For more than a decade, the United States has been guided by a story about energy that presents wind power as one of the few responsible paths forward. The idea has been repeated so often that it eventually stopped sounding like a policy proposal and began to sound like a moral duty.

Wind energy was described as the answer to climate change, the way to rebuild American manufacturing, and even a strategy to strengthen national security. Once that view became popular in national politics, questioning it was treated as a refusal to accept science rather than an effort to understand the actual costs and tradeoffs.

The problem is that this story never came from a neutral scientific study. It came from a mix of international institutions, corporate lobbying efforts, and foreign governments that realized they could benefit from it. China benefited more than anyone else. What American leaders described as a clean-energy transition became, in practice, a significant transfer of industrial power to a competing nation that understood the economic opportunities far earlier than the United States did.

China's rise in the renewable-energy market was a direct result of Western governments focusing more on climate politics than on common sense. While American and European leaders focused on emissions pledges and public messaging, China built the factories and rare-earth mining operations needed to dominate the global wind-turbine market.

Today, Chinese companies control more than 70 percent of the world's wind-turbine supply chain and more than 80 percent of the rare-earth materials needed for turbine generators and other green-energy technologies. That dominance was

© Townhall