Who is actually fighting climate change and who is throwing a tantrum in the corner
There is a map I keep returning to in my head. It is my mental picture of who is actually doing what about climate change, and who is busy dismantling the little that was built in the last few decades.
It is roughly this: Europe writes the rules. China makes the technology cheap enough for everyone to use. India and other developing nations adopt those technologies, adapt them, and build their own ambitions around them. And the United States, at least under both of Donald Trump’s terms, sits in the corner, arms crossed, rejecting the science, the treaties, the regulations, and occasionally the basic premise that there is a problem at all.
That is a simplification, obviously. But it is not wrong.
Europe and its actionable laws
The European Union has been, without serious contest, I think, the world’s primary architect of climate law and regulation. This is not because it is the most powerful economy or the most heroic climate saviour. It is because the EU actually keeps writing laws and then making them stick.
The European Climate Law sets legally binding targets. These include at least a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, and full climate neutrality by 2050. As of 2024, the EU had already cut net emissions by over 37% compared to that baseline. In late 2025, a provisional agreement added a 90% reduction target for 2040. These are not aspirations in a speech. They are legal obligations.
Between 2019 and 2024, the EU published 108 pieces of legislation under the European Green Deal. By 2035, all new passenger cars and vans sold in Europe must produce zero emissions. The EU also introduced a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. This is essentially a climate tariff that charges a price on imports from countries without equivalent emissions standards. This is the Brussels Effect in action. Companies that want to sell into the EU market must comply with EU environmental rules. These rules quietly turn EU standards into global ones.
Is Europe perfect? No. Political pressure is real. Some targets have been softened under industrial lobbying. But the direction holds. The architecture is there. Compared to anywhere else, this is what serious climate action looks like.
China and its affordable technology
China’s role in the global climate story is complex and often discussed in extremes. Let me try to present a more balanced view. China remains the world’s largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases and continues to build coal power plants, and its domestic energy transition is incomplete. All of that is true. However, as Science magazine named its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year “the unstoppable rise of renewable energy,” China emerged not solely as a villain but as the country that made clean energy affordable globally.
China produces 80% of solar cells, 70% of wind turbines, and 70% of lithium batteries. From 2010 to 2022, global solar costs dropped by 90%, and wind costs by 70%. This was no accident. It happened because China built supply chains, scaled manufacturing, and let competition lower prices until solar became the cheapest electricity ever. Not just for them, but for the world.
Ember reports 91% of new wind and solar plants are now cheaper than fossil fuels. Chinese factories that make wind turbines and solar panels drive that change. China is the top clean energy investor, spending $625 billion in 2024, or 31% of the global total.
The domestic picture is accelerating too. China’s wind and solar capacity more than doubled between 2021 and 2024. In early 2025, it surpassed coal for the first time. Emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months. Analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air say this is the first time China’s energy demand growth has not led to higher emissions.
Interest in new coal projects in China is minimal. Renewables are cheaper, faster to build, and less politically fraught. The transition is not clean or complete, but the economics have shifted.
As Jeremy Wallace, a China Studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, put it: “What America does is not the main part of the story. It is a cute side character. China’s efforts are the main story for fighting climate change.”
India and the developing world
The narrative I grew up with goes something like this: developing countries want to grow, rich countries want them to be clean about it, and the two things are fundamentally in conflict. These countries sit across the table from the developed world, arms folded, saying, “We did not cause this.” Which is true. And also, increasingly, beside the point.
Building on this narrative, India’s position offers a clear example. India still generates roughly 70% of its electricity from coal and has resisted rigid phase-out timelines, arguing for fair burden-sharing and the right to develop. While its climate ambition is genuinely shaped by developmental needs, this tension exists alongside another factor: a renewable energy programme that is outpacing almost every expectation.
At COP26, India committed to achieving 500 GW of non-fossil electricity capacity by 2030. Its Nationally Determined Contribution also targets a 50% non-fossil share of cumulative electricity capacity, which it has already achieved, five years early. By August 2025, India’s total installed capacity stood at approximately 495 GW, with the non-fossil share crossing 50%. The 500 GW absolute capacity target remains a work in progress, but the pace of deployment makes it credible.
India is no longer just adopting European standards or manufacturing capacity from China. It is a net exporter of wind generators. It is investing in green hydrogen, battery storage, and EV supply chains at scale. The WEF describes it as transitioning “from simple technology adoption to a fully integrated green innovation ecosystem.”
And India is not alone in this transformation. An Ember analysis found that 63% of emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America now draw a greater share of their power from solar than the United States does. Countries including Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Morocco, Kenya, and Namibia are outpacing the US in the shift to renewable energy, often using cheap Chinese technology, adapting it to local needs, and building new grids around it.
The story of the developing world and climate change is not only one of vulnerability but also one of pragmatic, accelerating action.
The United States has left the chat
Under Obama and Biden, the United States was genuinely fighting climate change. Imperfectly, insufficiently, but seriously. The federal government had the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases. The Paris Agreement was signed and re-signed. The Inflation Reduction Act was the largest single climate investment in US history.
Under both of Trump’s terms, that framework has been systematically dismantled. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order directing the US Ambassador to the United Nations to withdraw from the Paris Agreement (AGAIN!). He also repealed all climate-focused executive orders from the Biden administration and declared a national energy emergency to fast-track fossil fuel production.
Thousands of federal workers engaged in climate research have been fired from the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the Forest Service. Scientific data has been erased. The National Climate Assessment team was disbanded. References to human-caused climate change were scrubbed from government websites.
The US also withdrew from the board of the Loss and Damage fund for developing nations, abandoned the Just Energy Transition Partnership, blocked a global shipping carbon levy, and helped collapse international negotiations on a plastic treaty.
There is some counter-pressure. California, New York, and other states are legally fighting the federal rollback. But I find it hard to find hope in the US federal picture. Not after two Trump terms. Not after watching the systematic erasure of four decades of environmental regulatory infrastructure, not out of ignorance, but out of deliberate strategy. The difference between a bad actor and a confused one matters. This is not confusion.
The map still holds and the world keeps moving
This world has never had a story of perfect heroes and one villain. Europe has its political pressures and backsliding. China is still building coal plants. India still runs most of its grid on coal. None of them are clean.
But the map holds. Europe sets the standards. China manufactures the technology at a scale and price that makes adoption possible everywhere. India and the developing world are adopting, adapting, and beginning to innovate on their own terms.
And the US, under its current federal government, is doing something that goes beyond inaction. It is actively making things harder and ensuring that future administrations will find it more difficult to re-engage solutions for a better future.
The world is still moving. Just not with America at the front of it anymore.
My interest in climate change did not start with reading reports or watching news cycles. It started with YouTube and the educators on the platform who kept showing up, kept making it legible, kept refusing to let it become background noise. Simon Clark is at the top of my list. Over the last ten years, his work has probably done more to shape how I think about this topic than anything I have read in a formal setting.
This post, long as it is and rabbit-hole-inducing as it hopefully is, has a very specific recent trigger: Simon’s video India is taking a shortcut. Watch it.