China’s annual clean tech exports avoid 1% of emissions in the rest of the world

I have been saying this privately before I started this site, and now I can start saying it around here: the only fundamental breakthrough in the climate space over the past 20 years was China, through its massive manufacturing scale, drastically reduced the cost of solar, battery, and to a lesser extent, wind. Without these relentless incremental improvements in the manufacturing processes, international political agreements and sustainable finance innovations wouldn’t amount to much.

Today, when good journalists report on China’s incredible progress in manufacturing and deploying these solutions, they feel obliged to point out that (1) China is still building many new coal plants and (2) China is, by far, the world’s largest emitter, and the second-largest historical emitter. They rarely mention the fact that much of these emissions go into making Labubus and other stuff we buy on AliExpress and Shein that will soon end up in landfills.

With clean tech exports, on the other hand, China is solving the problem for the rest of the world, bigly:

The solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs) and wind turbines exported from China in 2024 are set to cut annual CO₂ emissions in the rest of the world by 1%, some 220m tonnes (MtCO₂).

Manufacturing these products resulted in an estimated 110MtCO₂ within China in 2024, implying that the upfront CO₂ emissions are offset in much less than a year of operation.

Over the expected lifetime of these products, their manufacturing emissions will be offset almost 40-fold, with cumulative CO₂ savings reaching 4.0GtCO₂.

When factoring in China’s plans to build overseas manufacturing plants for clean-energy products, as well as to construct overseas clean-power projects, the avoided CO₂ increases to 350MtCO₂ per year. This is 1.5% of global emissions outside China and almost equal to the annual emissions of Australia.

This analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta for the Carbon Brief also pointed out that China’s dominance in making clean tech leaves plenty of value for the rest of the world:

China’s outsized role in upstream clean-energy manufacturing creates potential supply chain vulnerabilities that many countries will want to address, by diversifying supply sources and strengthening domestic capabilities.

However, China’s dominance is not synonymous with capturing the majority of the economic value in global clean-energy development. Rather, it reflects a strategic advantage in segments that other economies have often neglected, due to low value and profitability.

Of course, China is not heroically carrying the decarbonisation burden for the benefits of the human race. It doesn’t have a grand conspiracy to corner the global clean tech market, either. Chinese entrepreneurs and engineers are just doing what they do best: making millions of widgets and making each one infinitesimally cheaper than the last.