William Matthews
On the same day President Donald Trump pledged to “drill, baby, drill” in his inaugural address, China’s EAST fusion reactor achieved an unprecedented breakthrough, maintaining a stable state for over 1,000 seconds and strengthening China’s position in the race for limitless energy. China leads the world in solar, wind, and commercial nuclear energy. If Washington throws its lot in with fossil fuels and neglects the energy technologies of the future, any short-term economic gain will be of little consequence. The United States will lose out on global influence and risk irreversibly falling behind China economically and technologically in the twenty-first century in the way that the coal-powered United Kingdom fell behind the oil-driven United States in the twentieth.
Trump has already signed orders to repeal Biden’s bar on offshore drilling, suspend new leasing for offshore wind, freeze funds for EV infrastructure and scrap EV targets, and withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement for a second time. His focus is on exploiting the U.S.’s huge fossil fuel reserves and reinvigorating the country’s automotive sector, which is at risk from competition from Chinese EVs.
This may prove successful in the short- to medium term in providing cheap energy and fueling the U.S. economy, but in the long run, it presents a serious risk to U.S. competitiveness unless it is combined with massive investment in nuclear, including research into the development of fusion power. While Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has spoken in favor of nuclear power, it is unclear how willing Trump himself is to invest.
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