China’s cultivated image as a renewable-energy leader masks its heavy, ongoing reliance on coal—which powers both its industrial base and the solar, wind, and EV hardware it exports to the West.

By Probe International

China has successfully cultivated an image of itself as a renewable-energy leader and essential driver of the global energy transition, while remaining heavily dependent on coal, writes energy and foreign policy specialist Brenda Shaffer in China’s Green Halo Hides Its Coal Dependence.

Developing themes that economist Patricia Adams has advanced since at least 2015, Shaffer contends that China has fashioned a “green halo” of itself that conceals an abiding dependence on coal. Endorsed by tech titans turned philanthropists, energy data organizations, NGOs and the press, Shaffer asserts China’s fossil-fuel use is the foundation of both its industrial might and strategic advantage over the West.

According to Shaffer, the West imports Chinese-made renewable-energy hardware—chiefly solar panels, wind towers and blades, electricity inverters, and related components—along with electric vehicles. These are manufactured largely with coal-fired power in China and then sold into Western markets, where they underpin the expansion of intermittent generation and electrified transport.

Adams had earlier made the same point in broader terms, noting that China had come to monopolize global wind and solar manufacturing and used that position to supply the West with equipment whose domestic deployment raised system costs and reliability challenges.

Adams first set out the core argument in her 2015 Global Warming Policy Foundation report “The Truth About China,” released during the COP21 negotiations in Paris. In that paper she wrote that the Chinese Communist Party would not accept binding emissions cuts, because continued economic growth—and therefore the Party’s own survival—depended on expanding fossil-fuel use, above all coal. Climate diplomacy, she argued, would serve mainly as a vehicle for extracting subsidies and trade concessions while China continued to raise absolute emissions and still relied on fossil fuels for the large majority of its energy.

Adams documented the persistence of China’s coal-centered energy strategy across successive climate summits, showed that wind and solar remained subject to high curtailment and contributed negligibly to primary energy, and argued that Western environmentalists and institutions had become the Chinese Communist Party’s “useful idiots.”

Where Adams established the structural logic, Shaffer demonstrates that the same pattern persists and has become more effective. She supplies newer examples of China’s coal consumption, and illustrations of elite acceptance, most notably tech billionaire Eric Schmidt’s claim that China has “infinite energy, most of it renewable.”

Go to the publisher’s website here to read Brenda Shaffer’s commentary in full.

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China’s Energy Dream

The Truth about China

The Red and the Green: China’s Useful Idiots

The Road from Paris: China’s Climate U-Turn

The Worm in the Rose