President Trump’s repudiation of renewable-energy technologies stands to make the United States an outlier in the world.
Many of its large-economy peers are choosing a different path. Even as coal, oil and gas still power the global economy, and more fossil fuels are burned year after year, the movement globally is toward heavy investment in solar, wind and batteries, the prices of which have fallen sharply in recent years.
The European Union has aggressively moved away from coal. Its use of natural gas is declining, and last year solar alone made up 11 percent of power generation across the 27-country bloc, inching above coal, according to a new analysis by Ember, a research group.
Britain closed its last coal-burning power plant last year, and its government has said it would issue no new drilling licenses in the North Sea. Norway, a petrostate that has enriched itself with oil exports, offers such attractive incentives for clean transport that 90 percent of new cars sold in 2024 were electric.
Even Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has set a goal to generate half of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030.
China is in a league of its own. It burns more coal than any country by far, making it the world’s biggest emitter of planet-heating greenhouse gases. But at the same time, it is home to nearly two-thirds of all the world’s utility-scale solar and wind projects under construction. China’s dominance of the manufacturing of inexpensive solar panels has driven down the price of solar energy globally. And its companies are setting up electric vehicle factories as far afield as Thailand and Brazil.
Worldwide, investors poured nearly twice as much money into renewable energy in 2024 as they did into fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. “The world is undergoing an energy transition that is unstoppable,” Simon Stiell, the head of the United Nations’ climate agency, said Tuesday at the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland.
Mr. Trump’s energy-related executive orders, many issued on his first day in office, seek to make it easier for companies to produce oil and gas, and empower the government to stop clean-energy projects that have already been approved. (Coal use has sharply declined in the United States, mainly because of the availability of cheap fracked gas.)
“Doubling down on fossil fuels puts the U.S. on a very different trajectory than Asian and European economies in particular,” said Chris Seiple, vice chairman for renewables at Wood Mackenzie, a research firm.
After all, relatively cheap oil and gas is what the United States has to sell to the world. It is the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas and it now produces more oil than any other country.
Kelly Sims Gallagher, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said the United States need not retreat aggressively from renewables, as the Trump administration vows. Doing so only cedes ground to its biggest rival, China, she said.
“The U.S. oil and gas industry is already thriving and arguably stronger than it has ever been in history,” said Ms. Gallagher, who previously worked in the Obama administration. “It is not threatened by expanded production of renewables. Purely on economic and security grounds it is simply contrary to the U.S. national interest to restrict the continued growth of clean energy technologies.”
Of course there are many countries pressing ahead to extract more coal, oil and gas, even those that position themselves as climate leaders. Brazil, for instance, is ramping up oil production, particularly offshore, even as it sets ambitious domestic goals to transition to renewables. Australia’s production of liquefied natural gas has grown over the past decade. Canada has steadily increased its gas production.
There are also countries continuing to extract all the fossil fuels they can. Russia remains committed to exploring its oil and gas resources, although international trade sanctions have affected its ability to sell to the European Union since its invasion of Ukraine.
And there are still plenty of eager buyers for oil and gas, and handsome profits to be made selling it, two major obstacles to the global energy transition. Investments in renewable energy technologies have been mainly to supplement, not replace, traditional fossil fuels. “The ‘transition’ as such hasn’t actually even begun, we are going through a period of global energy addition, not replacement,” said Brett Christophers, a professor of human geography at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Global gas demand grew in 2024 and is expected to grow this year, though at a slower pace, according to the International Energy Agency. The global demand for oil is growing too, but that is projected to slow, with demand peaking sometime within the next decade, according to several analyses. Most of the rising demand is in Asia, including India, where U.S. oil and gas could find new customers.
The day after Mr. Trump announced his goal to “drill baby drill,” India’s petroleum minister, Hardeep Singh Puri, said it’s possible India would step up its purchases. “More U.S. energy coming into the market is welcome,” he said, according to a Reuters report.
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