As many western countries take the slow road through the energy transition, Asia is aggressively “rewiring the global economy,” says business leader and sustainable development advocate Paul Polman.

Fresh from recent trips to Hong Kong and Mumbai, the former Unilever CEO reports a seismic difference between how the West is managing its transition off fossil fuels and the path pursued by many Asian countries.

No one is wasting time debating the rationale for the energy transition in Asia, Polman writes in a recent LinkedIn post. Among policymakers, industrialists, and investors, the conversation is about grid connections, permitting, human capital, and financing structures, “the ordinary work of building a system that is already under way.”

Where the European Union and the United States continue to frame sustainability as “a cost to be managed,” Asia is seizing it “as a generational opportunity” to build an entirely new industrial strategy, he says. This divergence “is showing up in hard numbers: trillions of dollars of capital deployed, factories built, grids expanded, and supply chains secured,” all supported by regulators and capital markets.

Asia: Clean Juggernaut

Installing “roughly one gigawatt of clean power every day” in 2024, and becoming the first country to achieve one terawatt of installed solar capacity in May 2025, China is Exhibit A in Polman’s analysis. 

Energy-intensive industries like steel, chemicals, and artificial intelligence will “cluster” where they can get power most cheaply, and the West is shaping up to be the loser in this realignment. 

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China, on the other hand, is already winning, with its clean energy sectors contributing roughly US$2.1 trillion to its GDP last year, or around 11% of its economy.

India is another clean energy powerhouse, Polman writes. Through January of this fiscal year, three-quarters of the country’s new electricity capacity came from renewables.

This trajectory will continue, according to the latest projections from the country’s Central Electricity Authority (CEA). The CEA estimates that India’s total non-fossil fuel capacity will reach 786 gigawatts (GW) by 2035-36, ⁠with solar energy quadrupling to reach 65% of the clean power mix, while pumped storage hydro catapults 13-fold to 94 GW, reports Reuters. Battery storage capacity will expand over the same period from 0.27 GW to 80 GW, while large hydro capacity rises by 50% to 77 GW. Nuclear capacity is expected to triple to 22 GW.

A recent “thought experiment” by Ember gives further reason to anticipate India’s ascension into the ranks of a global clean energy superpower. The London-based energy think tank’s analysis shows how solar and battery storage can meet 90% of the country’s 2024 electricity demand at a competitive cost, using but a fraction of its enormous solar potential.

The West in Retrograde

As Asia advances, many countries in the West have their foot on the brake, or have reversed direction, Polman writes. The United States scaled back or cancelled 51 large clean energy projects in 2025, “wiping out $28.8 billion in planned investment and an estimated 30,000 projected jobs.”

Now, northeastern states are “rethinking” climate goals, driven in large part by the Donald Trump administration’s attachment to fossil fuels, the New York Times reports.

In Germany, meanwhile, renewable energy advocates are “decrying” proposed shifts in federal energy policy, including plans to “eliminate support for small rooftop solar panels below a capacity of 25 kilowatts,” reports Clean Energy Wire. Such a move would constitute the “largest attack on our industry in 15 years,” said Carsten  Körnig, head of the German Solar Association. Elimination of a regulation that mandates 65% minimum renewable energy share on new heating systems is also being proposed.

France is likewise throttling down on its shift to clean energy. RTE, the country’s public operator of high-voltage power lines, lowered its electricity consumption target in its updated scenarios for 2035, citing low demand amid a slow rollout of electrification projects.

Wind Europe is arguing for a €1.6-trillion reason why Europe should be proceeding post-haste into a renewable energy economy.

Western countries now face a critical choice, writes Polman. They can “continue to frame sustainability as a regulatory burden and a fiscal trade-off,” or they can recognize it as the footing for industrial renewal.