8 JANUARY 2025
Climate change is playing an increasingly important role in the decline of biodiversity. It is causing the loss of local species, increasing diseases, and driving mass mortality of plants and animals, including pollinators. The consequences of climate change include food insecurity, forced human displacements, and risks to human and environmental health from intense droughts, water scarcity, severe fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting polar ice, and catastrophic storms.
In 2025, the United States made a fateful choice. Flying in the face of climate science, the Trump Administration – in a sweeping reversal of US environmental policy – rolled back key safeguards, stalled climate action, and gutted the Inflation Reduction Act – America’s most ambitious clean energy investment in decades. Projects that would have positioned the United States at the forefront of the global energy transition, including what was slated to become the country’s largest solar array, were halted.
Now, the Trump Administration is attempting to block construction on nearly completed wind farms off the Atlantic coast in Nevada. These destructive actions paved the way for China to take the leadership and “balance such goals as environmental protection, economic development, job creation, and poverty eradication”, as the Chinese Vice-Premier, Ding Xuexiang, explained at the Conference of the Parties (COP) global climate talks in Belem, Brazil.
China had already surpassed its 2030 renewable-energy goals six years earlier in 2024, and set even bolder targets for 2035, including pushing its renewable-electricity share above 30%. All in all, according to the United States Net Zero Policy Lab, Chinese manufacturing investments around the world have exceeded $225 billion, with three-fourths shaping the development trajectories of some of the world’s emerging and fastest-growing economies – not only exporting solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles but often also financing the projects as well.
In 2025, even as the United States detached from a transition to clean energy, China – with its green-energy exports already one and a half times greater than the value of all U.S. oil and gas exports combined – took the lead with stunning efficiency.
China is now focused on investing in and accelerating the transition to clean energy on every continent. Countries hitherto weighed down by dependency on fossil-fuel from oil-producing countries now benefit from green technology innovations from China.
Politics drift but the sun still shines and the wind still blows. We can imagine a better world. Solar and wind power promises a better future for pollinators, people, and the planet:
- India hit its 2030 target five years early – 50% of its electric capacity now comes from non-fossil sources. Coal use fell nearly 3% in the first half of 2025.
- Pakistan launched a massive solar rollout, freeing itself from its dependence on imported liquified natural gas.
- Brazil and Vietnam are rapidly expanding solar and wind infrastructure.
- Ethiopia and Nepal are shifting to battery-powered vehicles.
- Nigeria, long defined by oil wealth, is building its first solar-panel manufacturing plant.
- Morocco is emerging as a major battery supplier to European carmakers.
- Santiago, Chile, has electrified more than 50 % of its bus fleet.
Europe is powerfully positioned to engage in the global race for clean tech but “… the EU needs a coherent and strong policy for clean technologies to ensure that we maintain and strengthen a foothold both in established and nascent clean tech,” summarises Elisabetta Cornago, Assistant Director at the Centre for European Reform.
America is not doomed, but it is drifting. Electricity prices are up roughly 10% nationwide as the Trump Administration greenlights a boom in its energy-hungry data centres while simultaneously restricting growth in the cheapest forms of power: wind, solar, and storage.
However, even as the United States’ policy deliberately trashes environmental protection and despite federal rollbacks, the reality on the ground is that Americans do care about climate change. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) California used 17% less natural gas for electricity generation than the previous year, and new data reveals that the states with the lowest energy prices – Iowa, North Dakota, and others – tend to be those rich in wind, solar, and hydropower.
Switching from fossil fuels to renewables like solar or wind would reduce the emissions driving global climate change but diplomacy continues to be undermined by the fossil-fuel industry and its proxy governments (Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States) and meanwhile the Earth inches closer to the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in temperature that we must not exceed if we want to preserve a planet that we can safely inhabit.
Renewable energy is the cleanest, healthiest most affordable source of power, the only key to a safer future for humanity. As the international rules-based order falls apart and creates divisive policies, all of us who see that clean energy is an investment in life itself hope that the global trend to clean energy gathers speed in which case humanity may yet be able to keep below 1.5 Celsius.
TO LEARN MORE about why the adoption of renewables is our only hope for a safer world, click here.
To see the latest climate reports from the United Nations, click here and here.
To read the paper ‘Europe’s clean tech industry between Trump’s policies and Chinese pressure’ by the Centre for European Reform (CER), click here.
FACT SHEET
The clean energy transition is already delivering results, lower costs, cleaner air, and greater energy independence. Yet progress is uneven, shaped by national decisions that either accelerate or stall change. These three facts illustrate how leadership in renewables is reshaping the global balance of power and opportunity.
Thought for the Day
“Leadership is not measured by what we protect today, but by what we leave standing for tomorrow. Clean energy isn’t a sacrifice—it’s an investment in life itself.”
– Sabiha Rumani Malik, Founder, The World Bee Project
Here come the Bee-eaters
Bees aren’t just master pollinators. They may also be natural mathematicians. From learning numerical sequences to reflecting the Fibonacci pattern in their family trees, bees reveal a fascinating link between maths, nature, and the Golden Ratio that even shapes our sense of beauty.
