An E.P.A. Plan to Kill a Major Climate Rule Is Worrying Business Leaders

Some carmakers and energy executives say the plan would trigger costly litigation and spur individual states to create a patchwork of tighter rules.

By Karen Zraick and Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Oct. 25, 2025

The Environmental Protection Agency is promising to erase a scientific finding that underpins climate regulations nationwide. But some business leaders said they are wary that the move could lead to a costly legal quagmire.

The rule, known as the “endangerment finding,” is the conclusion by the E.P.A. that greenhouse gases endanger public health and therefore must be regulated by the federal government. Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, has said the agency would repeal the finding, claiming that the burden to industries of cutting greenhouse gas emissions is more harmful than a warming planet.

And yet carmakers, electric utilities and even the oil and gas industry have asked the E.P.A. to tread carefully. If the federal government were to stop regulating greenhouse gases, it could clear the way for states and municipalities to sue companies for damages from climate change. And it could spur individual states to come up with their own pollution limits, creating a patchwork of regulations. Environmental groups have also promised to sue the E.P.A. if it repeals the finding, leading to more uncertainty for businesses.

“This is something that the vast majority of industry didn’t ask for and doesn’t want,” said Zach Friedman, the senior director of federal policy at Ceres, a nonprofit group that submitted a letter from 59 companies and investors opposing the E.P.A. plan.

Brigit Hirsch, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in a statement that rescinding the endangerment finding would “unlock regulatory clarity like never before” and said the finding had led to heavy costs, particularly for the auto industry. “We live in a democracy, and as such private companies are welcome to make decisions as they see fit,” she said.

Human activities, mainly the burning of coal, oil and gas for energy, have produced the greenhouse gases that have been the primary driver of climate change for more than half a century. Carbon dioxide, methane and other gases have accumulated in the atmosphere and are warming the planet by trapping the sun’s heat. That has contributed to more intense wildfires and heat waves, rising seas and extreme weather events.

In its proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. cited a recent Energy Department report that downplayed the severity of climate change. That report was written by five prominent climate contrarians chosen by the Trump administration.

Their work has been sharply criticized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the American Meteorological Society and more than 85 climate scientists in the United States, who found that the Trump administration’s climate report has numerous inaccuracies and misrepresents climate science.

Scott Saleska, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, said the evidence that supported the endangerment finding 16 years ago has only grown stronger since then. Air temperatures have increased, sea levels have risen, ocean acidification has worsened. Heat-related deaths are rising, smoke from wildfires is increasingly severe and the spread of climate-enabled diseases is on the uptick.

Ignoring that evidence, as the E.P.A. appears poised to do, Dr. Saleska said, “puts an exclamation point on the idea that science, as the best method the human species has ever come up with for discerning objective reality, has no role in this government.”

Few business leaders raised the threat of climate change in their opposition to the E.P.A. plan, and many in fact argued for loosened emissions standards. The administration has linked the repeal of the endangerment finding to the rollback of strict limits on tailpipe pollution imposed under the Biden administration, something most automakers and oil companies are eager to see.

Indeed, many companies stressed that they are on board with the Trump administration’s energy agenda, which involves promoting oil, gas and coal, and pulling back from clean energy like solar and wind.

But they still said the federal government should retain the ability to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Rescinding the endangerment finding “will serve not as a path to regulatory stability, but rather a route to prolonged legal battles, possible market fragmentation and technological stagnation,” wrote Jim Kliesch, the director of regulatory affairs at American Honda Motor Company Inc.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, wrote that “federal government action is a necessary part of the solution” to climate change and said it believed the E.P.A. had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

The Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing the electric power industry, said that if without a federal role in regulating greenhouse gases, states and cities could “attempt to fill that perceived void through increased regulatory requirements that could vary significantly from one jurisdiction to the next.”

But other business groups supported removing the endangerment finding. The National Mining Association, which represents mining companies, and the Steel Manufacturers Association backed the agency, as did energy associations from several states, including coal and gas-rich Wyoming.

Changing federal regulations is typically a lengthy process, and the E.P.A. was required to solicit and review public comments about potential changes. The Trump administration is aiming to finalize the repeal before the end of the year, according to several E.P.A. officials.

When the public comment period closed on Sept. 22, the agency had received more than 500,000 comments, about 2 percent of which have so far been posted on the E.P.A.’s website, according to an analysis Wednesday by InfluenceMap, a London-based sustainability think tank. In its report on the comments released so far, the group said that companies and trade groups across many sectors of the economy were concerned about the legal viability of the agency’s proposal, and some proposed weakening greenhouse gas standards instead of jettisoning them.

“I was definitely surprised to see the level of concern that some of these companies and industry associations are voicing about the proposal, especially the companies that have traditionally tried to weaken emissions standards,” said Leo Menninger, a senior analyst for the group. “They’re generally concerned about the entire framework being removed.”

Repealing the finding would almost certainly lead to litigation that could eventually reach the Supreme Court. The endangerment finding, which dates from 2009, came out of a Supreme Court decision two years earlier, Massachusetts v. E.P.A., in which the justices concluded that greenhouse gases were pollutants, and that the agency was obligated to determine whether they were a danger to public health.

Nixing the finding could also have another unintended consequence for fossil fuel producers: It would potentially weaken a primary argument that they have used to fight some of the lawsuits filed against them in state courts.

The industry has said in court that the E.P.A. has exclusive authority to oversee emissions that cross state lines, overriding other state and federal laws. (Plaintiffs in many of the suits have countered that their lawsuits are based on corporate misbehavior, not actual emissions.) But if the E.P.A. removes its own authority to regulate emissions, that could open up the potential for some lawsuits against the industry to proceed more easily.

In its proposed rule, the E.P.A. said the Clean Air Act and the structure of the federal system would still block such lawsuits, even without the endangerment finding in place. But that reading of the law would most likely be challenged in court.

“I think that’s one reason why Trump didn’t try to do this in his first term,” said Robert Percival, director of the environmental law program at the University of Maryland’s law school. “They were warned that it was too dangerous to open up this Pandora’s box.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-energy-lawsuits.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20251028&instance_id=165314&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=209493&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

The Kids Who Sued Trump Just Lost Big in Court. Or Did They?

A federal judge threw out their climate lawsuit against the president a few days ago. But legal experts say there was a silver lining in the judge’s opinion.

By Karen Zraick, The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2025

When a judge threw out a lawsuit this week accusing President Trump of violating the Constitution, it was a major setback for a group of young people trying to fight climate change in the courts.

But the ruling had a silver lining. The judge also said the plaintiffs had successfully argued that climate change constitutes a “children’s health emergency.”

Legal experts said that language reinforced a yearslong strategy by an organization called Our Children’s Trust, a public-interest law firm, to put children and young people in the courtroom and on the stand to argue that governments should do more to rein in global warming.

Daniel Metzger, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the judge’s opinion offered “very detailed guidance for designing cases that can overcome the challenges this one faced.”

The court “went out of its way,” he said, to establish that the plaintiffs in the case, Lighthiser v. Trump, had successfully tied health risks for children to the Trump administration’s climate policies. “It didn’t have to,” Mr. Metzger said. But by doing so, the ruling — even though it’s a clear loss for the plaintiffs — “will shape how other courts weigh similar arguments” in the future.

The strategy of filing climate lawsuits with children and young people as plaintiffs has become a fixture of the legal landscape worldwide in recent years. It can win sympathy and public attention for a case, but it has its risks, too.

For the plaintiffs, there is the risk of putting children or young people on the stand and exposing them not only to cross-examination but also potential public criticism or attacks more broadly. As for the defense, young plaintiffs can raise difficult questions about when or how aggressively to go about cross-examining people who might be as young as elementary-school age.

For example, in the Montana case thrown out this week, the Justice Department declined to cross-examine two of the underage plaintiffs, ages 17 and 11, during a two-day hearing last month.

That hearing, held before Judge Dana L. Christensen in the federal court in Missoula, had moments of drama.

In the case, filed in May, a group of 22 young people led by Our Children’s Trust sued the federal government, arguing that three of President Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels would intensify climate change, threatening the health of young people and violating the Constitution’s guarantees of life and liberty. Government lawyers countered that the lawsuit was meritless and should be dismissed.

Jorja McCormick, 17, of Livingston, Mont., was one of the plaintiffs who took the stand, testifying about the difficulties of caring for her horses during wildfires. Later, listening to a defense argument that involved making a point about laws against speeding, she scribbled a note to her lawyer. “People get a choice on how fast they go on the highway,” she wrote. “We can’t choose how much coal is driven through my town.”

Later her lawyer, Julia Olson, read the note in court, saying, “The plaintiffs always make me cry, Your Honor.”

But the case could not overcome what the defendants — the president and a dozen federal agencies — said was its fatal flaw. They argued that it was a facsimile of a case filed a decade ago by Our Children’s Trust, Juliana v. United States.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (the same court that would hear an appeal in this case) previously had dismissed Juliana, finding that the political branches of government, not the courts, were the appropriate venue for the plaintiffs’ demands. Judge Christensen essentially concluded that his hands were bound by the precedent set by that earlier decision.

Ms. Olson has vowed to appeal his decision.

After the lawsuit was dismissed, Adam Gustafson, the acting head of the Justice Department’s environmental division, called it a “sweeping and baseless attack on President Trump’s energy agenda” and said the judge was correct to conclude that legal precedent blocked the case.

Jonathan Adler, a professor at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Va., who is not involved in the litigation, said the lawsuit was built on “fanciful” theories and its dismissal wasn’t particularly surprising. Having young plaintiffs may make cases “a more interesting drama” for publicity reasons, he said, but it doesn’t add legal heft. “This litigation is more about the court of public opinion than the courts of law,” he said.

Despite the recent setback, Our Children’s Trust has had some high-profile successes with the strategy of putting young people at the center of climate lawsuits. The group won a closely watched case in Montana State Court in 2023, and came to a settlement last year in a lawsuit against Hawaii’s Department of Transportation.

Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, was also unsurprised by the decision in the Lighthiser case, given the precedent. But he called the judge’s 31-page opinion groundbreaking, and said it would help build a body of law on climate change and its effects on children. “No other U.S. court decision has gone this far,” he said.

He also pointed to similar cases in Colombia and Germany, as well as a recent International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legal obligations of states with regard to climate change, which was spurred by a yearslong campaign led by students from Pacific island countries. That court’s ruling, while lacking an enforcement mechanism, said that governments must protect people from the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change.

The Juliana case has no path forward in U.S. courts since the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. However, Our Children’s Trust is now bringing it to an international body: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is part of the Washington-based Organization of American States.

In a petition filed last month, the group argued that the United States had violated international law by blocking access to justice for the young plaintiffs. James R. May, a professor at Washburn University School of Law who worked on the filing, said it was the first time that the International Court of Justice’s new climate opinion had been invoked in a legal action.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center, said it was exceedingly rare to have testimony about climate change in a U.S. federal court. Having minors on the stand was also somewhat rare, though it has happened in a few notable cases in the past, including Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, a watershed Supreme Court case that cemented free speech rights in schools, according to Lisa V. Martin, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s Joseph F. Rice School of Law. That case started with students’ plans to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

And in her closing argument at the recent hearing in Montana, Ms. Olson invoked another case in which children were plaintiffs: Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that declared segregation in schools unconstitutional.

“I think it’s a great thing when children are able to access the courts to assert their rights,” said Professor Martin, who is not connected to the Lighthiser case. “This is one of the few parts of democracy where they can easily participate. They can’t vote, and so that takes them out of some of our other democratic processes.”

Professor Parenteau also pointed to the risks and limitations of climate litigation. In the Lighthiser case, the legal risk is that an appeal could result in an even stronger decision by the Ninth Circuit against the plaintiffs, one that could potentially be affirmed by the Supreme Court. For example, a ruling on the ability of plaintiffs to sue over presidential executive orders could have broad consequences for all sorts of cases.

He also said he believed that Our Children’s Trust, which he supports and has donated to but has no formal relationship with, might have more success in electoral politics than in courts of law. Climate change is “ultimately a political issue,” he said. “It may be that these kids could have more of an influence on parents and grandparents in the voting booth than they are in the courtroom.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/climate/climate-lawsuit-children-montana-trump-health.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20251019&instance_id=164735&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=208212&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Trump's Coal Revival Is All Smoke and No Future

Op-ed by Seth Feaster and Dennis Wamsted, The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2025

The two-unit Cumberland coal plant in northwestern Tennessee, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the United States, capable of supplying electricity to as many as 1.4 million homes when it is running.

But lately, the plant has been failing right when customers need electricity the most.

In the middle of the heat wave that hit the eastern United States this June, one of the units tripped offline, forcing the T.V.A. to declare a power emergency and ask customers to cut back on electricity use. For consumers, this meant raising the temperature of their air-conditioning on some of the hottest days of the year.

Cumberland’s problems run so deep that the T.V.A. plans to retire the 52-year-old units in 2026 and 2028. It has warned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that keeping the plant open any longer would require significant investment and create economic and reliability risks.

“Clean, beautiful coal” has become a mantra for the Trump administration. But it is neither clean nor beautiful. More to the point, it is neither economical nor reliable — central concerns for utilities and power producers across the country. In contrast, wind and solar energy and battery storage, which the administration actively opposes, are less expensive, more reliable and far better for the climate.

Most of the coal mined in the United States today fuels aging electric power plants such as Cumberland that are costly to maintain and increasingly unsound. It’s why America gets just one-third as much electricity from coal as it did in 2007, when power production from coal peaked. Since then, large coal-fired plants have been steadily replaced by cheaper, cleaner and more efficient alternatives. In 2025 alone, 23 units are scheduled to close or be converted to gas by utilities and other power producers. From 2026 to 2030, 109 more units are expected to stop burning coal, according to research by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, where we work.

The Trump administration is betting that forcing coal plants to stay open, offering $625 million to upgrade plants, giving away coal on federal land, cutting pollution limits and opening more land to coal mining will spark a turnaround for coal-fired power generation. But while these measures could prolong the operating lives of some coal plants for a short period, they will not reverse the decline of an industry hurtling into economic and technological obsolescence.

Coal-fired power plants are essentially steam engines, a technology the railroads abandoned in the 1950s and ’60s. They are practically identical to the first coal-fired plant, built in 1882 by Thomas Edison to produce electricity in New York City.

But power technology and grid operations have evolved significantly over the past two decades, first by the rise of generation that has no fuel cost (wind and solar) and more recently by battery storage, which can send power to the grid as needed. Batteries in Texas now store power when demand is low and solar generation is high (think 10 a.m.) and then send that power back into the system when demand is high (around 7 p.m.).

This capability, which didn’t exist in the grid until recently, is sharply lowering spikes in power prices and reducing consumer costs. It’s also enabling even more low-cost renewables to be built and reducing the old approach of building expensive fossil-fueled plants dedicated to meeting periods of peak demand.

Coal plants, in contrast, cannot respond quickly to changes in grid demand. Many of them lose money across the day when power prices are low, since they cannot easily stop running in response to low demand.

While coal power struggles with high fuel, operation and maintenance costs, solar and battery storage costs are projected to continue falling while performance improves, further undercutting coal’s competitiveness.

Because the batteries large enough to store electricity for the grid are based on the same technology as batteries for consumer electronics and electric vehicles, they benefit enormously from global investment and research. As a result, energy storage density, a key measure of performance, has been improving by 5 percent or more annually. Solar panels have also seen consistent increases in efficiency combined with falling costs.

Battery storage and solar have other key advantages that conventional power plants do not. Both can be built at nearly any size, from small residential units to large, high-power utility projects. They can also be built almost anywhere, helping utilities avoid costly transmission upgrades and other infrastructure investments.

These advantages have increasingly undercut the economics of coal generation. The problem has gotten so severe that many utilities, even in coal-friendly states, have converted or are planning to convert their existing coal plants to burn natural gas to keep them open and operating. Think about that for a minute: It is often cheaper and more reliable to retrofit a coal plant to burn gas than to keep operating it as is.

Gas is the preferred option for the T.V.A. saddled with the Cumberland coal plants. It is building a 1,450-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant as a replacement.

The Trump administration is likely to push the T.V.A. to continue operating the facility past its planned closure dates, regardless of the cost and reliability implications for consumers. The Department of Energy has already forced a Michigan utility to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant open — despite long-term, state-approved plans to close it in May — which cost $29 million in the first five weeks alone. Consumers, including many who are not even served by the utility, will ultimately be forced to pay for these actions.

These costly stopgap measures are largely performative. They will not prevent coal’s declining importance as an electricity generation resource. The alternatives are simply less expensive, more reliable and quicker to build.

Seth Feaster and Dennis Wamsted are analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/opinion/coal-electricity-solar-batteries.html?searchResultPosition=1

Trump to World: Green Energy Is a Scam and Climate Science Is From ‘Stupid People’

In a remarkable United Nations address, the president lashed out at wind turbines, environmentalists and allies around the world while dismissing the dangers of climate change.

By Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Sept. 23, 2025

President Trump went on a rant against climate change at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, calling it the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and saying that the scientific consensus on global warming was created by “stupid people.” He also berated countries, including close allies of the United States, for adopting renewable energy.

It added up to an extraordinary diatribe that ignored the human suffering exacted by the heat waves, wildfires and deadly floods that are aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels and, at the same time, stood at odds with the rapid expansion of renewable energy all over the world.

He chose his two targets, demonizing immigrants and green energy, and called them a “double-tailed monster” that he claimed, without evidence, are “destroying” Europe. Both subjects play well to his base in the Republican Party. But it was remarkable that he said all this to a global audience.

“You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you’re going to be great again,” he said. “I worry about Europe, I love the people of Europe. I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration.”

His attacks on clean energy appear to be part of an effort by the White House to derail European Union’s legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and stoke a political backlash against Europe’s clean energy advances.

Wind and solar power are generally among the cheapest forms of energy in much of the world, according to independent energy analysts, and global investments in renewables exceed investments in coal, oil and gas.

“Trump continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” Gina McCarthy, who served as the United States climate policy director in the Biden administration, said in a statement. “He’s rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, defended Mr. Trump’s comments and said in a written statement, “Whether it’s called global cooling, global warming, or climate change, the radical climate agenda continues to destroy many great countries around the world.”

On his first day in office, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a voluntary pact among nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is the only country to have done so. His administration also has thwarted renewable energy projects, stripped federal incentives for wind and solar power and removed climate-science data from government websites. It has also commissioned a report downplaying the consequences of climate change.

European lawmakers see the expansion of clean energy as a way to ensure energy security and not rely on the imports of oil and gas. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has urged Europeans to buy more U.S. oil and gas. The administration has received a pledge from the European Union to buy $250 billion in U.S. energy every year through the rest of the president’s term in exchange for some relief from tariffs.

The United States is already the world’s leading exporter of natural gas and the biggest producer of oil, and the Trump administration is encouraging new development. Mr. Trump has also signed executive orders to expand the burning and mining of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

According to overwhelming scientific consensus, the burning of coal, oil and gas has raised the average global temperature by well over 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the preindustrial era, and has exacerbated deadly heat, fires and floods.

He referred to global warming as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated” and upbraided world leaders for sticking to an international agreement to limit global temperature rise and transition away from fossil fuels. The moment was all the more remarkable because the United States is responsible for the largest share of global emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

“I’ve been right about everything and I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail,” he said.

Mr. Trump assailed environmentalists for wanting to “kill all the cows,” a claim for which there is no evidence. Cattle produce methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas, and for that and other reasons, some environmentalists have urged people to eat less meat.

The speech lasted 56 minutes, more than three times longer than the 15-minute limit on remarks by world leaders on the General Assembly podium. He criticized countries in Europe, including Britain, where he received a royal welcome last week, for expanding their renewable energy infrastructure.

Germany, he claimed, “was being led down a very sick path both on immigration by the way and energy.”

Jennifer Morgan, who has served as Germany’s climate change envoy, said European countries saw clean energy as a way to ensure their energy security and to expand their economies. To build a strong Europe, she said, it is necessary to “tackle climate change to avoid people having to leave their homes.”

One of Mr. Trump’s longer digressions involved the idea of “a carbon footprint,” the notion that individuals or groups, through their actions, produce varying amounts of greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide. He called it “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions.”

The term was popularized years ago by oil companies as part of a rebranding effort.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/climate/trump-climate-energy-united-nations-unga.html?searchResultPosition=1

‘China Is the Engine’ Driving Nations Away From Fossil Fuels, Report Says

Its vast investment in solar, wind and batteries is on track to end an era of global growth in the use of coal, oil and gas, the researchers said.

By Max Bearak, The New York Times, Sept. 8, 2025

Since the beginning of the industrial age, the global economy has required more and more fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — to power growth.

It is increasingly clear, however, that China’s aggressive efforts to sell batteries, solar panels and wind turbines to the world is on course to bring that era to an end, a new report says. The Chinese dominance of clean-energy industries is “creating the conditions for a decline in fossil fuel use,” according to a report by Ember, a research group focused on the prospects for clean-energy technologies.

The report includes a sprawling set of data to support its claim.

The scale of Chinese production since 2010 has driven the price of these technologies down by 60 to 90 percent, the researchers found. And last year, more than 90 percent of wind and solar projects commissioned worldwide produced power more cheaply than the cheapest available fossil-fuel alternative, they said. That cost advantage might have seemed laughable before China began pumping billions of dollars of subsidies into the sector.

“China is the engine,” said Richard Black, the report’s editor. “And it is changing the energy landscape not just domestically but in countries across the world.”

If Beijing is trying to wrest the future of energy from anyone, it would be the United States, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer and exporter. The Trump administration has eliminated almost all federal support for renewable energies and has pressured countries to purchase American fossil fuels as part of trade deals.

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The falling cost of renewable energy, though, means that many countries, particularly poorer ones, have a strong incentive to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

According to Ember’s report, the falling costs of energy produced by Chinese-made wind and solar installations have allowed countries like Mexico, Bangladesh and Malaysia to race past the United States in recent years in terms of using renewably produced electricity (rather than fossil fuels) in everyday activities like heating and cooling buildings or powering vehicles.

Across Africa, solar panel imports from China rose 60 percent in the last 12 months, and 20 African countries imported a record amount over that period, Ember said in a separate study recently.

American companies, who do not make solar panels or wind turbines at anywhere near the scale of Chinese ones, are at a major disadvantage. Chinese companies now supply 80 percent of solar panels and 60 percent of wind turbines worldwide, Ember said.

China has pushed for dominance in renewable energy partly for economic reasons and also to protect its national security by limiting its reliance on oil imports. But the implications for the planet’s health could scarcely be greater. Scientific consensus has long been that a sharp decline in fossil fuel use is the surest way to lessen the pace of climate change.

“For too long, emerging economies have faced what seemed like a stark trade-off between growth and sustainability,” said Suwit Khunkitti, Thailand’s former deputy prime minister. The Ember report “challenges that assumption,” he said.

To be sure, some countries would not be keen to rely so heavily on Chinese technology for geopolitical reasons. And few developing countries have the spending capacity to install the kinds of energy transmission and storage capacity that has allowed China to transform its own domestic energy grid so quickly.

When the world’s fossil fuel use will peak also comes down to the pace of that change in China itself.

China still burns more coal than the rest of the world combined and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe together. The country has not yet seen a decline in coal usage overall, though its total greenhouse gas emissions have reached what looks like a plateau.

But last year, China met 84 percent of its electricity demand growth with solar and wind power, according to the report. That meant it was able to cut fossil fuel use by 2 percent, despite a growing demand for power.

Mr. Black said that decline in fossil fuel use was largely due to burning less coal to produce electricity. He pointed to a number of recent policy directives that have reallocated subsidies and production incentives away from coal and toward solar and wind.

China is still building dozens of new coal-burning power plants, he said, but instead of running constantly like many existing ones, they might be at full capacity only during peaks in energy demand. Meanwhile, the contribution of wind and solar to the grid was quickly growing, he said.

“Coal is increasingly acting like training wheels,” said Yuan Jiahai, a professor at North China Electric Power University. “It provides balance and backup while the clean electricity system gains strength and confidence.”

China’s economy as a whole is increasingly reliant on the clean energy sector.

Investment and production in clean energy last year contributed nearly $2 trillion to China’s economy, a figure which the report said was around one-tenth of the country’s economy as a whole, or comparable to Australia’s entire economy. The clean energy sector grew at a rate three times that of China’s economy overall, according to the report.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/climate/china-clean-energy-fossil-fuel-research.html?searchResultPosition=1

Trump, With Tariffs and Threats, Tries to Strong-Arm Nations to Retreat on Climate Goals

The president has made no secret of his distaste for wind and solar in America. Now he’s taking his fossil fuel agenda overseas.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Aug. 27, 2025

President Trump is not only working to stop a transition away from fossil fuels in the United States, he is pressuring other countries to relax their pledges to fight climate change and instead burn more oil, gas and coal.

Mr. Trump, who has joined with Republicans in Congress to shred federal support for electric vehicles and for solar and wind energy, is applying tariffs, levies and other mechanisms of the world’s biggest economy to induce other countries to burn more fossil fuels. His animus is particularly focused on the wind industry, which is a well-established and growing source of electricity in several European countries as well as in China and Brazil.

During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he was trying to educate other nations. “I’m trying to have people learn about wind real fast, and I think I’ve done a good job, but not good enough because some countries are still trying,” Mr. Trump said. He said countries were “destroying themselves” with wind energy and said, “I hope they get back to fossil fuels.”

Two weeks ago, the administration promised to punish countries — by applying tariffs, visa restrictions and port fees — that vote for a global agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the shipping sector.

Days later in Geneva, the Trump administration joined Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries to oppose limits on the production of petroleum-based plastics, which have exploded in use in recent years and are polluting waterways, harming wildlife and have even been detected in the human brain.

Last month, the Trump administration struck a trade deal with the European Union in which it agreed to reduce some tariffs if the bloc purchased $750 billion in American oil and gas over three years. That deal has raised concerns in some European countries because it would conflict with plans to reduce the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which is the main driver of climate change.

“They are clearly using various tools in an attempt to increase the use of fossil fuels around the world instead of decrease,” Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s former special envoy for climate action, said.

Also last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright warned that the United States could pull out of the International Energy Agency after the organization predicted that global oil demand would peak this decade instead of continue to climb.

Mr. Wright told Europeans in April that they faced a choice between the “freedom and sovereignty” of abundant fossil fuels and the policies of “climate alarmism” that would make them less prosperous.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump’s goal was “restoring America’s energy dominance, ensuring energy independence to protect our national security and driving down costs for American families and businesses,” and added, “The Trump Administration will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals.”

Energy experts and European officials called the level of pressure Mr. Trump is exerting on other countries worrisome. Last year, the hottest on record, was the first calendar year in which the global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. Along with that came deadly heat, severe drought and devastating wildfires. This year is on track to be the second- or third-hottest on record, according to data from several agencies.

Scientists widely agree that to avoid worsening consequences of climate change, countries need to rapidly transition away from oil, gas and coal to clean energy sources like wind, solar, geothermal power and hydropower.

“At this moment in time it is absolutely imperative that countries double down, triple down, on their collaboration in the face of the climate crisis to not allow the active efforts for a fossil fuel world by the Trump administration succeed,” Ms. Morgan said.

Mr. Trump routinely mocks the established science of climate change and his administration has issued a report, written by five researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change, arguing that hundreds of the world’s leading experts have overstated the risks of a warming planet. The president also has made no secret of his disgust for wind turbines and solar panels.

Those disparagements don’t end at the water’s edge.

In July, Mr. Trump visited his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, where 14 years ago he tried unsuccessfully to stop construction of an offshore wind farm that could be seen from another Trump golf resort in Aberdeen.

During that visit, Mr. Trump met with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, to discuss trade. He denounced wind power as a “con job.” Ms. von der Leyen sat expressionless next to Mr. Trump during a news conference after their meeting as the president falsely claimed wind turbines drive birds “loco.”

In a separate meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain that week, Mr. Trump called wind energy “a disaster.”

Wind accounts for about 20 percent of the electricity mix in Europe, and E.U. countries plan to increase that to more than 50 percent by 2050.

“Wind needs massive subsidies, and you are paying in Scotland and in U.K., and in all over the place where they have them, massive subsidies to have these ugly monsters all over the place,” Mr. Trump said in his meeting with Mr. Starmer.

The arm-twisting goes far beyond Mr. Trump’s actions during his first term, some observers said. As he did in 2017, Mr. Trump in January withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact among nearly 200 countries to fight climate change. But during the first term, Mr. Trump primarily focused his energy policy on withdrawing the United States from global discussions about climate change while he promoted domestic fossil fuel production.

This time around, the administration is “actively trying to undermine countries” on global warming, said David L. Goldwyn, president of Goldwyn Global Strategies, an energy consulting firm.

Several diplomats from other countries said that the administration has used increasingly aggressive tactics to influence international energy policies.

In February, Mr. Wright addressed a conference in London via video and called net zero (when the amount of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere is equal to or less than the amount removed) a “sinister goal” and criticized a British law to reach net zero by 2050.

In March, the Trump administration denounced the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted by nations unanimously in 2015 and include ending poverty and hunger, and addressing climate change. The administration said “the government of the United States must refocus on the interests of Americans,” and course-correct on things like “climate ideology.”

The Trump administration declined to attend global negotiations this summer that are a precursor to annual United Nations climate talks to be held in Brazil in November.

It also skipped an April meeting of the International Maritime Organization where the world’s largest shipping countries agreed to impose a minimum fee of $100 for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by ships above certain thresholds as a way of curbing emissions. The body had been expected to formally adopt the fee in October.

But the administration’s announcement this month that it would reject the maritime organization deal shocked many with its blunt promise that the United States would “not hesitate to retaliate or explore remedies for our citizens” against other countries that support the shipping fee.

Meanwhile, virtually all of the Trump administration’s trade deals include requirements that the trading partners buy U.S. oil and gas.

South Korea promised to buy $100 billion worth of liquefied natural gas over an unstated period of time. Japan is also expected to invest $550 billion in the United States, partially focused on “energy infrastructure production.” A White House statement said that the money would include liquefied natural gas and advanced fuels. The administration said the United States and Japan also were planning a “major expansion of U.S. energy exports to Japan.” That is widely believed to be a reference to a proposed $44 billion project to ship gas to Asia from the North Slope of Alaska.

Europe narrowly avoided a trade war with Mr. Trump by agreeing, among other things, to purchase $750 billion in crude oil, natural gas, other petroleum derivatives and nuclear reactor fuel over three years.

On an annual basis, that would amount to more than three times the amount the bloc bought last year from the United States.

“You see a more systematic attempt to be a fossil fuel first strategy to everything that they do,” said Jake Schmidt, director of international programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

The administration may slow the transition to clean energy by other countries but cannot stop it, Mr. Schmidt said. Most countries that signed the Paris Agreement will submit more ambitious targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations this year, although some may temper those plans because of the U.S. position, he said.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, argued that the Trump administration was doing the right thing by pressuring countries to reject renewable energy.

“Europe is coming to the United States saying, ‘Help defend us against Russia, help us with Ukraine,’” Ms. Furchtgott-Roth said. “Where at the same time, they’re spending $350 billion a year on green energy investments that are slowing their economies.”

“It doesn’t seem to make very much sense to the Trump administration,” she said, adding, “I think we’re going to see more pressure.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/trump-international-pressure-climate-oil.html?searchResultPosition=1