Abstract
This article examines the global clean energy transition through the lenses of world systems theory and historical materialism, situating contemporary energy system shifts within broader histories of economic struggle and geopolitical contestation. Extending existing frameworks of energy transitions as products of economic conflict, it traces how energy security concerns produced divergent responses among oil importers, embodied by US market-led shale extraction versus China’s state coordinated renewable dominance. While the US approach continues to facilitate imperial decline, China’s renewables strategy has catalyzed its rise as a global power while simultaneously enabling the resurgence of resource nationalism and the developmental state across the Global South. The renewable transition thus emerges not as a technical shift but as a geopolitical rupture signifying radical economic transformation at the global scale.
1. Introduction
In today’s world, the increasingly acknowledged “climate crisis” is most commonly presented by climate activists and scientists as an untenable escalation in greenhouse gas emissions leading to life-threatening increases in the average global temperature. The root of the problem, as the mainstream argument goes, is the global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels—and under this framing, the solution is the elimination of fossil fuels and their replacement with renewable energy, which can presumably be realized under existing structures of economic and political organization. Little to no attention is devoted in these arguments to the geopolitical complexities and contradictions underlying status quo global energy dynamics, or of the radical changes to these dynamics unfolding alongside the transition to renewables.
The very definition of “transition”—whom it serves, who bears its costs, and who stands to profit from it—is fraught with conflict. Historical experience reminds us that energy systems are never neutral infrastructures; they reflect, reinforce, and even reshape structures of political authority, economic power, and social organization. The transition from water to coal during the Industrial Revolution, for instance, was not simply a matter of harnessing new fuel sources, but also of centralizing labor control and consolidating capital, with far-reaching repercussions for the organization of daily life (Malm 2016). Likewise, the rise of oil and the collapse of coal’s centrality were woven into contests over labor power and heavily influenced by colonial and imperial ambitions (Mitchell 2011). The contemporary clean energy transition emerges, therefore, not in a vacuum but as the latest in a lineage of energy transitions deeply intertwined with local and global politics.
Recent years have witnessed the acceleration of geopolitical realignments as new energy regimes take shape. The rivalry between established powers in the imperial core, spearheaded by the United States, and ascendant powers in the periphery, most notably China, has come to define the very foundations of the investment flows, mineral supply chains, and policy decisions that define the energy transition. These dynamics transcend national borders, encompassing the entire world in a struggle over critical minerals—lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and others—and the labor, land, and resources of countries across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The result is a landscape marked by both opportunity and threat. For some, the energy transition promises a cleaner environment, stronger development possibilities, and new pathways to sovereignty and sustainability; for others, it brings intensified extraction, environmental degradation, and renewed forms of dependency.
Against this backdrop, calls for a “just transition” have multiplied, attempting to unite the urgent imperative of decarbonization with broader demands for redress and reparations. Yet the substance of such justice is itself the object of intense negotiation and debate. Is a cleaner energy system possible within existing structures of ownership, trade, and property? Or does it require deeper transformation of economic organization and international relations? Who is entitled to benefit from new technologies, and who decides on the terms of resource control and risk distribution? Can the shift to renewables break with the colonial logics that have long shaped global extractive industries, or are we witnessing their reinvention under a green banner?
These questions are neither abstract nor new; they echo in the histories of anticolonial resistance, postwar developmental ambitions, and the struggles over sovereignty that have animated much of the Global South’s engagement with the world system. In past decades, assertions of resource nationalism and demands for a New International Economic Order testified to the enduring aspiration for a world in which resources, technology, and decision-making power are shared equitably across borders. The clean energy transition, with its sizable demand for minerals, land, and technological capacity, has reactivated many of these historical tensions, making old questions newly urgent. Academic researchers and policymakers alike increasingly recognize the need to situate the energy transition within these wider historical and geopolitical frames. This line of inquiry compels us to look beyond aggregate emissions and net zero targets to the concrete realities of labor relations, resource governance, global value chains, and systems of ownership that mediate the flows of energy and value on a planetary scale.
Accordingly, this article makes three connected arguments. First, it extends Malm (2016) and Mitchell (2011) by showing how contradictions within twentieth-century oil extraction—geopolitical resistance by oil producers, geological limits, and labor disruptions—fractured US hegemony and compelled a transition away from oil. Second, it traces divergent responses, rooted in market dependence versus state coordination, materialized in the US imperial “boomerang” toward domestic shale extraction versus China’s outward capture of renewable value chains. Third, it examines how China’s midstream dominance has catalyzed the resurgence of resource nationalism and the developmental state across the Global South, precipitating a global shift toward the assertion of postcolonial sovereignty with profound implications for international economic and political architecture.
2. Theoretical Framework
The relationship between energy, capitalism, and world systemic power has been extensively studied by scholars seeking to understand how energy transitions are embedded within, and constitutive of, power struggles.
In Fossil Capital, Malm (2016) demonstrates that the transition from water to coal during the Industrial Revolution was not simply a matter of technological progress or efficiency. Rather, it was a strategic choice by British capitalists to centralize labor and energy infrastructure. Water mills were geographically dispersed and subject to seasonal flows, limiting the ability of capitalists to discipline and extract surplus from workers. Coal, on the other hand, could be transported and stockpiled, allowing factories to be located in urban centers where labor could be more easily controlled. This centralization of energy and labor was essential to early capital accumulation and the consolidation of the capitalist state.
Mitchell (2011), in Carbon Democracy, extends this analysis to the politics of coal and oil. He shows that the rise of coal-powered industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enabled the emergence of powerful labor movements, as miners and transport workers could leverage their strategic position within the energy system to demand concessions. The transition to oil was, in part, a response to this tension: Oil’s greater mobility and lower labor requirements made it easier for capitalists and states to circumvent organized labor and to extend imperial control over new geographies. Oil extraction and distribution could be more easily moved across borders, undermining the bargaining power of workers and facilitating the projection of military and economic power by core states onto those in the periphery.
Both Malm and Mitchell thus emphasize that energy transitions are not simply technological shifts, but deeply political processes shaped by class contradictions, economic conflict, and the dynamics of capital accumulation. The choice of energy sources, the organization of production, and the distribution of power within and between societies are all fundamentally interconnected. While these works provide a robust theoretical foundation, the contemporary transition to renewable energy presents new configurations of geopolitical competition—particularly the US-China rivalry—that both echo and depart from previous transitions.
While Malm identifies coal’s role in centralizing class power and Mitchell traces oil’s imperial geopolitics, the shift to renewables follows a growing concern for “energy security” among oil importers as a response to the instability of energy markets induced by anti-imperial resistance to exploitative regimes of oil extraction. The renewable transition also introduces novel structural dynamics distinct from coal’s geographical fixity or oil’s pipeline-bound flows, as renewables depend not only on mineral extraction but also, crucially, on manufacturing scale for solar modules, wind turbines, and battery storage, in which China has achieved decisive dominance. Analysts describe these midstream processing positions as possessing a “killer weapon” effect, enabling China to shape global prices, set technical standards, and exercise supply chain leverage rooted in manufacturing rather than extraction (Marks 2025; Wang et al. 2024).
Based on this theoretical orientation, the following analysis traces how the transition to renewable energy is reordering global power hierarchies with significant consequences for existing global systems of resource extraction, energy production, and value distribution.
3. Empirical Extension
As discussed above, energy transitions are never simply technical or environmental shifts; they are always embedded in the broader context of geopolitical and economic contestation. In the second half of the twentieth century, the world system was increasingly shaped by anticolonial resistance and the assertion of resource sovereignty by the Global South. These shifts forced the world’s largest economies to adapt, producing divergent strategies that reflect not only different approaches to energy security but also fundamental differences in their economic models and visions of the world order.
3.1. Reaching the limits of oil
The post–World War II oil regime, which powered core accumulation and US hegemony, began to unravel in the 1970s through a confluence of anti-imperial resistance, rising resource nationalism, and structural limits to extraction itself. The formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960 and subsequent nationalizations of oil wealth in states across the Global South including Algeria, Libya, Iraq, and Venezuela marked the periphery’s assertion of sovereignty over resources previously controlled by Global North interests. These moves were not merely revenue claims but geopolitical maneuvers by newly independent states to leverage oil as a weapon against core dominance, wielded most notably in the 1973 embargo that quadrupled global prices and exposed the fragility of US import dependence.
Simultaneously, physical limits and geological contradictions emerged within the extractive process. As had been anticipated by geophysicist M. King Hubbert in 1956, US crude oil production peaked in 1970, leading to an increase in US dependency on foreign oil—particularly from the Persian Gulf and Latin America—during the period of heightened resource nationalism discussed above (Hubbert 1956; US EIA 2024). The rising sulfur content in the remaining accessible reserves of crude oil beginning in 1970 necessitated substantial investment into desulfurization infrastructure for refineries within the United States to handle the growing share of high-sulfur oil in imported crude supply, resulting in increased refining costs and environmental pressures (US Bureau of Mines 1972; Painter 1986).
These contradictions strained the postwar oil consensus, forcing the US economy to adapt. While the US response crystallized around domestic fossil expansion, China, facing similar pressures as it became a net oil importer in the 1990s, pursued diversification into renewables. The case studies that follow illustrate how these responses not only addressed immediate vulnerabilities but also accelerated the restructuring of world systemic power through divergent energy security paradigms.
3.2. US response: The shale revolution
The rise of resource nationalism in the Global South began to pose new challenges to imperial control over oil resources as a wave of oil nationalizations took hold in the years following the formation of OPEC. The oil shocks of the 1970s, along with the need for growing net oil imports to meet demand, exposed the vulnerabilities of the United States and other core economies, which had become deeply dependent on imported oil, which was often wielded by exporters as leverage to assert their national sovereignty against imperial interests (Mitchell 2011). In response, the United States launched a multipronged strategy to reduce its exposure to international oil market volatility.
Following the 1973 oil embargo, the United States sought to preserve its global hegemony by establishing the petrodollar system, whereby oil trade is denominated in US dollars and oil-exporting states recycle revenues into US financial markets. This arrangement made control over oil resources inseparable from the defense of US monetary hegemony. Given the global economy’s reliance on oil, the petrodollar system has enabled sustained US financial dominance, undergirded by global oil markets regardless of the destination of oil exports or concerns about physical scarcity.
Within US borders, the strategy for energy security was one driven by deregulation and market-based mechanisms in facilitating domestic natural gas extraction to diversify energy resources away from oil. Initially, gas was a byproduct of oil drilling, but massive private investment into technological innovations, most notably hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and horizontal drilling, eventually made it possible to tap vast shale gas reserves within US borders (Wang and Krupnick 2013). Starting in the 1970s, the Natural Gas Policy Act (NGPA) of 1978 initiated wellhead price decontrol, progressively freeing gas prices from federal regulation and creating incentives for private exploration and production. This market-oriented framework culminated in FERC Order 636 (1992), which mandated open access pipelines and unbundled services, eliminating the “take or pay” contract barriers that had protected incumbent pipelines and enabling independent producers to compete directly in a restructured national market. Simultaneously, US energy producers seeking to combat the decline in domestic fossil fuel production following the impacts of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo began to invest extensively in research and development to enhance domestic oil and gas extraction, with billions of dollars in private R&D investments per year from 1980 to 1982 alone (Dooley 2010). Crucially, the shift toward intensified private domestic extraction was heavily subsidized by public funds: The 1980 Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act, which included the Section 29 tax credit specifically for unconventional gas, produced over $10 billion in tax breaks for drillers from 1980 to 2002—funded by US taxpayer dollars—to incentivize greater investment into fossil gas extraction infrastructure, more than tripling the production of unconventional gas in this same period (Ong and Munson 2018). This approach has been massively lucrative for private interests—generating, for instance, tens of billions of dollars in royalties for shale owners in 2014 alone—while the federal government’s royalty income from shale extraction in the same year amounted to less than a quarter of private royalties (Brown et al. 2016). Overall, the result was an explosive boom in fracking practices beginning in the 1990s and the resulting exponential increase in gas supply, which enabled the US economy to move from energy scarcity to energy abundance as it subsequently became a top global producer and exporter of hydrocarbons.
The US turn to gas, then, was not simply about replacing one fossil fuel with another; it was a calculated move to achieve energy independence and insulate the US economy from the political turbulence of oil-exporting regions (Levi 2013). By investing in domestic extraction and infrastructure, the United States could maintain high levels of energy consumption and economic growth while reducing its vulnerability to supply disruptions and price shocks. Nonetheless, though the shale revolution enabled the United States to become a net exporter of natural gas and related products, it delivered only a limited buffer against global crude oil price shocks rather than true energy independence. US refineries underwent decades of retooling to process heavy imported crudes from other countries (such as Venezuela, Canada, and Saudi Arabia), rendering them incompatible with the light shale condensate produced through domestic fracking, which requires extensive upgrading infrastructure that remains underdeveloped. As a result, heavy crude import volumes have remained high, even as light exports have grown. The rapid decline rates inherent to hydraulic fracturing further necessitate continuous new drilling operations, which generates persistent supply volatility.
This approach, though lucrative for US political and economic elite interests, has come with significant externalities imposed on peripheralized populations within the US core along with entire nations elsewhere around the world. The socioecological impacts of fracking—including groundwater contamination, methane emissions, and public health risks—along with those of refining and combustion generate disproportionate harms for marginalized and disenfranchised communities within the United States, particularly racialized, Indigenous, lower income, and rural populations (Jackson et al. 2014). Beyond US borders, the US economy’s sustained dependence on foreign oil has led to a systematic foreign policy strategy that prioritizes US corporate control—often backed by violence—over oil and other natural resources around the world while overriding the sovereignty of the nations in which these resources are extracted. The US economy’s continued reliance on fossil fuels has also perpetuated disproportionately high levels of greenhouse gas emissions and reinforced entrenched patterns of ecological destruction, both domestically and abroad. Simultaneously, the prolongation of fossil fuel dependence delays the deployment of renewables, as natural gas receives promotion as a bridge fuel and receives hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure investments in the name of reliability amid continued increases in annual greenhouse gas emissions.
3.3 Chinese response: The renewable revolution
Concurrent with the US shift from oil to gas was China’s rapid growth as a world power. A semifeudal and semicolonial peripheral nation just three decades prior, China’s trajectory from the 1970s through 2000 was shaped by rapid industrialization and growing integration into the global economy. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and with the launch of liberalization policies under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China prioritized economic modernization and industrial growth, which led to a dramatic increase in energy demand. Initially, China relied heavily on domestic coal, but as industrialization accelerated, its oil consumption also surged, and the state shifted from being a net oil exporter in the 1960s and 1970s to a net importer by the early 1990s (Downs 2004).
This growing dependence on imported oil coincided with a period of global oil price volatility, driven by geopolitical instability in the Middle East and the assertion of sovereignty by oil-producing countries through OPEC. Chinese policymakers became increasingly concerned about the risks associated with reliance on foreign oil, especially after the Gulf War in 1991 and the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, both of which highlighted the vulnerability of China’s energy security to external shocks (Downs 2004).
While the United States doubled down on fossil fuel extraction and market-driven energy security, China’s response to oil-induced instability took a markedly different path. Rather than replicating the US model, China embarked on a state-led campaign to diversify its energy sources and achieve greater self-reliance. After China became a net oil importer in 1993, state leadership began to articulate a comprehensive strategy for energy security, emphasizing diversification of energy sources, investment in domestic resource development, and the pursuit of alternatives to imported oil in order to insulate the country’s growing economy from energy insecurity and instability. The ecological costs of fossil fuels were also a key consideration, particularly following the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, which emphasized the need for sustainable development strategies.
In 1994, two years after the Rio summit, China’s State Council officially adopted China’s Agenda 21—a white paper titled “Population, Environment, and Development in the 21st Century”—as a guiding document for Chinese economic and social development strategies. Chapter 13 of China’s Agenda 21 focuses on sustainable energy production, noting specifically that current patterns of energy consumption in China were unsustainable in terms of not only supply and security but also ecological impacts:
If the present pattern of energy production and consumption is maintained, China would be hard pressed to meet future energy demands due to shortages of resources, low financial inputs and inadequate transportation, combined with the need for environmental protection. Therefore, major components of China’s strategy for sustainable development include changing present energy production and consumption patterns, diversifying energy sources and the structure of power production, and establishing an energy structure that is less or not at all harmful to the environment. (ACCA21 1994)
Accordingly, China’s Agenda 21 calls specifically for the Chinese government to “[give] priority to the development of renewable energy resources in the national energy development strategy,” and to “adopt appropriate financial incentives and market mechanisms to increase national financial inputs into the development of renewable energy resources” (ACCA21 1994). Almost immediately, the state began to prioritize investments into renewable energy, beginning with the formal publication of the “Outline for the Development of New Energy and Renewable Energy” in 1995 and the associated provisions in China’s Ninth Ten-Year Plan (1996–2000). The Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001–2005), approved in 2001, set ambitious targets for renewable energy deployment and declared that “the development of new and renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy [would] be actively promoted” as a means of enhancing national energy security (Dinghuan 2000; GOSC 2001). Subsequent Five-Year Plans have continued to deepen and expand China’s expansion of clean energy infrastructure by prioritizing massive investments in renewable energy technologies through industrial policy, subsidies, and direct state support (Mathews and Tan 2015).
China’s renewables strategy has transformed energy system dynamics globally and has achieved a rapid and sustained shift away from fossil fuels. Historically, China’s economy was reliant on coal for energy production, and today China produces approximately 90 percent of its coal requirements from domestic sources. Over the past decade, this coal’s share of national power generation has steadily decreased along the explosive increase in renewable energy production, and China’s growing electricity demand is increasingly supplied by renewable resources rather than coal. Early on, China’s policies drove renewable energy prices down to match those of coal and used state subsidies to cover the remaining costs of renewable generation, allowing for massive renewables deployment without raising consumer energy costs while renewables were still costlier than coal (Liu and Davidson 2021). For years now, this strategy has led to a systematic decrease in renewable energy costs relative to coal: As of 2020, the median levelized cost of energy for new utility scale solar installations in China was $51 per megawatt-hour, compared to $75 per megawatt-hour for new coal plants (IEA 2020). Renewable costs have continued to drop in the years since, with the levelized cost of Chinese utility scale solar as low as $27 per megawatt-hour in 2025 (Thomton et al. 2025). These massive cost reductions, considering China’s dominance in global renewables production, have driven down costs all over the world, dramatically increasing the economic viability of decarbonization by making renewables more cost effective than fossil fuels and enabling massive displacement of fossil fuels with renewables (IRENA 2025).
In this context, the 2025 expansions of coal capacity in China do not constitute a reversal of existing progress toward decarbonization. Rather, they form a key part of a deliberate state strategy that positions coal as a temporary bridge fuel to support electrification and the scaling of renewable energy systems. China’s additions to coal capacity have emphasized system reliability during periods of peak demand from manufacturing and urban growth, rather than permanent long-term growth, and the construction of new coal plants in China since 2023 has not been linked to overall increases in coal-fired generation, suggesting that these new plants are not intended for sustained use, but rather to meet gaps in energy supply when needed at times of peak industrial use (Qin and Myllyvirta 2025). State controls over pricing have effectively decoupled domestic coal prices from international market fluctuations through subsidies and strategic stockpiles, thereby shielding industrial production from external volatility as renewable capacity expands. The larger trend is clear, however, in demonstrating the systematic replacement of coal with renewables while preserving stability in energy access and reliability. In this framework, coal functions primarily as a use value that underpins national energy security during the transition to renewables, rather than a permanent requirement for energy production. The state’s management of coal also facilitates a gradual phaseout after the projected 2025 peak in emissions, as articulated in China’s fifteenth Five-Year Plan for 2026–2030 (Xinhua 2025). Renewables thus emerge as the primary engine of future economic expansion, building on the temporary stability provided by coal without reliance on its continued use.
3.4. Comparison: Assessing progress and power in the energy transition
The divergent strategies of the United States and China in the energy transition capture two fundamentally different models of energy security and industrial development. China has rapidly asserted global leadership through state-coordinated investments, massive manufacturing, and aggressive renewable deployment, decisively outpacing the United States not only in annual capacity additions but also in the overall scale and scope of its clean energy economy. While China’s investments have driven record-breaking growth in renewables and enabled its domestic greenhouse gas emissions to peak in 2025, the United States continues to fall short of even modest clean energy goals, maintaining its status as the world’s most pollution-intensive advanced economy. The case studies below analyze the investment dynamics, production infrastructure, and labor market conditions that reveal how China has become the global epicenter of decarbonization, and why the United States fails to catch up.
3.4.1. Energy investment
China’s scale and pace of clean energy investment over the past decade reveal profound structural changes shaping the global energy transition. From 2015 to 2024, China invested more than $4.25 trillion in clean energy, dwarfing all other states and reshaping energy markets at the global scale (IEA 2025). Central to this effort is the fusion of state-directed industrial policy, massive public investment, and tightly managed sectoral planning, as evidenced by programs such as “Made in China 2025” and successive Five-Year Plans, which have consistently targeted solar, wind, batteries, and grid modernization as pillars of national competitiveness. Chinese policy has prioritized not only the buildout of generative capacity but also domestic supply chains, resulting in local firms dominating upstream equipment manufacturing, critical mineral refining, and downstream deployment.
By contrast, the United States has lagged well behind in annualized clean energy investment, averaging less than $100 billion per year from 2015 to 2022. Its landmark 2022 policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, delivered $500 billion over the subsequent two years—simultaneously the largest amount in domestic historical context yet a tiny fraction of China’s annual output. Political conflict and changes in political leadership continue to diminish, delay, and disrupt the expansion of clean energy infrastructure, with US investments driven by a fragmented mix of tax incentives, regulatory nudges, and private financing lacking centralized industrial coordination (Christophers 2024). This approach has resulted in patchwork boom-and-bust cycles in renewables, persistent underinvestment in grid upgrades and storage, and reliance on international suppliers for core technologies such as batteries and photovoltaic cells.
3.4.2 Renewables production
Core to China’s dominance in renewables is its productive capacity. According to data from the United Nations’ COMTRADE database, China has spent over thirty times as much as the United States on imports of raw lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese—key minerals for the production of electric vehicle and grid storage batteries—importing over 160 times the physical quantity of these minerals, in kilograms, from 2015 to 2024 (UN COMTRADE). 1 In 2024 alone, China spent $13.2 billion on 68 million tons of imports of these critical minerals, dwarfing US imports of these minerals in the same year, which were valued at $415 million for 346,121 tons. Consequently, China’s battery manufacturing has consistently and vastly exceeded US production, and in 2024 and 2025, Chinese exports of renewable technologies even outstripped US exports of fossil fuels, indicating a global shift away from US-led fossil fuel dominance toward a new Chinese-led renewable energy order (Rathi 2025).
China’s approach has propelled it to control over 80 percent of global solar panel production, more than 75 percent of global battery output, and a dominant position in wind turbine manufacturing and smart grid technologies. These advantages have translated into lower costs for consumers, vast export surpluses, and heightened bargaining power in global trade, technology transfer, and labor migration for skilled technicians and engineers.
The US strategy, meanwhile, has failed to induce sufficient domestic supply chain formation, leading to continued dependence on imports, especially from China. From November 2024 to October 2025, the United States imported over 1.2 million metric tons of lithium-ion batteries from China, valued at nearly $14 billion, according to US customs data (US International Trade Commission). The 2025 US tariffs on green technology imports from China induced a decline in Chinese renewable exports to the United States, ostensibly to incentivize US renewables production domestically and boost US competitiveness against China. However, these tariffs have backfired, as they are projected to induce a net contraction in US renewable installations, indicating the failure of US manufacturing to compensate for the reduction in imports from China; simultaneously, China’s total renewables exports have continued to grow steadily even despite the tariffs, owing to substantial increases in exports to non-US markets in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East (SEIA 2025; Ember 2026).
3.4.3. Labor market conditions
Achieving a clean energy transition in material terms requires recruiting sufficient labor, which in turn demands labor market conditions that favor renewable energy jobs. China’s socialist employment model heavily incentivizes workers to join the renewables sector, while the US market-driven approach produces incentives for workers to remain in fossil fuel industries due to poor renewable job conditions.
China leads the world in renewable energy employment, with over 7 million green jobs amounting to 46 percent of the global total. State-led strategies include expansive retraining programs for workers displaced from coal and heavy industries, generous relocation incentives, and robust social safety nets. Many clean energy jobs are embedded within large, vertically integrated state-owned enterprises with state backed guarantees for fair pay, robust benefits, and secure employment. Government-led training programs explicitly prioritize women and rural communities, drawing workers to renewables through stable contracts and career growth.
In the United States, renewable installation jobs are characterized by temporary contracts, inadequate pay, poor working conditions, low unionization, geographic uncertainty, and job insecurity. In 2023, half of all solar panel installers earned less than $23.50 per hour—falling short of a living wage—while fossil fuel workers earned up to $65 per hour with greater stability and union protection (Peddada 2024). Geographic imbalances exacerbate exclusion: new jobs cluster in affluent or sunbelt regions, while fossil-dependent communities in Appalachia or the Rust Belt are left behind. Government support for retraining remains piecemeal and underfunded, with racial and gender disparities in access and anti-union policies eroding worker bargaining power. These dynamics hinder renewable expansion as workers remain incentivized to stay in fossil fuel jobs.
With regard to the notion of a “just transition,” the Chinese state directs substantial funding toward maintaining stable employment and funding retraining programs for coal workers, particularly in regions like Shanxi’s coal towns, thereby sustaining working class support during the shift to renewable energy (Bridle et al. 2017). In stark contrast, despite decades of US labor and grassroots activism around proposals precisely along these lines, there is no clear plan for the systematic phasedown of coal generation, nor are there any protections for displaced coal workers in those regions that have seen shutdowns of coal production, undermining support for the energy transition even as the rest of the world prepares for a clean energy future.
4. Analysis
The accelerating clean energy transition has initiated a profound reordering of global economic and political power, challenging US hegemony and centering China as a leader in renewable technologies and critical mineral supply chains. Where the US twentieth-century leadership was built atop fossil fuel abundance and a liberalized world order, the twenty-first century is entering a new phase marked by Chinese dominance in green industries, and a simultaneous pivot across the Global South away from the neoliberal orthodoxy of previous decades and toward assertive forms of resource nationalism and the developmental state model.
4.1. Competing models of development and organization
The US approach to energy security remains rooted in capitalist market logic. The “shale revolution,” which transformed the United States from a major importer to a leading exporter of natural gas, was driven by private investment, technological innovation, and deregulation rather than coordinated public planning (Wang and Krupnick 2013). The state’s role has been largely facilitative—providing tax incentives and research support—rather than directive or developmental. This model effectively socializes the costs of risky investments while privatizing the benefits thereof. Moreover, this approach creates incentives for prolonged fossil fuel use even at the expense of public and environmental interests. Investment decisions follow short-term price signals and profit expectations rather than long-term social or ecological goals, leading to boom-and-bust cycles that have undermined sustainable energy planning. Because the US energy transition is governed by the logic of profitability, there is little incentive to move beyond fossil fuels as long as they remain lucrative for capital, lest fossil fuel corporations suffer losses from stranded assets. The expansion of natural gas has, in many cases, delayed or crowded out investment in renewables, locking in fossil fuel infrastructure and sustaining unnecessarily high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
China’s response to energy insecurity adopted a markedly different approach focusing not only on energy supply and stability but also on environmental security, with the government playing a central role in setting strategic priorities, mobilizing investment, and coordinating research across state-owned enterprises and public institutions. This state-led strategy enabled China to leapfrog into global leadership in renewables manufacturing through subsidies, tax incentives, and support for domestic firms. China’s comprehensive rise in renewable energy sectors represents a paradigm shift in global production and value capture. Policies such as “Made in China 2025,” robust state subsidies, and cross-sectoral planning have enabled China to lead the world in solar, wind, battery storage, and electric vehicle production through its planned, state-led development approach that lies in sharp contrast with the US preference for market-led, private sector–driven models.
The global clean energy transition is thus unfolding in a context marked by stark contrast in state approaches to energy security and industrial policy between the world’s largest two economies. This dichotomy is not incidental; it is illustrative of a larger struggle between two contesting visions of economic development and organization.
4.2. Resource nationalism, renewed
The emerging shift in global power from Washington to Beijing has profound implications for the Global South. As discussed previously, the clean energy transition relies on battery production, which in turn depends on vast quantities of critical minerals—such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese—extracted overwhelmingly from countries in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The battery value chain is marked by extreme asymmetry: producer countries capture little value while bearing the brunt of environmental and social harms. Lithium extraction in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert depletes already scarce water resources and disrupts indigenous livelihoods. Cobalt mining in the DRC is associated with hazardous labor conditions, child labor, and toxic pollution, with minimal benefits accruing locally. Nickel mining in Indonesia has led to deforestation, heavy metal contamination, and displacement of indigenous communities. In most cases, the highest value-added activities—refining, battery manufacturing, and final assembly—occur in China and the Global North, perpetuating patterns of unequal exchange and ecological destruction even while revising the economic terms. Consequently, China’s ascent does not automatically guarantee liberation from exploitation for the rest of the Global South.
Simultaneously, China’s central role in the global battery supply chain positions it to shape the terms of extraction, and recent developments reveal a more complex dynamic: China’s dominance facilitates, rather than forecloses, Global South resource nationalism. Over the past several years, numerous resource-rich nations have implemented policies to capture greater shares of critical mineral rents domestically—including Chile’s state-led lithium strategy, Indonesia’s raw nickel export ban, and the DRC’s cobalt export quotas—representing a resurgence of sovereignty assertions against decades of US-led neoliberal extraction. Chinese analysts frame this nationalism not as a threat but as a “legitimate assertion of postcolonial autonomy” in response to historical asymmetries with Western powers and adapts to resource nationalism by investing in mineral processing infrastructure across the Global South that enables greater value capture (Marks 2025).
Indeed, the rise of China has, in many respects, been accompanied by—and actively promoted—a swelling movement toward a twenty-first century resource nationalism throughout the Global South, as states across Asia, Latin America, and Africa have pursued increasingly bold approaches to asserting sovereignty over their natural resources. Empirical examples across multiple countries demonstrate this structural shift in concrete terms. Indonesia’s 2020 prohibition on raw nickel exports required foreign investors, including Chinese firms, to establish domestic smelting capacity, which dramatically increased production levels and generated substantial export revenues that could finance the BPJS national healthcare program serving a quarter billion people (Statistics Indonesia 2026). Chile’s recent nationalization of lithium resources, coupled with joint ventures involving state-owned enterprises and Chinese partners, captures 70 percent of resource rents to fund pension system reforms and environmental restoration initiatives. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the revised 2018 Mining Code substantially increased royalty rates, and agreements such as those exchanging infrastructure development for mineral access have generated finances that could fund domestic educational and healthcare facilities, representing a clear departure from the minimal royalty structures that prevailed under previous contracts with Western mining corporations. 2 Gabon’s declared intention to ban raw manganese exports in the coming years follows this established pattern, with the objective of developing domestic capacity for steel and battery production to facilitate local development. In each of these cases, Chinese resource diplomacy, distinguished by concessional financing arrangements that avoid the austerity measures typically attached to International Monetary Fund lending, effectively aligns midstream processing requirements with the sovereign assertions of resource nationalism by host governments.
US strategies for control over global energy resources, meanwhile, illustrate a vastly different approach: Since the 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh following his nationalization of the country’s oil resources, numerous US interventions across the Global South have focused on seizing control over natural resources, particularly oil, in countries asserting their national sovereignty against imperial interests. This trend has continued steadily into the twenty-first century, with US-backed interventions successfully deposing resource-nationalist regimes in Iraq and Libya and threatening to do so with recent attacks against Venezuela and Iran. In each of these cases, a core motive has been to secure private US corporate control over oil resources in countries where these resources have been nationalized and used to fund domestic social spending, in precisely the way China has enabled in critical mineral exporting states in recent years. Whereas oil revenues in other geopolitical contexts have often relied upon and sustained US-backed military interventions, the rents from critical minerals in these cases bolster emerging coalitions that challenge established imperial dominance, fundamentally threatening to upend the petrodollar system and, with it, the very basis of US hegemony. For China, long-term energy security and sustainability emerge not through systematic coercion and dominance but rather through systematic investment and cooperation, ultimately laying the groundwork for a new international economic order in which peripheral economies secure a greater proportion of the value generated from their natural resources.
4.3. The “imperial boomerang,” revisited
The United States’ failure to compete with China’s strategic control over renewable supply chains has forced a domestic pivot that vividly embodies Aimé Césaire’s thesis regarding the internal limits of imperialism, in which fascism emerges not as ideological novelty but as imperialism’s logical domestic extension, “nothing other than colonialism. . . [that] comes home to roost.” Techniques systematically refined against colonized peripheries—securitized resource appropriation, systematic ecological sacrifice zones, and suspension of democratic consultation—are redeployed against the colonizer’s own racialized, deindustrialized, and politically marginal populations precisely when external hegemony begins to fracture.
For example, the United States has doubled down on fossil prolongation as an explicit hedge against renewable restructuring. LNG export terminals proliferated from two in 2016 to seven operational by 2025, with seventeen under construction, framing natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to sustain energy dominance amid China’s rise. Executive orders in 2025 have accelerated permitting for oil and gas drilling on federal lands, invoking national security to counter “supply chain vulnerabilities,” reinforcing domestic fossil fuel extraction even despite its immense tolls on vulnerable communities within and beyond US borders. Moreover, the Trump administration’s 2025 “Unleashing American Energy” executive order represents the redeployment of this same strategy in the realm of critical mineral extraction by deploying billions of dollars through Defense Production Act authorities to fast-track rare earth element separation facilities, lithium brine extraction, and graphite processing plants in sacrifice zones across the country. National security framing explicitly rationalizes the suspension of democratic process, as local referenda and tribal consultations have been bypassed through classified Pentagon determinations, mirroring the governance suspensions US policy has historically imposed on peripheralized Global South states. The geography of these sacrifice zones—predominantly high poverty, racialized, and deindustrialized—replicates conditions in overseas colonies and neo-colonies, concentrating the externalities of capital accumulation onto populations structurally excluded from its benefits. This domestic redeployment of imperial technique reveals not an aberration from but a progression of the systemic logic of empire: When external coercion fails against assertions of sovereignty abroad, imperialism internalizes its violence against the metropole’s own peripheries to sustain accumulation amid hegemonic decline.
5. Concluding Discussion
The preceding analysis demonstrates that the ongoing global energy transition is deeply shaped by the emergent geopolitical order, characterized by China’s leadership in renewable technology, manufacturing, and infrastructure, and the relative decline of US dominance over the world system. China’s industrial ascent has been structurally necessary for unprecedented cost reductions and rapid deployment of renewable technologies worldwide. Through state-led investment, strategic cooperation, and coherent long-term planning, China has built the productive capacity essential for global decarbonization, upending the neoliberal market fundamentalism dominant in the US model.
Against this backdrop, the US government continues to struggle against China for control over critical mineral resources across the Global South. The escalating conflict in eastern DRC, for instance, fueled by the invasion of Rwanda-backed M23 militias in early 2025, intensified US-China competition over the region’s massive cobalt resources, as the US government intervened to broker a peace deal, a move regional analysts view as countering both Rwandan aggression and Chinese mineral dominance (Neema 2025). This intervention has culminated in a formal deal between the United States and the DRC granting the former access to the latter’s cobalt resources in exchange for military support (US Department of State 2025). Around the same time, the US government solidified an agreement to grant tariff exemptions for key Indonesian exports in exchange for access to its critical mineral (primarily nickel) resources (White House 2025). In Bolivia, the world’s second largest holder of lithium resources, after the 2025 presidential election of Rodrigo Paz, the new foreign minister declared the country’s interest in shifting away from its existing reliance on Chinese investment in lithium and pursuing investment deals with the United States (Dubé and Pearson 2025). In these instances and others, it is evident that US geopolitical competition with China is generating sizable and growing resistance to the shift in power from Washington to Beijing. Nonetheless, US critical mineral strategy continues to be piecemeal rather than systematic, and thus unlikely to dislodge China’s dominance.
China’s renewable manufacturing hegemony has not only outpaced US capacity but actively diffused the developmental state model across the Global South and facilitated a broad shift toward resource nationalism, offering the global majority a possible path to development and dignity, as the assertion of resource sovereignty brings with it the potential for increased foreign investment, local job creation, and domestic redistribution of natural resource rents toward the provision of decent living standards for all. The use of a multilateral framework could internationalize these benefits beyond the borders of individual critical mineral exporters. For instance, a critical mineral sellers’ club organized through the G77 plus China, coordinating critical mineral exporters in OPEC-style production quotas and price floor mechanisms, could channel a share of processing profits (predominantly accruing to Chinese midstream firms) through a multilateral fund to offer billions of dollars in annual investments into social infrastructure programs across the Global South.
Yet the viability of such a path is contingent upon the configurations of power and political economy within and between states, and this process, taking place in a world defined by unequal and unjust power structures at all levels of organization, is not without its struggles and contradictions. As previously noted, the existing world system and global hierarchies between states reproduce ecological and economic injustices in “sacrifice zones” around the world, even in the transition to renewable energy. In addition, the internal contradictions of class, race, and indigeneity within critical mineral exporting states across the Global South continue to characterize the impacts of resource extraction, as socially marginalized communities bear disproportionate shares of ecological and social costs associated with mining activities, even in the boldest instances of resource nationalism. Even so, despite their limitations and contradictions, these experiments in resource nationalism are essential tests of whether producer states can convert control over critical minerals into higher domestic value added, fiscal space, and improved social outcomes, rather than continued reliance on external capital under the dynamics of peripheral dependency.
In sum, the renewable transition constitutes a world systemic rupture. Despite contradictions and US resistance, China’s structural role has catalyzed the resurgence of ambitions of national sovereignty in critical mineral exporting states across the Global South. These experiments in resource nationalism test whether Global South states can convert mineral control into developmental autonomy, or whether green extraction will reproduce capitalist dependency under new geopolitical alignments. The viability of a “just transition” to a clean energy future thus hinges not merely on technological substitution, but on whether resource sovereignty can command the value flows central to planetary survival.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1
Data obtained from 
. Search parameters were as follows: (1) HS codes: 283691 (lithium carbonate), 282520 (lithium oxide and hydroxide), 260500 (cobalt ores and concentrates), 282200 (cobalt oxides and hydroxides), 260200 (manganese ores and concentrates), 282010 (manganese dioxide), 260400 (nickel ores and concentrates), 282540 (nickel oxides and hydroxides), 750110 (nickel mattes), and 283324 (nickel sulfate); (2) Trade flow: Imports; (3) Reporter: China, USA; (4) Partner: All; (5) Years: 2015–2024.
2
The historical trajectory of the Congo provides a stark illustration of the contrast between Chinese partnerships and imperial strategies that previously undermined such sovereign development. Following Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, successive regimes facilitated systemic corruption that diverted mineral revenues away from domestic investment and public welfare. Current mining codes and associated partnership agreements thus mark a decisive break from this historical pattern of extraction.