While there has been high profile conflict between the United States and China over energy issues, quiet cooperation does exist, in the form of decades of joint work on energy efficiency standards and through a new, but under-funded, US-China Clean Energy Research Center.

2009 ended with an unproductive US-China standoff at the Copenhagen Climate Summit and high-level tensions have developed over China's rapidly scaled-up production and global sales of renewable energy technology - specifically solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries for the burgeoning electric vehicle markets - and China's dominance in the production of rare earth elements for advanced electronics.

However, China's incredible acceleration of production and sales of clean energy technology is the result of necessity. China has become the world's largest energy consumer, and while its coal resources are vast, 70 percent of China's energy and 80 percent of its electricity come from coal, no other nation pays as high an environmental cost for energy than China, which has no other path to continued growth and energy security than through renewable energy efficiency. To meet the rising demand, China invested more than $50 billion in clean energy in 2009, twice as much as the US.