content: China is currently the world leader in solar. They have ~290GWh of solar installed as of today and that is increasing rapidly. A large part of this is certainly about the environment. Their cities with their unbreatheable air are a stark reminder of what happens when you have insufficient environmental concern in your national policy. At the same time this is also largely driven by the fact that the US economy is largely supported by the petrodollar.  The petrodollar only has value when fossil fuels are in large usage. This is, for instance, why the US is doing things like supporting an oil pipeline to transport oil sands that are so expensive to mine that they were recently being sold at a loss. And why our oil producing lapdogs like Saudi Arabia are not really upset that we're trying to tank the price of oil. Oil needs to stay below the price of renewables, or the petro dollar will collapse in on itself. Each country that removes their dependence on fossil fuels indirectly weakens the US economy in that our money might actually begin to need to stand on its own merit. Right now we don't have to worry about that. Thanks to some prescient deals in the 70s the vast majority of oil is still pegged to the dollar, and these countries reinvest their surplus oil revenue into US securities. So imagine what happens if we print a trillion dollars. Naturally there would be inflation. But when there's inflation that means other countries need to acquire more USD for the same amount of oil. The oil producing countries then end up reinvesting what's left over of that US currency into US securities. The net result? When we have inflation USD is more rapidly taken out of the economy and, like magic, that inflation starts to reverse. This is a large part of the reason why the US can arbitrarily "print money" (not how money is made... but that's another topic) with 0 immediate economic consequences.