US Abandons the Clean Energy Battlefield It Claimed to Want to Win

Trump's withdrawal from COP31 and reversal of Biden-era clean energy policy hands China uncontested dominance of the sector the US spent billions trying to enter.

The United States is the only major country absent from the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey. No delegation was sent. The White House called the talks detached from reality, dismissing what nearly every other nation treats as the central coordination mechanism for planetary emissions policy. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, present at COP31, called Trump "the biggest loser we've seen in a long time" for ceding the clean energy supply chain to China.

The structural story here is straightforward: under Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act offered tax breaks for clean energy manufacturing and EV production, explicitly designed to compete with China's dominant position in solar panels, batteries, and wind components. Republicans have since eliminated most of that support. Trump has imposed tariffs on various goods while redirecting public money toward struggling coal-fired power plants — the dirtiest fossil fuel source. Kerry's sharpest point is not the insult but the strategic diagnosis. "He declared he wanted to beat China, be number one in X, Y, or Z, and he walked away from the battlefield," Kerry said. The US spent years and hundreds of billions positioning itself as a clean energy competitor. The current administration has not merely paused that effort — it has actively dismantled the policy architecture that made it possible while subsidizing the sector's decline. Meanwhile, global emissions edged down slightly last year, driven largely by rapid renewables growth — predominantly in China. UN Secretary General António Guterres told the gathering it was "long past time" to phase out fossil fuels. Greta Thunberg, arriving in Antalya, was blunter: "COPs have become greenwashed circuses." Kerry acknowledged the glacial pace of climate diplomacy but argued the issue has real electoral weight. He pointed to recent US midterm results, claiming climate concerns overlapped with alarm over rising energy costs and helped drive Democratic victories. "I think we will have a number of candidates who will have this high on the agenda," he said. The White House framed its absence as a rejection of "extremist climate policies destroying countries around the world." This is the administration's consistent posture: treat climate action as economic sabotage rather than industrial strategy. The problem with this framing is that it ignores who is actually building the factories, filing the patents, and capturing the global market for the energy systems every country will need. Trump's hostility to wind energy — "wind turbines are a major loser," he said Monday — is now embedded in potential legislation that would make it harder to build new energy projects. The net effect: the US retreats from a multitrillion-dollar global market while propping up a fuel source in terminal structural decline. Whether this registers as ideology or strategy, the industrial consequences are the same.