How Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Will Make China Great Again

Can you hear it — that loud roar coming from the East? It’s the sound of 1.4 billion Chinese laughing at us.

The Chinese simply can’t believe their luck: that at the dawn of the electricity-guzzling era of artificial intelligence, the U.S. president and his party have decided to engage in one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm imaginable. They have passed a giant bill that, among other craziness, deliberately undermines America’s ability to generate electricity through renewables — solar, battery and wind power in particular.

And why? Because they view those as “liberal” energy sources, even though today they are the quickest and cheapest ways to boost our electricity grid to meet the explosion of demand from A.I. data centers.

It is exactly the opposite of what China is doing. Indeed, Beijing may have to make July 4 its own national holiday going forward: American Electricity Dependence Day.

You cannot make this up: China and even Saudi Arabia are doubling down on solar power to meet the needs of the A.I. data centers it wants to recruit from the West, while Trump’s “big beautiful bill” actually does just the opposite. It quickly phases out tax credits enjoyed by utility-scale solar and wind — as well as electric vehicle tax credits. This virtually guarantees that China will own the future of solar energy, wind power and electric cars and trucks, as well as autonomous vehicles.

Thankfully, Trump and friends did keep until 2036 a major Biden-era tax credit for companies that build other emissions-free technologies like nuclear reactors, hydroelectric dams, geothermal plants and battery storage. The problem is that it can take up to 10 years to build a nuclear plant in America, and, as The Times reported, the bill added “complex restrictions” to the battery credits “that bar recipients from having ties to ‘prohibited foreign entities’ like China.’’ As a result, “some worry that the restrictions are so complicated that the credits could end up being unusable for many projects.”

In sum, this dog’s breakfast of a bill — rushed through without a single congressional hearing with independent energy experts or even one scientist — is sure to put at risk billions of dollars of investments in renewable energy, mostly in Republican states, and potentially kill the jobs of tens of thousands of U.S. workers. By the way, the bill also bans for 10 years a first-ever fee on excess methane emissions from oil and gas production, a key driver of global warming.

So, in one fell swoop, this bill will make your home hotter, your air-conditioning bill higher, your clean energy job scarcer, America’s auto industry weaker and China happier. How does that make sense?

It doesn’t. And the person in America who knows that best is actually Elon Musk. It is really sad to me that Musk, who is without question one of America’s greatest manufacturing innovators — having started globally leading companies making electric vehicles, renewable rockets, battery storage and telecommunications satellites — has discredited himself with so many voters because of his dalliance with Trump and because of his Department of Government Efficiency’s capricious cuts to the government work force. Because of that, many will not understand the vital truth that Musk has been shouting to his fellow Americans: Trump’s bill is “utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

This is not complicated and this is what China knows: There has never been a more intimate connection than there is now between a nation’s ability to generate huge amounts of electricity at affordable prices (and in the cleanest way possible) and its ability to develop A.I. engines that consume huge amounts of electricity as they learn and generate answers that could give us the tools we need to cure diseases, discover new materials and even produce the holy grail of cheap, clean, climate-saving fusion energy.

To put it differently, there has never been a more intimate connection between the amount of cheap, clean electricity a nation can generate for A.I. models and its future economic and military might.

That is why Musk and many others find it so “insane and destructive” that Trump and his G.O.P. cult have rejected an energy policy of “all of the above as clean as possible as fast as possible” — oil, natural gas, coal, wind, hydro, nuclear, solar, geothermal, hydrogen — that is always working to phase out the dirtiest for the cleanest, the way China often has. Instead, Trump has chosen instead to kneecap America’s renewable energy industry the way China has not. The president has even called clean energy tax credits a “scam,” saying he’d rather spend the money anywhere else. This is industrial-scale foolishness.

I was struck by a quote from an energy expert in The Wall Street Journal the other day. “The big-picture outlook for energy is we are going to be less competitive because of this law,” said Nick Nigro of Atlas Public Policy. “Ten years from now we could look back on this moment as the time in which the U.S. pulled back and essentially lost the transition to clean energy.”

Alas, truth be told, Democratic Party progressives helped to make Trump and his party this foolish on energy with their own crazy fantasies. Too many of them behaved as if we could go cold turkey from a fossil fuel economy to a clean and green one, without scaling cleaner fuels to bridge the transition, like natural gas and nuclear, and without loosening permitting standards for more transmission lines to get clean power from the middle of the desert to the cities where it is needed.

Few Americans understand how far ahead of us China already is in this realm and moving farther ahead, and faster, every day.

Consider this snapshot: In 2000 China produced just over 1,300 terawatt hours of electricity while the U.S. produced nearly 3,800 (a terawatt is equal to a million megawatts). Fast forward to today, China produces over 10,000 terawatt hours while the U.S., since 2000, has added only 500 — an increase of only 13 percent in two and a half decades. Much of China’s electricity growth originally came from expanded coal-fired generation, but in recent years it has been driven by expanding hydro, solar, wind and battery sources, which are easier, cheaper and quicker to build and also help the climate.

As a recent article from Shanghai in the The Financial Times put it: “China is on its way to becoming the world’s first ‘electrostate,’ with a growing share of its energy coming from electricity and an economy increasingly driven by clean technologies. It offers China a strategic buffer from trade decoupling and rising geopolitical tensions with the U.S.”

As for Trump’s goal of making America globally energy dominant during his term of office, his bill just made that impossible. There is no path to energy dominance in the next five years without renewables.

Let’s say you want to generate additional electricity for more data centers just through natural gas today. Even if you have an abundance of gas, as America does, you need more giant turbines to convert the gas to electricity. If you ask the major manufacturers of those turbines — GE Vernova, Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Power — they will likely tell you that they will be very happy to deliver you one, but you will be lucky to have it installed by 2030. That is how long their backlogs are. And there is no telling what that turbine will cost with all of Trump’s new steel and aluminum tariffs.

By contrast, you can build and put online a new solar farm with battery storage in Texas in just 18 months.

“During the past quarter, Texas took the lead in clean power installations, adding an impressive 2,596 MW of new utility-scale solar, wind and storage capacity,” reads an October research report from Texas A&M, referring to megawatts of power. “This milestone marks the first time Texas has surpassed California to become the top solar state in the nation.’”

A Texas energy expert, Doug Lewin, posted last week that the Texas grid, known as ERCOT, recently reported that the state had added 10,000 megawatts of power in just the last year — most of it from supercheap solar power with battery storage, so energy can be distributed at night when the sun is not shining. As a result, Texas has seen a drop in brownouts on its grid because of more renewables combined with bigger storage batteries. Texas can still deploy solar-plus-batteries in the future, but now the electricity will cost consumers a lot more thanks to the Trump bill.

If that higher monthly electricity bill bothers you, call Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He assuredly knows better, but like every other sycophant in Trump’s cabinet he seems to have just told the boss what he wanted to hear. As Wright must know, solar energy plus storage batteries made up 81 percent of the new electricity capacity added in the U.S. in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Now Trump’s idiotic bill will slash that amount.

The result for Americans? The research firm Energy Innovation, whose peer-reviewed energy modeling is widely respected, projects that Trump’s effort to diminish America’s renewable energy industry will cause wholesale electric power prices to increase roughly 50 percent by 2035, and that cumulative annual consumer energy costs will increase more than $16 billion by 2030. It also projects that some 830,000 renewable energy jobs will be lost or not created by 2030.

For all of these reasons, I am certain there are only two political parties in the world today cheering the passage of this bill: Trump’s Republican Party and the Chinese Communist Party — because nothing is more destined to make China great again than Trump’s “big, beautiful, America surrenders the future of electricity to Beijing” bill.

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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook

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