Some Republicans want to beat China on clean energy. Trump doesn’t care.

The Republican clean-energy feud complicating President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” megabill comes down to a fundamental divide in Washington over how to confront China.

One camp wants the United States to compete with Beijing in the race to dominate the energy technologies of the future, from solar panels and wind turbines to batteries and electric cars.

The other side says China has already won the clean energy race, due in part to practices such as forced labor, massive subsidies and intellectual property theft — and playing in that game would make the United States the loser. They want the U.S. to focus on energy sources it already dominates, including oil, natural gas and coal.

This intra-party rift has become a significant stumbling block for the GOP’s tax and spending bill, which is caught up in demands by hard-line conservatives for a wholesale gutting of hundreds of billions of dollars in Biden-era clean energy tax incentives. That push threatens to alienate moderate Republicans whose communities stand to gain from factories and other projects enabled by the tax breaks — and green-tech advocates who had hoped they could sway Trump by framing the incentives as the key to edging out China.

The message they’ve gotten instead: When it comes to winning on clean energy, Trump just isn’t interested.

“The second administration is really not about taking half-measures,” said Daniel Simmons, who ran the Energy Department’s energy efficiency and renewable energy office in Trump’s first term. “To all appearances, it is not a battlefield that they care about.”

Trump’s Energy Department confirmed as much in a statement to POLITICO that focused largely on oil — an energy source that the U.S. produces more of than any other country.

“Thanks to President Trump, America is leading the way in lowering costs by removing red tape and unleashing affordable, abundant, and reliable American energy,” the department said Friday, adding: “As the world’s largest oil producer, the United States welcomes a secure and stable global supply of oil that promotes economic prosperity at home and promotes peace and stability around the world.”

The White House referred questions about its clean-energy worldview to the Energy Department.

Trump officials have argued that putting money into green technology boosts China, which dominates major slices of the global battery, electric vehicle, solar and wind energy supply chains.

Trump’s zero-sum assessment of the clean energy market has forged an energy strategy even more reliant on fossil fuels than he pursued in his first term. Following this approach would jeopardize a U.S. clean energy manufacturing industry that is just beginning to sprout — and, green tech advocates say, all but ensure that China will command the global sector.

That vision is coming to a head in Congress, where Republicans are working to slash the clean energy incentives created by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. While not proposing to erase the tax breaks altogether, GOP lawmakers in the House have floated tight restrictions outlawing Chinese sourcing in energy projects’ supply chains. Those limits would render most of the tax credits unusable for projects that have not yet been built, effectively squelching the nascent U.S. clean manufacturing sector.

The changes remain in limbo as part of the broader budget reconciliation bill, the legislative vehicle for greenlighting Republicans’ and Trump’s policy agenda that can pass with a simple majority vote in Congress. House Republicans are trying to forge a compromise among fiscal conservatives and blocs of GOP lawmakers that want to preserve clean energy credits and raise tax deductions caps for state and local taxes.

Trump’s presence looms over the negotiations. He has repeatedly vowed to end Biden’s programs — the nation’s largest-ever investment in clean energy and fighting climate change — while labeling them the “green new scam.” Cutting many of those policies, such as consumer credits to purchase electric vehicles, would fund a small portion of his administration’s other priorities, including trillions of dollars in tax breaks.

“They don’t see climate change as a problem,” George David Banks, who ran Trump’s first-term climate portfolio, said of the current team’s outlook. He added, “They don’t want to essentially create a jobs program for China.”

Defenders of the IRA tax credits say killing them would wipe out an American jobs program, one whose benefits would flow to heavily Republican communities as well as Democratic strongholds. Private-sector manufacturing projects seizing on Biden’s incentives had been projected to create roughly 160,000 jobs, according to analyses published last year.

Overturning the subsidies would eliminate a potential U.S. export market for solar modules and batteries that could be worth as much as $50 billion by 2030, according to another analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Other countries would fill an $80 billion investment gap left by shuttered U.S. solar facilities, electric vehicle shops and battery gigafactories.

Many countries stand to benefit from the U.S. vacating the space, the Johns Hopkins researchers wrote. But governments outside the U.S. would face risks as well: Those that fail to encourage clean tech investments at home could fall even further behind China, which would likely benefit in every industrial category.

The researchers also raised the prospect of a transition of intellectual property to China: As U.S. business shuttered, they said, foreign companies could purchase their technical knowledge at fire-sale prices.

Trump’s barrage of tariffs against nations worldwide would limit some of the advantage countries could gain by selling clean technology to the U.S., said Tim Sahay, one of the authors of the study. Still, he said, the upshot from Trump’s policies was clear — including for European allies that had erupted in fury over Biden’s use of protectionist tax breaks to move clean energy manufacturing to the United States.

“China would be the biggest winner but not the only winner. … The rest of the world wins,” Sahay said. It’s “basically the IRA in reverse. When the IRA passed, foreigners were like, ‘Oh my God, Americans are stealing our jobs and investments because of their superior fiscal space.’ Well, now the IRA is gone, then foreigners are like, ‘Well, more for us.’”

Some conservative clean energy supporters still hope they can persuade Trump to back tax credits that have sprung solar manufacturing and battery-making plants across Republican strongholds in the Sun Belt and Rust Belt.

Those advocates criticized the IRA for being too lenient on allowing Chinese content into the supply chains of products receiving the tax incentives. But they believe Trump would bless tweaks that tighten foreign content requirements to retain incentives that support blue-collar jobs in the U.S.

“There's an enormous and rapidly growing market for low-carbon technologies around the world, and right now the U.S. is a secondary player,” said Greg Bertelsen, CEO of the Cleaner Economy Coalition, a business advocacy organization that promotes low-carbon manufacturing at the state and federal level. “There's a recognition within the Trump administration that we need to be competing in these markets for these technologies.”

Trump officials have been making a very different case.

Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright flew to Eastern Europe to propose that ministers from Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and other regional governments join “Team Energy Freedom,” urging them to embrace oil, gas and nuclear energy and reject what he framed as climate dogma.

“Climate alarmism has reduced freedom, prosperity and national security,” he said, adding — in language that carried a particular charge addressed to former communist bloc countries — that it may be a Trojan horse to “grow centralization and re-establish top-down control.”

Wright’s subordinate Tommy Joyce was even more blunt when he told a gathering of 60 governments last month in London that the pursuit of climate policy was a gift to Beijing.

“There are no wind turbines without concessions to or coercion from China,” he said.

People outside MAGA world also acknowledge the dominance China has built over decades of developing its clean energy supply chains.

In solar, batteries, electric vehicles and to some extent wind power, “China started early. China is the biggest,” said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

These are the core clean technologies the world is going to need en masse in the coming decades as it shifts towards a cleaner energy system. And in all of these fields, Li said, “the Chinese lead is significant and irreversible.”

In the past months, for example, two rival Chinese companies — BYD and CATL — made potentially game-changing claims when they announced they had developed electric vehicle batteries that could get 400 or even 500 kilometers (roughly 250 to 310 miles) from just a five-minute charge. Tesla boasts that its “superchargers” can give drivers around 320 kilometers in about 15 minutes.

Republican proposals would also hamstring some clean energy technologies that the Trump administration has touted, such as next-generation nuclear, fusion and geothermal, according to an analysis by the research firm Rhodium Group. The proposed tweaks to subsidies would essentially eliminate the long-term price signals that early-stage technologies covet, eroding their business case. Beyond that, the administration’s massive spending and job cuts across federal agencies and science research threaten to constrain U.S. innovation.

Rather than focusing on clean energy technologies such as batteries and EVs, the Trump administration has so far made critical minerals the forefront of its strategy to combat China, said a State Department official who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media. Those efforts focus on extracting and processing raw materials rather than supporting the value-added industries like battery-making or electric vehicles.

The official said the administration’s opposition to subsidies for green technology doesn’t mean it opposes the technologies writ large — apart from wind energy, which Trump has made clear for years that he despises.

Apart from the current U.S. government, no other major power has determined that China’s dominance means that action to fight climate change needs to take a backseat. The Biden administration’s argument, one still being pursued in Europe, was that a targeted industrial strategy could claw back some share of those industries.

Those strategies have often come cloaked in pledges to make this country or that country a “clean energy superpower.” But Li said there was a danger of “making too big of a promise. A promise that cannot be entirely fulfilled.”

Li said he had long feared that someday a U.S. president would ask: If China’s lead is so big, “then why do we play the game?”

That is the conclusion being drawn in the White House during Trump’s second term. And it helps explain why the administration has gone beyond shutting down government funding for future projects and kneecapping agencies that deal with clean energy while reversing regulations.

Not even energy projects that have drawn big-time investment and are already under construction are safe. Last month, the federal government ordered work to stop on a massive offshore wind project that would have powered half a million homes in New York.

“What has surprised me is the extent to which the administration hasn’t just pursued an agenda but has thrown sand in the gears of the parts of agenda that they don’t agree with,” said Thom Woodroofe, a former Australian diplomat in Washington who now works at the Smart Energy Council. “Even when it costs American jobs.”

Zack Colman reported from Washington. Karl Mathiesen reported from London.