Remember U.S. infrastructure? Something maybe about how bridges across America have been cracking and sometimes collapsing—or how our energy grid is an antiquated mess? Perhaps something about how the Biden administration passed a $891 billion spending package largely devoted to modernizing all the crumbling hardware undergirding the U.S. economy, making it safer, fortified against extreme weather, and less of a contributor of greenhouse gases? Well, sorry to say, the party’s over. In a sign of just how hostile the Trump administration has been toward its predecessor’s investment in a more sustainable and green economy, Chinese firms have scuttled an estimated $2.8 billion in planned U.S. energy projects over the past year. According to new research by analysts with the Rhodium Group, more than half of China’s proposed plans for clean-energy tech projects across the United States since 2022 have been either paused, delayed, or outright abandoned. “The policy environment is getting more restrictive,” as one former senior counselor to the Biden era’s Department of Commerce, Margaret Jackson, told Bloomberg.
Jackson, now a senior associate at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies, suspects that this inhospitable climate for green tech investing is unlikely to change even in the not uncommon scenario where Trump’s whims pivot in response to flattery.
