Despite the mass extinction event known as the second Trump administration, cleantech lives. Renewable energy deployment is breaking records, even in the US, and more than one-in-four of every new passenger vehicle sold worldwide now sports a socket. This reflects two things. First, neither President Donald Trump nor the US, powerful as they are, can negate basic scientific and economic forces. Second, Trump’s own actions have strengthened those forces.

The result is not merely that cleantech displays a cockroach-like will to live. It is also killing off the assumptions underlying projections of future fossil fuel demand growth in the countries that matter most for that, emerging markets.

Trump reinforced a broader vibe shift away from climate action as inflation, war and data centers reoriented energy narratives. Catching up with a cleantech venture fund founder at the recent New York Climate Week, they remarked how little they had heard the word “climate,” with buzzwords like “resilience” and “security” far more prominent.

To be clear, proliferating calls for energy “pragmatism” that ignore mounting deferred climate costs are, at best, myopic. Cleantech has, thankfully, bucked the new vibes. Blackstone Inc. just raised an $8.7 billion energy transition fund, 55% larger than the prior one. Globally, cleantech investment has retreated from its record in 2025, which reflected pulled-forward demand ahead of subsidies expiring anyway, but remains strong. It has been remarkably stable in the US.

Even in cleantech venture capital, where fundraising has struggled so far this year, deal volume has risen both in the US and globally, according to PitchBook, a data provider.

Deployment is also resilient. Solar and wind accounted for 85% of the world’s net new electricity generation capacity in 2025 and, in a remarkable milestone, they will surpass the world’s installed base of fossil-fuel power plants this year, according to BloombergNEF. US solar, wind and battery deployments, meanwhile, are projected to hit a record this year and then break that record next year. Plus, the US retreat on electric vehicles is an anomaly, not a template for the rest of the world.

The primary reason for all this concerns cost: “Unsubsidized renewable energy remains the most cost competitive form of new-build generation,” according to Lazard’s latest benchmarking analysis. Gas turbines have the advantage of being dispatchable — that is, not dependent on weather or time of day — but they are bottlenecked, driving up costs and delivery schedules. Grid storage is also amplifying the value of intermittent renewable energy — look at Texas. Batteries, spanning power, transportation and defense applications, are fast becoming a foundational technology for this century, similar to internal combustion engines in the last one.

The most profound development underway concerns the diffusion of cleantech. In a striking example, new data from Ember, a UK-based clean energy think tank, show that battery EVs now account for almost 9% of the new vehicle market in India. That is up from only 2% two years ago and, notably, puts India ahead of the US at 6%.

This odd flipping of the usual trajectory whereby new technologies saturate advanced economies and spread from there owes something to America’s peculiarly divisive climate politics and attachment to trucks. But it owes more to falling prices for cleantech, and increased economic and strategic costs for fuel-importing nations.

India has reached a level of EV penetration at income and fuel-usage levels far below where the world leader in vehicle electrification, China, did so. The dislocations of the Iran war and rising trade barriers add further impetus. It is perhaps no accident that China’s cleantech exports surged after February, hitting a record $21 billion in July, according to BloombergNEF.

The implications are profound. When it comes to future fossil fuel demand growth, emerging markets are the entire ballgame. India accounts for almost half the projected growth in global oil demand through 2035, and 40% through 2050, in the International Energy Agency’s more conservative climate-policy scenario.

Yet, cleantech’s increasing competitiveness has weakened the traditional relationship between prosperity and fossil-fuel consumption, as the IEA’s persistent underestimation of solar power has demonstrated. The recent unexpected boom in rooftop solar energy in Pakistan or, analogously, African nations leap-frogging straight to mobile telephony rather than fixed line networks show how new technology plows through old assumptions about development pathways.

Ideology also struggles with falling costs and rising performance. Green energy enthusiasts were easily branded as out-of-touch fanatics a couple of decades back, when solar power was still a novelty and EVs a joke. As cleantech rolls across multiple markets today, it is the lobbyists and politicians who insist it can’t work or, per Trump, constitutes a scam who sound like zealots.

This is, in large part, because the benefits have expanded outward from the original green premise. As I wrote here, the new ESG of economics, security and geopolitics are pushing nations to diversify away from traded fossil fuels for alternatives, not necessarily because they are zero-emissions but because they are zero-drama. That same venture investor I spoke with added, as long as cleantech opportunities keep coming, “I don’t care what they call it.”