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Opinion|How Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Will Make China Great Again
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/opinion/trump-bill-clean-energy-china.html
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Thomas L. Friedman
July 3, 2025
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: Even Saudi Arabia is 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.
