#solarization

Back around the time of the Paris Accords, there was a raging debate about national carbon targets, with poor countries in the global south arguing that because rich northern countries were responsible for nearly all the CO2 in the atmosphere, the rich world should make the sacrifices needed to decarbonize, leaving China, India, and other poor countries to continue to enjoy the benefits of burning coal.

China made an especially pointed case, insisting that their CO2 figures were grossly inflated because they made all the stuff that the rich world consumed. The carbon emissions from the appliances, consumer goods and industrial equipment and other exports from China were really the rich world's carbon, which had been offshored to "the world's factory" – China.

This may have been true back then, but things have changed dramatically. China is running away from coal as fast as it can, and solarizing everything. China lights up a new solar generation facility with the capacity of a coal plant every eight hours. Trump can subsidize fossil fuels and throw up as many structural impediments to renewables as he can think of, and it won't change the fact that as a planet, we're on track to replace all of the embodied energy in the stuff the whole world uses with solar.

So when you read that 54% of the energy in the EU is coming from renewables, that doesn't mean that they're cheating by offshoring their emissions to China. The EU is offshoring its manufacturing to China, but China has found a better way to manufacture Europe's stuff, without having to set old dead stuff on fire 24/7:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-leads-eu-electricity-generation-as-renewables-hit-54-percent/

Reading Here Comes the Sun is a forceful reminder that there's a big old world out there beyond America's borders. It's true that American policy was once very important to the whole world, but that was largely down to the things that Trump is hell-bent on destroying. American dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system gave the US a massive, global structural advantage, but the weaponization of SWIFT, the deliberate weakening of the US dollar, and the destruction of American monetarism via cryptocurrency scams has put dollar clearing into terminal decline:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Even US military might is in decline. US military spending remains off the charts, but Trump and Hegseth are purging the forces, targeting Black and brown people (disproportionately represented in the US military because people from minority groups are typically poorer, and the US military recruits a lot of poor people without many other options):

https://theintercept.com/2025/10/01/pete-hegseth-war-pentagon-beardos-dei/

American aid agendas used to give it a huge global footprint. When American evangelicals forced the government to ban aid that included birth control or helping gender minorities, countries all around the world saw surges in unwanted pregnancies and homophobic discrimination. Now that the US has cut off all that aid, the US can no longer set priorities for those countries.

America's domestic research agenda used to set the standard for the world, because the brightest scholars in the world moved here to go to university and to pursue their research. This meant that the priorities behind US federal scientific and academic grants determined what the world's best and brightest worked on. Of course, that's dead, too.

Trump hasn't just killed research funding in America – he's also singlehandedly reversed generations of work to lure the world's most talented scientists and scholars to the USA. Grad students, professors, engineers and researchers are leaving the US rather than risk being kidnapped to a gulag in El Salvador or imprisoned in Alligator Auschwitz. Our loss is everyone else's gain. It's not clear whether people will ever again aspire to come to America to pursue their research.

The point is that things are very much up for grabs right now. The planet is solarizing at rates that beggar the imagination (and warm the heart). McKibben quotes many sources who've called China "the Saudi Arabia of solar," but he is skeptical of that characterization. The sun, after all, shines everywhere and once you've got the solar installed, China can't take it away from you.

Or can they?

Solar – and the whole cleantech sector – is the first truly successful "internet of things" application. From inverters to EVs to household batteries, the new, electric world is digital and networked, and that means that it's all terribly enshittification prone.

Today, the US has the ability to remotely, permanently disable every John Deere tractor in the world and set off a global famine:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Tomorrow, Chinese soft (and not-so-soft) power could be vested in the ability to remotely update, downgrade, disable, or brick whole countries' worth of cleantech:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

There's a way to prevent this, thankfully. The only reason that technologists around the world can't reverse-engineer and unlock these "smart" devices is that the US trade representative bullied every country into passing punitive IP laws that ban this practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Absent these laws, there could be a roaring trade in jailbreaking smart devices of all kinds – from printers to ventilators, but also all of cleantech – so that owners of these devices could always change how they work, blocking field updates and restoring functionality that had been confiscated by the manufacturer, whether due to greed or geopolitics.

The US trade rep got these IP laws passed abroad by threatening America's trading partners with tariffs. Tariffs: another source of power that Trump has vaporized. The threat of tariffs loomed over the whole world, and fear of losing access to American markets meant that policymakers all over the world kept laws on the books that allowed US tech companies to extract rent and extort their populations. But a deterrent only works if you don't use it. Now that everyone's been tariffed by Trump, the threat is dead. Happy Liberation Day, folks.

It's these US tech-protecting laws that create the conditions for an eventual mass-enshittification of cleantech. It's these laws that Chinese firms – and the Chinese state – would use to secure their ability to truly be the Saudi Arabia of the sun: not just the source of the technology that converts sunshine to electrons, but also the landlord of those sunbeams, with the power to evict whole countries from their solar arrays, at the click of a mouse.

Creating a legal and technical framework for local control over cleantech's software has many advantages. The mere existence of a killswitch (or any remote-update facility that device owners can't override) makes devices vulnerable to shutdown by malicious hackers as well as manufacturers.

However, a world of cleantech devices that are under their owners' absolute control also poses some challenges to the solar revolution. If you want to build a virtual power plant by harnessing the batteries of thousands of homeowners, or relieve grid pressure by adjusting the thermostats and fridges of millions of utility subscribers, it's a lot easier if you know that you're communicating with devices that do what you tell them to do and faithfully communicate their operations to you.

That's a tradeoff we're going to have to make, though. The incremental reliability of designing technology so its owners can't override remote instructions is swamped by the massive risk that this power will be abused to attack individuals, regions, and whole countries.

As the US government turns its back on solar, the sun is setting on the American empire. It's not clear whether there will be elections next year. Trump says he'll use terrorism laws to arrest people who are "anti-Christian" or "anti-capitalist":

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/trump-classifies-anti-capitalism-as-a-political-pre-crime/

Will China step in and become the world's unipower as America shits itself to death after drinking raw milk or coughs itself to death after boycotting vaccines? I don't know. I hope we end up with a multipolar world, and that someone picks up the research agendas that Trump has destroyed. Earlier this year, Elon Musk's DOGE killed all the NIH grants that included the word "systemic" (because they're racist against the idea of "systemic racism"). Speaking as a guy whose cancer diagnosis was just upgraded from "localized" to "systemic," I really want some other well-resourced entity to do this work.

One way the EU can act as a hedge against Chinese hegemony is by turning itself to manufacturing and selling disenshittifying technology – tools to jailbreak computers, phones, consoles, and embedded systems in cars and solar inverters and medical devices. This is a giant market opportunity for the EU, and it's also key to actually moving to a "Eurostack" of technology that is independent from the American tech companies that Trump uses to project power into every company and government in the world (except China).

It doesn't matter if the EU funds an Office365 clone if there's no way to migrate data from Microsoft to that made-in-Europe alternative. No government ministry, no large firm, no civil society group is going to manually move each of their documents, messages, edit histories, directories and permissions over from a US tech product to a Eurostack alternative. To do that work, you'll need automation: scrapers, jailbreaks of virtualized devices that directly access their RAM and instruction flow.

What about America? Well, there's still the tattered remains of federalism. The states and localities have power – on paper, at least. Many of these localities (including ones in deepest, reddest Trumpland) have been able to seize control over their energy destiny. If you want to get involved in insulating your town from "the Saudi Arabia of oil" (AKA "Saudi Arabia"), check out the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's work on "Community Power":

https://ilsr.org/article/energy-democracy/four-shortcuts-to-boost-your-states-community-power-score/

Do that work, and maybe you'll be able to keep the lights on in the coming American Dark Ages. Practically speaking, it's unlikely that the rest of the world is going to accept 250 million American refugees fleeing the 50 million Trump diehards who've looted the country and torched its future.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting