Green energies: Trump’s victory, China’s opportunity

• Global investments in renewable energies will indeed reach $2,000 billion this year, according to the latest report of the International Energy Agency.
• Global solar energy capacity has doubled since 2022, according to an estimate published by the World Solar Council at the opening of COP29.
• Furthermore, in China, foreign observers have been debating since last spring whether the peak of greenhouse gas emissions was reached last year or this year.

In this perspective, a Trump administration which would fulfill its promise to put an end to the Biden administration’s massive investments in the energy transition (l’Inflation Reduction Act) could be misguided. Especially since these investments were three times more numerous in counties that voted for Trump in 2020, according to an estimate from the Washington Post published at the end of October.

Certainly, most of the world’s governments are far from being on track to achieve the greenhouse gas reduction targets that they had set for 2030. And in this regard, the United States under Biden did not do better. The hope of avoiding exceeding the threshold of 1.5 degrees of increase compared to the pre-industrial era has therefore faded, and the threshold of 2 degrees will also be exceeded at this rate in the second half of the century. .

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However, if the trend continues, that is to say if renewable energies continue to progress at the same pace, it is the market that could dictate the next steps, not politicianswhatever Donald Trump’s entourage says.

The latter was denounced during the electoral campaign for having promised oil and gas leaders, during a dinner last Mayr, that he would rid them of all environmental regulations if they paid “a billion dollars” to his campaign.

Or, le Wall Street Journal reported on October 6 that the oil lobby allegedly pressured the Trump team not to roll back Biden-era environmental regulations, nor l’Inflation Reduction Act.

Still, investments or not, one thing seems clear as COP29 takes place : in the short term, it is no longer towards the United States that the rest of the world looks to for political leadership against climate change. China is asserting itself, having spent the last decade building a solar and wind industry, which it is now starting to export. Much to the dismay of American solar and wind entrepreneurs.

And even to the great dismay of Europeans: the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions still decreased by 8% last yearr, almost as much as the year of pandemic confinement.