact, while incompetently, started the process of drawing them down further. While the USA has around 750 military bases in over 80 countries and territories worldwide, they were not being used for force projection under Biden and won’t be under Trump.

Militarily, Trump is as incompetent and blustering as he is on economic policy, foreign policy, education, and agriculture. He talks big, but doesn’t know how to swing the stick he now has again, and doesn’t want to outside of US borders. He wants to swing that stick inside US borders, as he’s said time and again. That’s deeply to the detriment of Americans, but that’s a relief to innumerable countries around the world who are fully aware of America’s historical tendency to bomb inconvenient places into democracy.

Trump is no George W. Bush, trying to set right the legacy of his father, willing to invade two foreign countries on spurious grounds, surrounded by militarily aggressive hawks who see the world entirely through gun sights. On this sad day, that’s something to be grateful for.

On China, Trump is less likely than Biden was to increase military provocation around Taiwan. Trump doesn’t and can’t understand TSMC and the geopolitics of chips. The vast majority of his advisors can’t either. Trump doesn’t have the 50 years of China-oriented geopolitics that Biden had. He’ll complain that they are being unfair and slap tariffs on them, but that’s going to hurt the USA far more than China.

Europe is continuing and will continue with its carbon border adjustment mechanism. Now there is no hope for a carbon price in the USA and federal actions which reduce the carbon debt of American products to keep them competitive in the second largest trading economy in the world. Europe will continue to pivot to Chinese EVs, Chinese wind turbines, Chinese solar panels, and Chinese batteries as American products simply get more expensive and less competitive. Europe will continue to have a much more nuanced tariff policy and deal with China in mature negotiations, enabling at least some European manufacturing to succeed and thrive.

Europe and China are both pivoting away from America’s primary export, fossil fuels. European energy is moving much faster toward renewables than the USA is. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and attendant energy crisis led to a blip in imports of American LNG, but not nearly as much as the increased focus on efficiency, electrification, and renewables.

As I noted recently, China’s coal demand is going to plummet in the coming years. Last quarter saw a widespread heat wave and a massive spike in electrical demand from air conditioning as a result, but no increased burning of coal. The solar that China deployed this year alone soaked up all of the excess demand. China is continuing to deploy more solar, wind, water, storage and transmission than the rest of the world combined. It has electrified its industries more than the rest of the world. It’s stopped permitting new coal-fired blast furnaces and is pivoting to electric arc furnaces for steel. Its infrastructure boom is at an end, so its cement demand and coal use there is going to decline substantially as it enters the infrastructure maintain and replace cycle the USA and Europe have been in for decades.

15% to 20% of America’s coal experts are to China. Those will be declining rapidly, and other countries around the world won’t be taking that coal.

China reached peak gasoline in 2023 per Sinopec. It’s at peak diesel. It’s electrified transportation far more than any country in the world with its high-speed rail network, new cities with electric subways and buses, and rapid pivot to electric vehicles of all scales. The world is looking to China for models of sustainable transportation, not the USA.

American hopes of increasing oil and gas exports to China and the world are going to be dashed, just as American shale oil enters a decline in the most profitable sites for new shale oil extraction. America’s position as the leading petrostate will be seriously challenged in coming years as global demand declines and extraction costs increase.

And then there’s innovation, something America has excelled at for the past 60 years. Once it had the best STEM universities in the world and welcomed foreign students and immigrants with open arms. 50% of the USA’s Fortune 500 countries were started by immigrants. 50% of STEM PhD graduates were foreign students, with 18% from China alone.

The increasing racism and xenophobia that’s turned microaggressions increasingly into macroaggressions was already changing that dynamic, along with China’s universities now being among the best in the world. Of the 50% of STEM graduates that were foreign students, already during Biden’s administration the trend was increasingly that they simply returned home to start businesses and do research there.

That’s sharply higher among Chinese scientists and researchers. The US “China Initiative,” launched by the Department of Justice in 2018 to counter espionage and intellectual property theft, disproportionately targeted scientists of Chinese descent, leading to accusations of racial profiling and instilling fear within the academic community. Many cases were built on minor disclosure issues rather than concrete evidence of espionage, and some prosecutions were ultimately dismissed. Amid growing criticism, the Justice Department ended the initiative in 2022, refocusing its efforts on broad-based counterintelligence threats.

But the damage had been done. Now Chinese scientists aren’t bothering to come to American universities, creating a crisis in higher education, where foreign student income dominated revenue. Chinese researchers still working in the USA are returning to China and being welcomed with open arms and big research budgets. To a lesser extent, that’s true of all foreign-born researchers in the USA. They are increasingly leaving the USA.

Trump’s ascension, fueled by racism, xenophobia, anti-immigration rhetoric, and white grievance, is simply going to increase that trend. The number of foreign students in American universities will continue to drop and the number of them that leave upon graduation will increase.

America’s global innovation talent conveyor belt is slowing, and while it won’t stop, China’s innovation conveyor belt continues to pick up speed. Chinese researchers dominate multiple fields already. Their domestic market is far bigger than America’s and has had higher purchasing power parity than America since 2014. China’s innovations will flow to the world, while what innovations America continues to manage will increasingly be solely for domestic consumers.

Despite Trump’s isolationism, so in keeping with the mood of Americans these days, there is a real risk of the world’s largest military force being used by the thrashing giant in its decline. Just as the world united to contain the Soviet Union and then aid it during its collapse in return for dissolution of much of its nuclear arsenal, the world might have to assist the USA to more gracefully draw down its 750 bases and massive foreign military machine.

That’s not an outcome to be concerned about in the next four years, but there are a lot of politicians who when faced with increasing economic challenges have started wars to bolster their popularity. Trump doesn’t care about the American or foreign lives which would be lost in any war like that, instead it would add bodies to his ego count, and so he might lash out if he feels it would gain him some advantage or other.

Given the care his team and Republicans have taken to pre-vet Trump loyalists for all positions, he won’t be surrounded by adults in his second administration, but enablers and exploiters. The good news is that incompetence comes with loyalty to Trump, along with personal advantage over coherent consensus on actions. The likelihood that Trump would be able to execute a war in his second Administration will be lower as well.

This is a place where Graham Allison’s flawed book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, has insights to consider. That Allison cited an ancient Greek in the title, used a quote from an ancient Greek in his chapter about understanding China, and used a data set of 16 almost entirely European economic transitions in which 11 included armed conflict is indicative of his bias and the weaknesses of his book. But he is correct that western empires which have had a lot of military might in their background do tend to lash out militarily at empires that are economically ascendant. He didn’t have the courage of his thesis to say that the problem was the USA, and certainly almost no one inside Washington influenced by the book, whether they read past the first chapter or not, acts as if they understand that.

Trump is unlikely to go to war for China because there’s nothing in it for him. He admires Xi, just as he admires Putin, but America doesn’t have a Ukraine or Taiwan that they consider theirs that they don’t already have. Sitting 50 kilometers north of the longest undefended border in the world, I feel some comfort that Manifest Destiny is a doctrine 180 years in the rear-view mirror.

And so, all economic indicators are that Trump will be very bad for America’s economy. While Biden was working hard to float the boats of the bottom 80% of Americans for the first time in 40 years, Trump and the Republicans are solely focused on floating the boats of the top 20%, and drowning the bottom 80%. That so many middle class and working class Americans continue to vote for a party so clearly and explicitly working only in favor of the rich is only explicable by the long-standing observation that in America, the poor see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They are voting for policies which favor who they delusionally think they will be, not policies which will help them get there. In this election, of course, they were also voting for hurting people who aren’t them, regardless of the degree of self-harm that results.

The USA’s brief sojourn into reductions in income equality and increased social and economic mobility are at an end again. The poor will get poorer, again. Middle class and working class wages will stagnate or drop, again. The products and energy they need to live will get more expensive. American hypertraveling patterns will be impacted as more Americans won’t be able to fly, won’t be able to afford gas to drive long distances, won’t be able to afford new cars capable of taking on long road trips and won’t be able to afford to stay in the places in America they’d like to visit.

And so, the world will power away from America, energized by solar- and wind-generated electricity, driving electric cars, breathing cleaner air and gaining the benefits of decarbonization. The USA will decline. Its emissions will sink because Americans won’t be able to afford to travel. Wind and solar will continue to displace coal and gas simply because they are cheaper and have proven fully reliable, something even Texas understands. The already slow pace of US decarbonization will slow further.

The world will keep a weather eye on the thrashing giant. Those like me who once admired many things about the country will mourn the loss of more and more checks and balances, the erosion of good governance, the continued increase of grievances of the working and middle class which Trump, his successors, and other Republicans will continue to exploit. The neighboring countries of Mexico and Canada will catch colds as the elephant sneezes.

But Europe, China, India, and the rest of the world will continue to move forward without the United States.