It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, September 04, 2026
Ukraine Diplomacy Heats Up as Russian Minister Returns to G20
Zelenskyy said Ukraine and the United States were working to set dates for a visit by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov attended the G20 finance meeting in Asheville and met US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, drawing objections from European officials.
Putin was simultaneously in Bishkek, where he met Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the SCO summit.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was briefed by US President Donald Trump’s special envoys following their latest trip to Moscow and said the two Americans were working on plans for a follow-up visit to Kyiv in the near future.
Meanwhile, while Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Bishkek to attend a regional summit, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov made a surprise visit to a G20 finance meeting in North Carolina, with some participants expressing anger over the appearance of the country’s representative while it is at war with Ukraine.
While the Ukraine battlefield remained relatively calm throughout the day, diplomatic activity took the spotlight on August 31.
Trump has confirmed he will send envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Kyiv in the coming weeks in what will mark their first visit to Ukraine since taking leading roles in the administration's efforts to end Russia's full-scale invasion.
Witkoff and Kushner have traveled to Moscow and met with Russian representatives in the US multiple times during Trump's second term, fueling some criticism that the administration has shown favoritism toward Putin and the Kremlin.
"We will see what the US president’s envoys can accomplish," Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram after holding a "detailed and constructive" call with the two.
"September can change a lot, and together with our partners, we must do everything possible to protect people, protect lives, and achieve peace."
"There needs to be the right mindset in Moscow -- from Putin, a mindset to end the war, not to keep fighting. For now, unfortunately, all the intel -- both ours and our partners’ -- and all the signals from Russia indicate that the Russian leader personally wants more war," Zelenskyy wrote.
Not 'Normal'
Meanwhile, in Asheville, North Carolina, Russia's Siluanov attended his first G20 gathering since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the country's exclusion from such gatherings.
Trump has spoken often about returning Russia to international groupings, such as the Group of 7 (G7) industrialized nations in the face of vehement opposition from most other member nations.
The G20 is comprised of 19 countries and the European Union, and accounts for around 85 percent of the world's economy and two-thirds of its population
German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil said the situation with Russia was not "normal" and expressed frustration that there was no forewarning of Siluanov's participation.
"People are dying every day. We have just seen another escalation in the [Russian] attacks," Klingbeil said. "You cannot simply return to normality."
“I find the signal sent by receiving the Russian finance minister here quite troubling," Klingbeil told reporters in Asheville. "I would have wanted greater clarity from the American side that he should not be received here as a normal guest."
Officials from European countries told Reuters that European ministers and central bankers opposed appearing in the normal "family photo" of participants. It was then decided to take the photograph without Siluanov's involvement.
At a meeting of G20 finance ministers in 2022 that Siluanov attended remotely, the United States under then-President Joe Biden led a multinational group in a walkout as Russian officials spoke.
Asked about Siluanov's attendance this time, White House spokesman Kush Desai told AFP that the US administration has been working with Moscow to push for a deal that "would stop the endless bloodshed that the president has really condemned."
"The president and the administration will never shy away from talking with the folks we need to talk to, to further that," he said. "That's what we're working on here at the G20."
Russia’s Finance Ministry said Siluanov and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent held bilateral talks to discuss Russia-US cooperation on financial issues and interaction within the framework of the G20.
A US official told AFP that the Treasury chief advocated for Trump's peace plan for Ukraine during the face-to-face meeting.
Plastics remanufacturing is the industry everyone wishes they’d gotten into earlier, with McKinsey seeing as much as $75 billion in economic opportunity by 2035 for technologies capable of putting the world’s plastic waste back to work. And Denovia has just taken its biggest step toward capturing a piece of that market, signing a strategic framework with a major international polyester producer that could eventually take its technology into billions of pounds of annual processing capacity.
The agreement starts with a planned commercial facility capable of processing tens of millions of pounds of material every year. Following technical and commercial validation, that will expand into multiple facilities handling billions of pounds of waste annually. At the one billion pound mark alone, Denovia would be handling roughly 454,000 tonnes of plastic, enough to fill around 18,000 semi trucks. Lined up bumper to bumper, that convoy would stretch nearly 240 miles, almost the entire length of the Grand Canyon.
That is a significant jump in scale for Denovia, which has developed a molecular recycling technology capable of breaking difficult polyester waste back down into the chemical building blocks needed to manufacture new material.
The real prize is in the waste conventional recycling finds difficult to handle. The partnership is targeting post industrial polyester, discarded textiles, contaminated and mixed polyester streams, automotive materials and other difficult PET based waste.
The scale of that problem is enormous. More than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced globally every year, while only a fraction makes its way back into usable material. And getting rid of the rest comes with an enormous price tag. The global cost of collecting and disposing of plastic is projected to reach $140 billion a year by 2040, while discarded textiles alone have been estimated to cost the U.S. roughly $700 million a year in landfill fees.
For manufacturers generating millions of pounds of polyester waste, disposal is a recurring cost before another dollar is spent replacing that material with new supply. Denovia is targeting both sides of that equation, taking material companies already pay to get rid of and breaking it back down into valuable chemical building blocks that can be sold or returned to manufacturing.
That turns an expensive waste stream into both a savings opportunity and a source of revenue, clearing Denovia’s path to monetizing billions of pounds of material that currently represents a cost to the companies producing it.
The World Has Too Much Plastic and Not Enough Recycled Plastic
The world is drowning in plastic waste, but manufacturers are facing the opposite problem: They can’t get enough high quality recycled plastic to meet growing demand.
That sounds almost impossible when more than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced every year and mountains of discarded material are already sitting in landfills, waste facilities and the environment.
But having an abundance of plastic waste does not mean having an abundance of usable recycled material. Most of that waste cannot simply be fed back into manufacturing, particularly when it is contaminated, mixed with other materials or has already deteriorated through previous recycling.
That leaves manufacturers chasing a much smaller pool of recycled material that is clean enough and high quality enough to replace virgin petrochemical inputs. And that pool could become dramatically undersupplied.
McKinsey estimates that demand for high quality recycled plastics could outstrip supply by as much as 50% to 60% by 2035.
That is where Denovia's up to 99.5%purity result becomes particularly relevant. Its technology is designed to take precisely the difficult material piling up at one end of the plastics economy and break it back down into chemical building blocks clean enough to return to manufacturing at the other.
The world does not need more plastic. It needs a way to recover the enormous amount it already has at a quality manufacturers can actually use.
Denovia's Shortcut to Global Industrial Scale
The new industrial agreement gives Denovia access to something that would take years and enormous amounts of capital to build independently: the recycling and manufacturing infrastructure of a major international polyester producer.
Rather than constructing an entirely new processing network facility by facility, Denovia could deploy its technology alongside operations that already handle and manufacture polyester, starting with a commercial facility expected to process tens of millions of pounds of material annually.
Successful technical and commercial validation would open the door to an even bigger rollout. The deal calls for a repeatable commercial model across multiple facilities, with eventual annual processing capacity measured in billions of pounds.
Polyester manufacturers are already sitting on a potentially valuable source of their own raw materials.
BCG estimates that the textile industry discards around 120 million metric tonnes of material every year, taking roughly $150 billion in raw material value with it. Recovering just a quarter of that waste could offset the combined annual material purchases of the world’s 30 largest fashion companies. Denovia’s new agreement goes directly after that lost value. The company plans to take post industrial polyester, textile waste, contaminated material and other difficult polyester streams and break them back down into the chemical building blocks manufacturers need to make new material.
Instead of paying to dispose of those materials and then buying new raw materials to replace them, manufacturers could recover part of that value inside their own production chain.
For Denovia, the money is in deploying the technology that makes that recovery possible. Its licensing model allows the company to earn from processing infrastructure operated by others, which becomes far more significant if the new agreement progresses from tens of millions of pounds at the first commercial facility to multiple facilities processing billions of pounds annually.
From Proven Chemistry to Commercial Production
Denovia has spent the past two years moving its technology out of the laboratory and into larger real world applications. In January 2025, the company installed its PL-1000 machine at Tymac's facility in the Port of Vancouver, where the system was designed to process plastic waste offloaded from maritime vessels as well as polyester textiles supplied through Goodwill.
The process breaks polyester back down into its original chemical building blocks, including terephthalic acid, which can then be purified for reuse in manufacturing.
The August agreement moves Denovia directly into industrial commercialization. Denovia and a major international polyester producer will evaluate the technology within the partner's existing polyester recycling and manufacturing operations, targeting a first commercial facility with annual processing capacity in the tens of millions of pounds.
Successful validation for Denovia from the first commercial facility then turns into a repeatable model that can be deployed across multiple sites, pushing potential annual processing capacity from tens of millions of pounds into the billions.
It all combines Denovia's molecular recycling technology with an international producer's existing manufacturing operations, giving the company an industrial platform for a much larger rollout.
The next milestone is industrial performance. Denovia does not need to own the factories to make money from the billions of pounds moving through them. Its licensing model puts the technology inside industrial infrastructure built and operated by its partners, giving Denovia a share of the economics without requiring the company to finance an equally massive global buildout of its own.
Beyond Plastic Bottles That versatility becomes more attractive by the day, as the world's plastic problem gets dramatically worse. Pew estimates 130 million tonnes of plastic already enters the environment every year, and without major intervention that will more than double to 280 million tonnes by 2040. The health bill is potentially even more staggering: research cited by Pew puts the annual cost of health effects from plastic chemicals alone as high as $1.5 trillion globally.
The money required to solve it will be enormous, but so is the commercial opportunity for companies that can turn that waste back into something manufacturers will pay for.
McKinsey already sees $50 billion to $75 billion in economic opportunity in plastics recycling by 2035, while manufacturers are already facing a looming shortage of the high quality recycled material they increasingly need. That opportunity is already attracting some of the biggest names in the U.S. chemicals and waste industries.
Eastman Chemical (NYSE: EMN) is perhaps the closest large-cap comparison to Denovia's molecular-recycling approach. Eastman operates a commercial-scale methanolysis facility in Kingsport, Tennessee, capable of processing more than 250 million pounds of plastic waste annually. The technology breaks difficult polyester waste down to its molecular building blocks, which can then be used to manufacture new materials with virgin-quality performance. Eastman says revenue from its circular platform doubled during the first half of 2026 as it continues to scale the business.
Dow (NYSE: DOW) is pursuing plastics circularity through both mechanical and advanced recycling. The chemicals giant has invested in recycling infrastructure and partnerships designed to convert difficult plastic waste into feedstocks that can be used to manufacture new plastics. Its advanced-recycling strategy includes technologies that break waste plastics into raw materials suitable for high-value applications, while its acquisition of Circulus expanded Dow's presence in post-consumer recycled resins.
LyondellBasell (NYSE: LYB) is also betting heavily on a future in which plastic waste becomes industrial feedstock. The company is developing its proprietary MoReTec advanced-recycling technology, designed to convert mixed plastic waste into raw materials for new polymers, alongside mechanical recycling operations. LYB has set an ambition to produce and market at least 2 million metric tons of recycled and renewable-based polymers annually by 2030.
Republic Services (NYSE: RSG) approaches the opportunity from the other end of the value chain. One of America's largest waste-management companies, Republic is building dedicated Polymer Centers that sort and process discarded plastics before supplying recycled material back to manufacturers. The company processes roughly 5 million tons of material annually across 74 recycling facilities, illustrating how valuable the infrastructure for recovering plastic feedstock itself is becoming.
Together, these companies show that plastics recycling is evolving from an environmental obligation into an increasingly important industrial market.
Denovia is no longer trying to prove this with a few grams of plastic in a laboratory. It has put equipment into the Port of Vancouver, processed difficult textile waste, moved into larger systems and now signed a framework with an international polyester producer for its first commercial facility and a potential rollout measured in billions of pounds. Denovia began with a chemistry problem: how to turn virtually permanent waste back into something valuable. It now has an industrial partner, a pathway to billions of pounds of processing capacity and a $75 billion recycling market opening up in front of it. That is a very different company from the one that started by proving it could break down a plastic bottle in minutes. By. Tom Kool
Tanzania has transformed its mining sector through tougher local ownership and state participation rules, while still attracting roughly $3.3 billion in private investment over four years.
Mining now contributes more than 10% of GDP, with booming gold exports and major nickel, graphite, niobium and mineral-sands projects expanding the industry.
The Kabanga nickel project could become a major test of Tanzania’s model, combining foreign capital with domestic processing, jobs and greater local capture of mineral wealth.
In 1967, a Maasai herder called Jumanne Mhero Ngoma stumbled across a clump of unusual violet crystals in the Mereli Hills near the Tanzanian city of Arusha. For his discovery, Ngoma was awarded 50,000 shillings – about $22 in today’s money. However, the rights to sell the mineral were awarded to Henry B. Platt, vice president of the American jeweller Tiffany and Co and the great-grandson of its founder, Louis Comfort Tiffany. Platt named the stone ‘Tanzanite’ and boasted in a marketing campaign that the jewel could only be found in two places: Tanzania and Tiffany’s.
Between 1967 and 1971, an estimated 2 million carats of Tanzanite were mined in Tanzania, sold almost exclusively by Tiffany’s. Today those stones could be worth up to $1.2 billion.
The story of Tanzania’s mineral wealth being siphoned off by external agents is not unique in Africa. What is interesting is how the country is rebalancing the odds in favor of ordinary Tanzanians.
Over the past two decades, Tanzania's mining industry has undergone not only rapid growth but major diversification. In the mid-2000s, minerals overtook tourism as Tanzania’s leading source of foreign currency. Since 2021, mining-related tax and royalty revenue has more than doubled. Gold exports grew by 38.2% last year to a record $4.7 billion, and mining’s overall contribution to GDP passed 10% for the first time. Beyond graphite and gold, mineral sands mining is now underway at Fungoni-Kigamboni and Tajiri, with a new processing plant under construction in Tanga. Additionally, a government-approved niobium project is underway at Panda Hill, expected to make Tanzania a top four global producer.
Since 2017, Tanzania has rewritten the rules governing mining, ensuring that both the Tanzanian people and mining companies benefit from the country’s mineral wealth. Amendments to the Mining Act granted the government a 16% non-dilutive, free-carried interest in large-scale mining licenses. Local content rules require that Tanzanian firms hold minimum equity stakes in both mining ventures and their service supply chains. President Samia Suluhu Hassan has branded this approach ‘sovereign pragmatism’, replacing dependence on aid with trade and investment. The state is now acting as a direct participant in mineral wealth, rather than a royalty collector. Investors also point to improvements in land titling and judicial efficiency as reasons Tanzania has become easier to operate in.
For a country with a history of resource nationalism, there were concerns that changes to the Mining Act would scare investors away rather than precipitate a minerals boom. However, Tanzania's careful engagement with the private sector and the global drive for critical minerals have encouraged more firms to partner with the government. Over the last four years, Tanzania’s mining sector has attracted roughly $3.3 billion in private investment.
The government’s stated ambition is to keep more of the mineral value chain within its borders. A promising test case is the Kabanga nickel project, one of the world’s largest undeveloped nickel deposits. A US government-backed consortium, Orion CMC, bolstered by Abu Dhabi's L'imad Holding, is nearing a final decision to develop a local refinery to produce battery-grade nickel for use in electric-vehicle batteries and other modern technologies.
The syndicate is negotiating a $500-600 million minority stake in Kabanga as Washington attempts to reduce reliance on China for critical minerals. The deal’s success would prove Tanzania's ability to simultaneously encourage international private-sector investment while ensuring that more value is captured for Tanzania's people through jobs and additional tax revenue.
Despite the mining sector’s overall strong momentum, two Western-linked graphite projects have faced some recent challenges. Following a decade of setbacks, Nachu, which had once been promised a binding offtake agreement with Tesla, was folded into a Nasdaq-listed company whose core business was freeze-dried sweets. Mahenge, which sits on the world’s second-largest graphite reserve and has an established and reputable international syndicate behind it, has repeatedly had its investment decision pushed back, most recently to November 2026. However, the delays facing Nachu and Mahenge are common among fast-growing mining jurisdictions. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Tanzania’s mining industry won’t be either.
None of this diminishes what Tanzania has achieved. A country whose mining industry was, until recently, best known for a gemstone it barely profited from is now setting its own terms with the world’s largest mining and battery players and is still attracting investment. This is the outcome of a government willing to make bold regulatory choices while planning for the long term. Under President Samia’s stewardship, that consistency has paired with savvy outward engagement, sampling Chinese, US, and Gulf capital simultaneously rather than betting on a single partner. This diversification protects Tanzania from being at the mercy of any one market or power.
The unresolved question is not whether Tanzania’s model works, but how fast Western financing structures can adapt to match it. If Kabanga’s final investment decision lands on schedule, it will be concrete proof that the country has built something durable; not just a mining boom, but a regulatory template for other resource-rich nations to learn from.
Romania's solar installations jumped 45 percent in 2025 while the rest of Europe barely grew, thanks to early investment in battery storage.
Pakistan is adding rooftop solar and batteries faster than any other market on Earth as residents bypass a failing national grid.
Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Morocco, Kenya and Namibia have all overtaken the United States in their clean energy transitions.
Solar energy is going gangbusters. The world is adding photovoltaic solar panels at a blistering rate, shattering its own records year after year, buoyed by a flood of ever-cheaper solar panels out of China. “We have a plentiful and cheap source of electricity that can be built quickly, almost anywhere in the world,” NewScientist wrote in an article published late last year. “Is it fanciful to imagine that solar could one day power everything?”
But the growth of solar power is uneven around the globe, with some regions seeing a rapid transformation while others see their numbers plateauing. Interestingly, it is some of the world’s poorest countries that are now leading the solar revolution, while some of the richest and most avid champions of the clean energy transition are lagging behind.
“Europe likes to think of itself as a champion of renewable energy, the Economist wrote in an August report, when in reality, solar additions in 2025 barely topped those of 2024, and in 2026 “new deployments are set to fall in every big EU country except Italy.”
Europe’s solar slowdown is in large part thanks to the constraints of the continent’s energy grid. During peak production hours, the grid is overly congested and lacks sufficient energy storage, leading to energy wastage, negative energy prices, and even the threat of grid failure and catastrophic blackouts, such as the one that took almost all of Spain and Portugal offline in 2025. European leaders are racing to add storage capacity to the grid in order to address these mounting issues and avoid yet another energy crisis, but in the meantime, adding even more solar to the overloaded grid will only serve to intensify these issues.
But one dark horse country managed to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to energy storage development, and is therefore now emerging as a surprise solar frontrunner in 2026. “Unlike many western European countries, Romania is deploying storage relatively early in its solar build-out, rather than trying to catch up after large amounts of solar capacity have already been installed,” Antonio Arruebo, an analyst at SolarPower Europe, told the Economist. Much of this growth comes in the form of small-scale and residential solar-plus-battery systems. As a result of the steady growth of these much smaller capacity additions, Romania managed to see a 45 percent increase in solar installations in 2025, while the rest of Europe barely eked out any growth at all.
“At the start of Europe’s solar revolution, the impulse was to get panels deployed by all means. As the industry matures, countries need to strike a balance between generating capacity and storage,” the Economist writes. “Romania looks like a model.”
But Romania is not alone in this approach – nor in its success. Around the globe, some of the world’s poorest countries are seeing unprecedented gains in solar energy capacity growth thanks to solar-plus-battery systems. In recent years, emerging economies including Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Morocco, Kenya, and Namibia have all overtaken the United States – the world’s largest economy – in their clean energy transitions.
“Some countries are pulling off stunningly fast energy transitions, adding solar so rapidly, it’s become a major source of electricity over the course of years — not decades,” reports CNN. Pakistan has become the surprise poster child of this movement over the past couple of years as residents install rooftop solar and batteries faster than any other market on Earth. Pakistanis are rapidly adopting these systems to provide electricity more cheaply and reliably than the country’s beleaguered energy infrastructure.
Globally, solar power adoption is no longer a matter of climate policy – it’s going gangbusters thanks to its essential and growing contribution to energy security and simple economics. Solar is now the cheapest form of energy on Earth, while also representing the clearest pathway forward to energy autonomy and resilience, especially for smaller and growing economies that need to shield themselves from the whipsaw geopolitical climate in which they have vanishingly little leverage.
Europe has reduced its reliance on Russian fossil fuels only to become heavily dependent on China for solar panels, batteries, critical minerals and other clean-energy technologies.
Brussels now wants to rebuild domestic supply chains and diversify imports, but officials warn this will increase costs and take years to achieve.
Current efforts have made little progress, with China still supplying 98% of European solar panels and 88% of its lithium-ion battery imports in 2024.
In recent years, the European Union has replaced one critical energy and security vulnerability with another heavy dependence for its green energy ambitions.
As the EU has moved to phase out Russian energy imports and reduce the overall dependence on oil and gas, it has rolled out massive renewable energy capacity. But the clean energy transition has become dependent on another global power, which could undermine Europe’s energy security—China.
China Dependence
For its renewable energy buildout, the EU has relied on imports of solar panels, wind turbines, critical minerals, battery materials, and other key equipment from China.
Cheaper Chinese products have flooded the EU market, raising concerns about the EU’s domestic manufacturing, energy security, and national security.
Since the launch of the EU green deal, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Middle East crisis, the EU has moved to slash its oil and gas dependence. But in the process of rapidly rolling out solar, wind, and battery capacity, Europe has moved to replace the fossil fuel dependence with dependence on China for critical minerals and components of clean energy installations.
The EU is realizing this dependence on China is untenable, and has launched measures to reduce the reliance on Chinese clean energy components.
None have made a meaningful impact so far.
Europe has struggled to find the balance between fast green energy rollout to meet its ambitious climate goals and cut fossil fuel dependence, on the one hand, and too much reliance on Chinese products for the energy transition, on the other hand.
The Cost of Reducing Reliance on China
The move away from Chinese dependence will cost the EU, a lot.
Building domestic capacity will reduce the reliance on China, but it will come with high costs in the short term, according to EU Climate Action Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra.
The EU must act now to reduce the outsized dependence on China, Hoekstra told Euronews in an interview this week.
Europe should have acted five or ten years ago, and the longer it delays decisive action, the higher the costs will be in the long term, according to the Commissioner.
“But it will be much cheaper and much more to our advantage to do it now than be wishy washy and wait another five to 10 years,” Hoekstra told Euronews.
The high dependence on China is a “dangerous and uncomfortable” vulnerability for both Europe’s climate ambitions and economic security, the Commissioner added.
Chinese parts and equipment are also a vulnerability for Europe’s security of critical infrastructure, Hoekstra said.
Europe’s challenge right now is to build domestic capacities to reduce dependence on China, even at higher costs in the short term, according to Commissioner.
Europe’s Challenges and Struggles
But this is easier said than done.
The EU is struggling to diversify its imports, a report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) found earlier this year.
“EU action on import diversification is not producing tangible results, bottlenecks hinder domestic production, and recycling is still in its infancy,” the auditors said.
“Against this backdrop, many EU-supported projects are unlikely to succeed in time.”
“Unfortunately, we are now dangerously dependent on a handful of countries outside the EU for the supply of these materials”, said Keit Pentus-Rosimannus, the ECA Member responsible for the audit.
“It is therefore vital for the EU to up its game and reduce its vulnerability in this area.”
The EU this year launched a platform to aggregate demand of raw materials and boost diversification under its Raw Materials Mechanism to diversify supplies of critical raw materials.
The EU is looking to partner with non-EU countries such as Brazil to diversify its supply chains away from China.
Analysts warn that dependence on China, while helping cheaper and faster clean energy installations, is undermining the economic and national security of the EU.
In 2024, China accounted for 98% of European solar panels, 88% of lithium-ion battery imports, and 61% of inverter imports, according to a report by non-profit strategy center Loom from earlier this year.
Despite the EU’s efforts in recent years, policies have not led to any significant de-risking of clean technology manufacturing, said the report, co-authored by Michal Meidan from the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) and Michael Collins, a former deputy head of national security strategy at the UK Cabinet Office.
If Europe doesn’t rein in its dependence on China’s clean tech, its economies will suffer, and its AI ambitions could be undermined and risk becoming dependent on Chinese batteries, the authors said.
“The fastest, cheapest route to deploying clean energy at scale — solar panels, battery storage, grid technologies, heat pumps — currently runs overwhelmingly through China,” Loom’s Executive Director Joss Garman said.
“Europe’s response to its oil and gas dependency risks quietly consolidating another dependency: this time on Chinese clean energy technology,” Garman noted in the foreword to the report.
“One chokepoint replaced by another, no less real for being less visible on an energy bill.”
