Xi Jinping at Davos

Donald Trump is now president of the United States. He has just issued ‘An America First Energy Plan’. It is a bizarre document. Absolutely no mention of renewables or energy storage, instead it focuses on oil and coal. It reads like something out of the 1970’s, assuming action to protect the environment is a cost to the economy rather than a net gain to the economy. What on earth all the companies involved in Cleantech research, development and deployment will make of it is hard to know. Will they move operations overseas? When in 2010 the Rajoy government was elected in Spain they very much slowed Cleantech innovation in that country and the companies that survived relied on foreign contracts. Will something similar happen in USA, or will California and a number of other states just develop energy policy totally at odds with what Washington wants? Scottish and UK policies on energy are on increasingly divergent paths.

As America retreats into a backward looking, insular, debt ridden shell of its former self, paradoxically communist China is rapidly emerging as the leader of the capitalist world. At Davos Xi Jinping argued in favour of free trade and open markets. He emerged as the dominant statesman of the gathering. He restated China’s commitment to the Paris agreement on climate change. One of Trump’s first actions was to delete all mention of climate change from the White House website. If the 196 countries who signed up in Paris are looking for leadership Xi Jinping will be one of the people to watch out for.

In the decade 2002 to 2012 Chinese carbon emissions skyrocketed, then levelled out for a few years and have been declining for the past couple of years. My prediction is that Chinese emissions will plummet over the decade 2017 to 2027. Over the coming few weeks I intend to do a number of blogs exploring the basis for this belief. There are lots of positive trends emerging: the closure of thousands of coal mines, the cancellation of coal fired power stations including ones under construction, increasing energy efficiency and flat energy demand, massive investment solar and wind power and in energy storage and transmission technologies. If the Twentieth Century was ‘the American Century’ and it was based on fossil fuels, the Twenty-First Century may be ‘the Chinese Century’ and it will feature the rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewables.