On January 23, 2025, Climate and Capital Media published an article by Danny Kennedy, senior adviser to the Sunrise Project, entitled “US’s Petrostate Versus China’s Electrostate.” This was among the first of a torrent of articles from the corporate media and climate watchers on the astonishing successes of China in peaking and then lowering carbon emissions due to what the Financial Times on May 12, 2025, called China’s “Electricity Revolution.” According to the Financial Times, “China could be on its way to becoming the world’s first major ‘electrostate,’ with a growing share of its energy coming from electricity and its economy increasingly driven by clean technologies” (Danny Kennedy, “US’s Petrostate Versus China’s Electrostate,” Climate and Capital Media, January 23, 2025, climateandcaptialmedia.com; Nassos Stylianou et al., “How Xi Sparked China’s Electricity Revolution,” Financial Times, May 12, 2025).
The extent of the Chinese energy revolution almost defies belief. As Kennedy writes:
China [is] moving faster than ever on the energy transition. It feels silly to say they’ve had another breakout year on solar, but they’ve had another breakout year with the numbers just coming for 2024. It’s worth remembering that China’s official targets for wind and solar at the start of this critical decade were almost too much to imagine. But they exceeded them so quickly that they brought them forward to 2025 in 2023 and then met them in 2024! Likewise, Beijing’s target for EV’s [electric vehicles] was 50% of car sales by 2035. It’ll hit that this year…ten years ahead of schedule! (Kennedy, “US’s Petrostate Versus China’s Electrostate”)
On May 15, 2025, Carbon Brief announced that not only have China’s carbon emissions now peaked but they have actually dropped by 1 percent over the last twelve months. This has occurred at the same time that its energy demand has been rapidly increasing. China’s electric vehicle (EV) sales in 2025 will more than double those of 2022, representing the first time that EVs have outsold internal combustion engines in any major auto market in the world. China accounts for 90 percent of the world’s electric bus market. Its high-speed rail system is five times the size of that of the European Union. Not only is it the world leader in clean energy technology, but half of China’s exports of solar and wind equipment and EVs now go to the Global South. Although China is the lead carbon emitter worldwide, this is largely explained by the fact that it produces 30 percent of the world’s manufactured goods, while remaining heavily dependent on coal. Still, with 18 percent of the world population, its per capita carbon emissions are only around half the U.S. level. Within the next three years, China, according to the Financial Times, is expected to be sourcing half of its power “from low-carbon energy including hydro, solar, wind, nuclear and battery storage systems.” Its solar capacity also is projected soon to exceed coal-fired power generation as China’s main energy source (Laurie Myllyvirta, “Clean Energy Just Put China’s CO2 Emissions Into Reverse for the First Time,” Carbon Brief, May 15, 2025, carbonbrief.org; Stylianou et al., “How Xi Sparked China’s Electricity Revolution”; Tina Landis, “Don’t Believe the New Cold War Lies, China Is Leading the World in Climate Solutions,” Liberation News, May 15, 2025, liberationnews.org; Jennifer L., “China’s Renewable Energy Boom: A Record-Breaking Shift or Still Chained to Coal?,” Carbon Credits, February 6, 2025, carboncredits.com).
China’s achievements in ecological modernization via the revolutionizing of its social forces of production are a result of its existing social relations, which include the ability to carry out extensive energy planning. This has so far proven impossible for monopoly-capitalist regimes. In short, China’s signal advantage in terms of addressing the climate change threat and ecological challenges generally is its “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This contrasts with persistent U.S. failures to carry out an energy transition. This was true even under the Biden administration, which sought a stance friendly to fossil fuel corporations in its Inflation Reduction Act. Under Trump, energy transition along with the reality of climate change are gone altogether and the goal is to build on the U.S. role as the world’s leading petrostate. If humanity is to prevent a planetary climate holocaust, the dominant class relations of global monopoly capitalism will need to go. There is no other way.
In the June Review of the Month on “The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism” by MR editor John Bellamy Foster, it was indicated that the Trump administration had imposed tariffs of 145 percent on China. However, while the June issue of the magazine was at the printer, the administration, faced with a dramatic drop in the stock market and a looming stagflation crisis, was forced to retreat, lowering its tariffs on Chinese imports to 30 percent. (The tariff rate set by the administration on most countries is now 10 percent.) Yet, despite the Trump retreat, what remains is a full-fledged tariff war, with the overall “pre-substitution” tariff rate, applied to current trade, at 17.8 percent, far exceeding the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. “The reality,” economist Paul Krugman writes,
is that we’ve gone from a completely insane tariff rate on imports from China to a rate that’s merely crazy…. [Based on reasonable economic assumptions,] we’d expect Trump’s tariffs after last weekend’s retreat on China to cut overall U.S. trade by roughly 50 percent. Trade with China, which would have been virtually eliminated with a 145 percent tariff rate, would fall by “only” around 65 percent with a 30 percent tariff.
Does cutting U.S. trade with the world in general by half and reducing trade with China by two thirds sound to you like Trump calling off his trade war? It sounds to me like a massive disruption of the world economy, only slightly less disruptive than we were looking at last week.
What about the impact on U.S. families? Tariffs are sales taxes levied on American households; don’t let anyone tell you different. Walmart declared yesterday that it will have to begin raising prices later this month because of the tariffs. (Paul Krugman, “The Trade War Isn’t Over,” May 16, 2025, Substack, paulkrugman.substack.com)
Some labor leaders, such as United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, have come out in support of the Trump tariffs. This position is strongly criticized on MR Online by labor economist and director of Monthly Review Press, Michael Yates, who focuses on the tragic implications of tariffs under the neofascist Trump regime. As MR editor Paul M. Sweezy wrote in a letter to Michael Lebowitz in 1987, “As long as the too-strong capitalists are in control of the government [facing a too-weak labor movement], I think the position of [Karl] Marx in his famous essay on free trade [vs. protection] is the correct one: a plague on both your houses, except to the extent that it may bring the revolution closer” (Michael D. Yates, “The Trump Tariffs and the U.S. Labor Movement,” MR Online, May 1, 2025; Paul M. Sweezy to Michael Lebowitz, July 21, 1987, MR Archives).
Shane Henry Mage, a noted Marxist economist, died on November 30, 2024, in his ninety-second year. He was a Monthly Review contributor, and translated, from the French, Samir Amin’s Specters of Capitalism, A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions (1998) for Monthly Review Press. Shane’s PhD dissertation, The “Law of the Falling Tendency of the Rate of Profit”: Its Place in the Marxian Theoretical System and Relevance to the U.S. Economy (Columbia University, 1963) was a pathbreaking work in establishing an empirical framework, based on the national accounts of the United States, corresponding to Marxian economy categories. It showed that it was possible to demonstrate the operation of Marx’s “law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit,” found in Capital, Volume 3, Part III, as an empirically testable description of a really existing capitalist economy, that of the United States from 1900 to 1960. This had never been done before. There is today a body of economic research and publications acknowledging descent from his work. Shane taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic and Grand Valley State University. He was senior editor at Collier’s Encyclopedia for over two decades.
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