Beijing’s Useful Idiots: Germany and California
Germany and the ‘People’s Republic of California’ are China’s ‘useful idiots’. The two self-appointed climate leaders have made power dear, hobbled their own industries and handed the supply chains to Beijing, says Tilak Doshi.
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Tilak Doshi
Date: 8 October 2026
Satire has become redundant. The Nation, an old abolitionist publication founded in 1865 in de US and now proudly the flagship of the Left, has just anointed Germany and California an “environmental superpower”. The author, Mark Hertsgaard, is the magazine’s Environment Correspondent and also Executive Director of Covering Climate Now, a foundation-funded media campaign that the Nation itself co-founded. His two showpiece claims are an interview that Gavin Newsom gave to Covering Climate Now and a poll-based crusade, the 89% Project, run by, naturally, Covering Climate Now and endorsed, in the AP story the piece cites, by an oat-milk company. A perfectly closed loop, which is more than can be said for the energy systems it celebrates.
Strip away the self-congratulation and the case is this. The world’s third- and fourth-largest economies have become a climate vanguard. Berlin has pledged, for the first time, to end fossil fuel use by 2045. It is not clear whether this is on a ‘Net Zero’ basis or if it actually means no fossil fuel use at all. Mr Newsom says California has run on 100% clean electricity on nine days out of 10 this year. What the Nation never asks is whom this performance serves.
Germany and California, it seems, are perfect complements to China. Beijing’s road to global supremacy in manufacturing and technology, artificial intelligence included, runs through cheap, dependable power and control of the supply chains. The two self-appointed climate leaders have made power dear, hobbled their own industries and handed the supply chains to Beijing. Lenin is said to have called such people useful idiots. Patricia Adams put the same point to Western greens in the Financial Post, and at greater length in her Global Warming Policy Foundation paper the Road from Paris. The pattern was already plain when Beijing was being cast as climate saviour: sign the green communiqué, collect the praise, keep building coal power plants as if there is no tomorrow.
In terms of realpolitik, in contrast to public posturing, China has little time for decarbonisation’s urgency. In this it is not alone. The US under Trump, India and Russia — representing over 40% of global emissions — reject the climate crisis narrative. These countries are intent on prioritising economic growth over climate alarmism and debilitating Net Zero policies. They share China’s pragmatism: aspirations for economic progress trumps unproven predictions of climate catastrophe. The first order imperative of Russia, China, India and their counterparts in the developing countries are regime and national security, dependent ultimately on improving the general welfare of their citizens.
A superpower that imports its energy
Germany has the highest household electricity prices in the EU, €0.38 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in the first half of 2025. A Verivox comparison for the second quarter of 2026 put the German household tariff at €0.36, more than five times the €0.07 paid in China. California’s residential price reached US$0.35 in April, against a national average of US$0.18 per kWh. Industrial users tell the same story. A steel mill in Germany can pay an order of magnitude more for power than a smelter in the Persian Gulf. More than 60% of the German household bill is taxes, levies and network charges – the cost of integrating weather-dependent generation and of paying for backup that must stand idle.
Germany sits on shale gas that its federal geological institute puts at 320 to 2,030 billion cubic metres of technically recoverable resource, far exceeding its conventional reserves, yet a 2016 ban keeps the frackers out while Berlin imported some 684 terawatt-hours of gas in 2025. That import dependence is a policy choice, and a bad one. Germany’s answer to the 2022 gas shock, after it sanctioned Russian gas imports to itself, was to lean harder on lignite while its last nuclear plants closed on schedule and were demolished with fanfare. Dunkelflaute, the cold, still, dark spells northern Europe undergoes, cannot be bridged by batteries at any price an economy could bear. Brussels, whose energy policy takes its cues from Berlin, is no better. Norway, outside the EU, ignores Brussels: it brought the Johan Castberg field onstream last year and its gas already covers about 30% of EU consumption. The Norwegians are not saving the planet; they are selling Germans heat.
California, once a great oil state, now sources 61% of its crude from abroad, led by Brazil and Iraq. The closure of Phillips 66’s Los Angeles refinery and Valero’s Benicia plant has stripped the state of 17% of its refining capacity and gasoline imports in 2025 exceeded the total for any year since at least 2004. Meanwhile more than a quarter of its electricity arrives down the wires from other states. None of this is an accident of geology. The state’s oil industry association says new drilling permits are down 96%; Sacramento shuts the wells, shuts the refineries and then buys the barrels from Baghdad.
When I worked in a major American oil company headquartered in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, there was an “all-hands” meeting on political risk for the corporate assets from Venezuela to Indonesia. A senior vice-president told the room not to forget the political risks of the “People’s Republic of California”. I never forgot it. The state is an energy island by choice, barely tied into the continental crude network, and it has spent two decades making its own hydrocarbons inaccessible.
Mr Newsom, expected to run for president in 2028, has every incentive to dress up the numbers and his “100%” boast deserves scrutiny. His office’s earlier version of the claim defined the feat as clean power “for at least some part of the day”, which in 2025 meant an average of seven hours daily, the equivalent of about 52 full days or nearly 30% of the year to that point. Nine days out of 10; 30% of the hours. Only a fully ordained member of the climate priesthood could present such statistics as a triumph and only a credulous press corps could print it. The US Department of Energy has put the point without ornament: about 15% of California’s primary energy comes from renewables and more than 75% from oil and natural gas. The California Policy Center has called the Governor’s clean-energy claims “transparently false”. He also says the “markets are moving his way” because the Iran war has made gasoline and diesel dearer. A state that imports most of its crude oil is, to put it kindly, an odd champion of that particular claim.
No wonder Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, a former Hamburg environment senator, told Apollo News this week that Germany’s Energiewende is “not a transition, but a retreat”. German chemical turnover is down about 22% from its 2022 peak. The DIHK energy-transition barometer finds industrial firms postponing core investment and shifting production abroad. Berlin’s answer is another subsidy – an admission that the Energiewende price is incompatible with manufacturing.
Lenin’s idiots, Beijing’s beneficiaries
Now to the beneficiary. The IEA reports that China’s share of every stage of solar panel manufacturing exceeds 80%, and that coal supplies more than 60% of the electricity used to make the world’s solar panels. Western virtue is manufactured in Chinese factories fired by Chinese coal. Beijing commissioned 78 gigawatts of new coal power in 2025, the most in a decade, with proposals for a further 161 gigawatts at a record. BloombergNEF finds mainland China holding over 70% of global capacity in every major clean-tech segment it tracks and China has shipped on the order of a trillion dollars of batteries, solar equipment, electric vehicles and wind components since 2018. The panel on a German roof or the Baidu EV in the streets of Los Angeles is the clean end of a dirty chain.
China also processes some 90% of the world’s rare earth magnets and when it throttled exports in 2025 Germany’s auto lobby warned that car production could be halted. Professor Vahrenholt’s “retreat” has a human face: Volkswagen now plans to cut 50,000 German jobs by 2030, its profit at the lowest since 2016, as it struggles against Chinese competitors. Nor is the retreat confined to Wolfsburg. Last December the European Commission, bowing to the carmakers, dropped its hard 2035 cut-off for new combustion-engine cars – a tacit admission that an industry cannot be legislated into a technology that China has already cornered.
Then comes the prize. Artificial Intelligence is, at bottom, a contest over electrons. China already generates more than twice the electricity of the United States, and BloombergNEF expects it to add more than six times as much generating capacity over the next five years. Where do you suppose the data-centre builders will go: to places that treat cheap, dependable power as a strategic asset, or to the two climate champions that treat it as a moral failing? Vahrenholt’s complaint is precisely that Germany shut its reactors while China and America race for AI leadership.
This article was republished from Tilak Doshi’s Substack and was first published on the Daily Sceptic on 5 October 2026.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
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