Senate candiate Graham Platner’s energy plan is really just surrender to China

The radical running to become Maine’s next Democratic senator has a plan for energy security. It’s called “surrender to China.”

Graham Platner — the progressive oyster farmer and Marine veteran who had a literal Nazi tattoo, is endorsed by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Polls say he is poised to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins and he recently explained his approach to America’s most dangerous geopolitical rival.

“Our position towards China should be one of cooperation instead of one of opposition,” he said, calling a hawkish posture toward Beijing “absurd.”

His rationale? We must join forces to address climate change. If we just work together with China on clean energy, the logic goes, we can make fossil fuels obsolete and usher in an era of peace, prosperity, and renewable power.

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It’s a farcical argument for an abundance of reasons. First, China is the worst polluter in the world and doesn’t care one iota about climate change. Second, energy wars of the future will focus on the components for clean energy technology, not on fossil fuels. And third, the answer to climate change is more American energy production and innovation, not less.

Let’s take these in turn.

Wanting to ally with China on climate policy is equivalent to working with Iran on nuclear policy or relying on the Amish to develop AI. It literally doesn’t make sense.

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China presents itself as a global clean energy leader while quietly running the dirtiest major economy on earth. China still generates the majority of its electricity from coal and emits more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined. Its factories operate under environmental standards that would be flatly illegal in the United States, and Chinese-dominated supply chains across Southeast Asia follow the same playbook.

China may produce more solar panels than any other country, but it does so by being willing to poison its workers, its water and its neighbors to undercut everyone else on price.

That being said, I’m sure China would be happy to make would-be-Sen. Platner a poster child for its greenwashing. Communist countries are always looking for another Walter Duranty. (Duranty, a New York Times reporter, infamously won a Pulitzer Prize for stories covering up how the Soviet Union murdered millions of Ukrainians in what is called the Holodomor.)

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As for future energy wars, environmental radicals seem to envision gathering around the solar battery-powered, zero emissions, electric campfire, singing “Kumbaya” with the commies once there is no need to worry about oil. The progressive darling Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., recently riffed on this point, arguing that the energy crisis would be avoided if we just “invest[ed] in solar and wind and geothermal and battery storage and electric vehicles.” 

It all sounds idyllic … that is, until one remembers that China holds the keys to the global supply of wind farms, rooftop solar panels, electric vehicles and other energy innovations with its stranglehold on critical minerals.

Critical minerals that make clean energy possible. But according to the International Energy Agency, for 19 out of 20 important strategic minerals, China is the leading refiner, with an average market share of 70%. China controls 80% or more of the global battery supply chain’s midstream and downstream segments, with near-monopoly shares of 95% or above in some categories. Lithium, cobalt, graphite, rare earth elements — the building blocks of the very clean tech Khanna praises — pass through Chinese refineries on their way to the rest of the world.

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All the more reason to work closely with China, right? Wrong. China has already started weaponizing that dominance. In 2025, Beijing imposed sweeping export controls on lithium-ion battery supply chains covering battery cells, cathode materials, and production equipment. Earlier this year, Chinese export controls on rare earth elements cut U.S. yttrium imports by approximately 95%, driving prices to roughly 69 times their pre-control levels.

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All of this is no excuse for the United States to give up on clean energy. The oil and gas crisis at the Strait of Hormuz only emphasizes our need to diversify our energy resources. Rather, it’s a sign that we need to beat China at their own game, ramping up domestic critical mineral and clean energy production, just as the Trump administration has already been doing, and legislation like the DOMINANCE Act seeks to support. 

Which brings us to our last point. The environment does best not when we work more with monopolistic, high-polluting China, but when America does more. The American shale revolution — which environmentalists still rail against — cut U.S. emissions to a 25-year low during Trump’s first term. AI-driven data centers are poised to spark the largest private clean energy buildout in American history, all driven by market forces. And U.S. manufacturing is nearly four times more emissions efficient than China’s.

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Growth, innovation and smart environmental regulations to curb the worst abuses have done more to cut carbon emissions than any international agreement or Chinese production facility. We don’t need China to tackle climate change. We need an America First environmentalism.

Graham Platner doesn’t want to be a China hawk, and that’s his right. But when a wannabe senator thinks the path to peace is cooperating with an adversarial country that pollutes with abandon and controls the clean energy supply, that’s worse than stupid. It’s dangerous.