The War Convinces the World for Clean Energy

While Donald Trump says he is opposed to windmills and solar farms, no one currently does more to help renewables win the world. Not because of anything he intends, but because of what he has unleashed. The war in the Middle East has done something that decades of climate conferences could not quite manage: it has made energy independence feel urgent, personal, and immediate to every government on Earth. The lesson from Hormuz is crystal clear: if you do not want your nation’s future to depend on a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, go renewable. Do it fast.

Nearly twenty million barrels of oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz every single day. When missiles fly and tankers freeze, oil prices spike, families pay more, and economies stagger. Every nation watching this unfold is asking the same question: how do we stop being this exposed? The answer is arriving at the same conclusion everywhere. The sunshine falling on Indian soil belongs to India. The wind blowing across Kenya belongs to Kenya. The rivers running through Brazil, China, Norway, and the Congo belong to those nations and no one else. No one can sanction your sunlight. No one can embargo your wind. Every solar panel you put up, every wind turbine you install, every hydropower project you commission makes your nation more secure and more reliant on resources that cannot be taken from you. No shipping lane required. No commodity market to gamble on. No distant power with a hand on the valve.

For a long time, the case for clean energy rested almost entirely on climate. That case was always right, and it remains urgent. But the world is a complicated place, and moral arguments alone have never been enough to move governments at the speed the crisis demands. What is changing now is that three powerful reasons to go green have converged at once. The first is the environment. The second is prosperity, jobs, and industrial competitiveness. And the third, newly sharpened by events in the Gulf, is energy security. These three arguments no longer pull in different directions. They point to the same answer. That is a historic shift, and we should not underestimate it.

Consider what has happened even in countries whose leaders have spoken most loudly against clean energy. Trump tried to stop solar and wind in the United States. He failed spectacularly. In 2026, 99.2 percent of new net electricity capacity in America is expected to come from renewables. Solar capacity grew 34 percent last year. Battery storage added 50 percent. Coal declined substantially. He can speak and act against renewables. He cannot uninvent solar panels or wind turbines, and he cannot stop the American people from choosing the cheapest power available. The market has already decided. The same is true across the world.

The reason the economics work so well, and the reason the green transition is now genuinely affordable for developing countries that once could not imagine it, is largely due to China. All paths to the renewable future, at this moment in history, run through China. Chinese companies dominate the manufacturing of nearly every critical component of a modern power grid: solar panels, high-voltage cables, transformers, batteries. China produces 97 percent of the world’s solar wafers, 92 percent of solar cells, and 86 percent of photovoltaic modules. Last year China added 430 gigawatts of solar and wind in a single year. No one beats China on scale and price, and no one comes close.

The price of solar has fallen to less than 5 percent of what it cost in 2005. That collapse happened because of China’s manufacturing scale and fierce domestic competition. My Norwegian friend Terje Osmundsen, who is busy constructing solar plants in Africa as CEO of Empower New Energy, said plainly: we should be grateful for China’s aggressive industrial strategy in solar manufacturing, because the dramatic drop in panel prices has been the main driver behind accelerating solar deployment across Africa and the developing world. This is not ideology. This is a supply chain reality that is changing the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Here is the part of this story that I find most inspiring, and that I think deserves far more attention than it receives. For most time of human history, prosperity came with pollution. That model spread across the world, from Europe to Japan to Korea to China. For generations, there was a real and painful contradiction between growing an economy and protecting the natural world.

That contradiction is over. For the first time in human history, a country does not have to choose between development and a clean environment. The economics of clean energy have made the old trade-off obsolete. And nowhere is this more visible, or more exciting, than in the countries of the Global South that are leapfrogging the dirty path entirely.

Look at what is already happening. In Indonesia, CATL is investing close to six billion dollars to build a complete battery supply chain from nickel mining through to finished cells, expected to create more than forty thousand jobs. Brazil is negotiating with CATL to establish large-scale battery production on Brazilian soil, turning natural resource wealth into domestic industry rather than raw material exports. Ethiopia now gets close to ninety percent of its electricity from renewables and has banned fossil cars. In Nepal, eighty percent of new car sales are electric. I recently walked down the main street of Katmandu and saw outlets from most electric car manufacturers, the majority of them Chinese. Global shipments of batteries doubled in the first quarter of this year alone. The Iran war is the shock that dramatically catalyses our clean energy future, but the underlying momentum was already there.

What all of this adds up to is a new model for South-South cooperation that no one quite predicted and that is moving faster than most institutions can track. Chinese companies are not simply selling cheap products to developing nations. They are co-investing in factories, building local supply chains, training workers, and helping countries transform their natural endowments into real industrial capacity. This is business-led, profit-driven, and it happens to align almost perfectly with what the developing world needs most: affordable electricity, domestic jobs, and a development path that does not require poisoning the air, soil, and water first.

There is one important thing to be clear about. Energy independence does not mean energy isolation. No small or medium-sized country can or should try to build a completely self-sufficient energy system from scratch. That would be enormously expensive and ultimately counterproductive. What it means is building your energy system on your own natural resources, while staying connected to the best available technology and finance. The sun and the wind belong to every nation. The supply chains that turn them into power belong, right now, primarily to China. The smart response is not to wall yourself off from that supply chain out of abstract geopolitical anxiety. It is to engage with it, build as much local capacity as you can, and use it to accelerate your own transition.

On this Earth Day, I want to say something that I genuinely believe: we are winning. The green revolution has stumbled many times. It has faced retreats, broken promises, and missed targets. But the underlying trajectory has not reversed, and it is now being accelerated by forces that no single government can stop. The price of clean energy keeps falling. The technology keeps improving. The business case keeps getting stronger. And now, the geopolitical case has joined them.

The old debate, whether we go green or whether we go prosperous, is dead. The war to remind the world of its dependence on fossil fuels is instead speeding up the world’s escape from them. That is the most important story of this Earth Day, and it is a story worth celebrating:

Every drop of oil you replace with solar or wind or hydro makes your nation more energy secure.

The article reflects the author’s opinions, and not necessarily the views of China Focus.