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Welcome to Dispatch Energy! In my first column for this newsletter last fall, I argued that the era of the climate hawk had ended. The stretch from roughly 2010 to 2022 was defined by inexpensive energy, low borrowing costs, rising progressive and cosmopolitan cultural currents, and a relatively calm geopolitical landscape, all of which culminated in an elite obsession with tackling climate change. As I noted, none of those conditions endure now: commodity prices are elevated, artificial intelligence is upending domestic politics, the conflict surrounding Iran commands international attention, and even progressives are regrouping to push back against what they see as America’s “oligarchy,” the White House’s stringent immigration enforcement, and other issues.
One other shift is in America’s posture toward China.
At the outset of the climate hawk era, many geopolitical analysts still anticipated China would liberalize in the 21st century. Climate advocates, meanwhile, were beginning to view China as a leader in clean-energy technologies like solar panels and wind turbines that would power the American—and global—energy transitions.
Today, of course, China is more often understood as an economic and geopolitical threat. Chinese state-owned enterprises have indeed driven a revolution in solar photovoltaics and lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and other applications, but they have done so on the backs of coerced labor and a fleet of industrial coal plants, making China by far the largest consumer of coal in the world.
Now, there are growing signals that Chinese interests have worked to stoke polarization in American energy politics and to undermine U.S. economic competitiveness. As it turns out, the compact that developed between American environmentalists and the Chinese Communist Party during the era of the climate hawk may have been closer, and more concerning, than was previously understood.
A number of American environmental advocacy organizations set up shop in China in the interregnum between the opening of China’s markets in the Bill Clinton years and the backlash against Chinese military and mercantilist power under the presidencies of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The Energy Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Law Institute, among others, all launched clean energy and sustainability programs in China in the 1990s.
This was a time of marked optimism about China in the West, including on environmental issues. Western leaders and opinion influencers set expectations high for Beijing’s contributions to the burgeoning green economy. “This is an opportune time to expand U.S.-Chinese cooperation in ways that will benefit both the environment and the global economy,” then-Vice President Al Gore declared in October 1997, upon the release of the first comprehensive statement on energy and the environment between the two nations. In his 2008 bestseller Hot, Flat, and Crowded, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman posed an optimistic question: “Can Red China Become Green China?”
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</div>Some of that optimism endures, and China has become the world’s leading producer of many clean-tech commodities. But first Republicans and then Democrats soured on U.S.-China relations, with environmental and human rights abuses becoming difficult to overlook as Chinese producers undercut Western firms across multiple economic sectors, green and otherwise. Powering a clean-tech export behemoth with the world’s largest (and still growing) fleet of coal-fired power plants generated enough cognitive dissonance as to erode the vision of an eco-friendly China.
But Beijing’s unfair pursuit of energy dominance may extend beyond its own soil, to the United States. In recent years, watchdog organizations and lawmakers have opened a series of inquiries into Chinese influence peddling in American environmental academia and nonprofits.
Take Code Pink, for example. The U.S.-based nonprofit organization links its support for a domestic fossil fuel phaseout to its mission to radically shrink the American military, advancing the slogan “War is not green.” But in 2023, the House Committee on Natural Resources’ Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee wrote a letter expressing concerns about Code Pink’s ties to Beijing following a New York Times report on its dubious funding and defense of Chinese human rights abuses. The so-called environmentalist group “is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda,” the Times concluded.
But China’s apparent influence campaign didn’t stop there. In 2024, the alleged that the U.S.-based Energy Foundation, in launching an arm in Beijing called Energy Foundation China, was channeling funding to U.S. academic and nonprofit advocacy organizations “dedicated to promoting the phase-out of fossil fuels and mass expansion of costly green energy alternatives.” The China-based offshoot was reportedly run by former Chinese Communist Party officials.
Then, this summer, the watchdog organization State Armor published an exposé of the Environmental Law Institute, an American nonprofit that provides direct support to Chinese nonprofits and government officials while also advancing anti-fossil fuel litigation and judicial influence campaigns in the United States. As State Armor CEO Michael Lucci put it for National Review, “The Chinese Communist Party is trying to subvert American power by weaponizing our own institutions against us.”
There is a long-standing debate in American clean energy circles about the nature of Chinese clean-tech production. Most of the U.S. solar industry, for instance, is in installation and development, and companies are only too happy to import increasingly cheap Chinese photovoltaic panels. Domestic manufacturers like First Solar, however, have long argued that lax environmental and labor standards, as well as dirty upstream energy production, give China an unfair advantage in the solar, battery, and critical minerals industries.
What has been less discussed is the degree to which Chinese interests are deliberately undermining U.S. energy competitiveness by bankrolling climate advocacy against domestic oil and gas production. This effort has taken the form of campaigns to ban fracking and natural gas exports, to end oil and gas drilling leases on public lands, and to nudge the U.S. judiciary to impose penalties on fossil fuel producers.
It’s worth noting that many, if not most, environmental groups are sincerely and categorically opposed to fossil fuel production and in favor of strict regulations on carbon emissions. We should take these values and positions seriously in their own right, even as we exercise due scrutiny on the financial and political forces influencing environmental philanthropy and advocacy.
That said, whatever the magnitude of China’s impact on American environmental politics and policy, there is an inherently anti-democratic undercurrent to the judicial and regulatory strategies the environmental movement is pursuing in the United States.
A number of advocacy organizations in this space—including the Environmental Law Institute and Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit that files environmental lawsuits on behalf of child plaintiffs—are behind an organized campaign to establish tortious or even criminal penalties against fossil fuel producers. This effort takes the form of activist litigation, like Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case currently under consideration by the Supreme Court, as well as efforts to “educate” judges on a narrow and contested understanding of both the causes of and solutions to climate change. As I wrote about these efforts for Dispatch Energy in May, “They are an attempt to subvert the deliberative democratic policymaking process by imposing climate targets through judicial fiat.”
Understood this way, it may not be that the CCP is serving as puppet master of the U.S. environmental movement. Rather, environmental advocacy organizations may instead serve as convenient tools for a Chinese regime that seeks to undermine the American energy system.
Policy Monitor
- Ongoing negotiations in Congress over federal environmental permitting reform may now hinge significantly on changes to the National Historic Preservation Act, or NHPA. Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, has made reforming NHPA a priority, arguing that the statute “has evolved into a sprawling, unpredictable process that now delays some of the very projects our country needs to build and maintain.” This month, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a federal agency largely staffed by President Donald Trump’s appointees, voted to limit engagement with states and Native American Tribes under the NHPA, a move that was quickly denounced by key Democrats involved in broader permitting reform negotiations. How these tensions will be resolved remains to be seen, with congressional recess and the midterm elections narrowing the window to introduce and pass comprehensive permitting legislation.
- Last summer, the Trump administration passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included, among many other provisions, the repeal of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) subsidies for solar, wind, and electric vehicles. But as researcher Lily Bermel documents in a new MIT policy paper, renewables may be more resilient to these policy changes than many feared. The legislation, Bermel finds, “preserves 74% of new clean energy capacity, 71% of new clean generation, and 67% of emissions reductions that the IRA trajectory would have delivered relative to 2021 over 2025-2035.” As Bermel described her findings in a Washington Post op-ed this week, “The IRA, for all it delivered, subsidized mature technologies that the market would have deployed anyway. It underinvested in reliable clean power and never touched the supply-side barriers that throttle both.”
Innovation Spotlight
- For my last Dispatch Energy installment in June, I wrote about the two nuclear startups—Valar Atomics and Antares Nuclear—whose prototype microreactors achieved criticality under the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program. In the short time since, two more companies—Aalo Atomic and Deployable Energy—have reached the same technical milestone. These working prototypes will give the startups—and regulators at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Departments of Energy and Defense—important performance data as the reactor designs move through the next stages of innovation and commercialization. As my Breakthrough Institute colleagues Adam Stein and Spencer Toohill put it this month, “The Reactor Pilot Program was a test of whether the United States could recreate the innovation cycle for nuclear developers to do what every other complex technology sector depends on: build, test, learn, and improve before scaling.”
