Net-zero illusion: How West’s climate push runs on outsourced emissions

For more than a decade, Western governments have positioned themselves as leaders of the global march toward net-zero economies. Europe, the UK, and Australia continue to demand deeper emissions cuts and tougher low-carbon commitments.

Yet, as an opinion piece published by Oilprice.com argues, there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this ambition: much of the West’s emissions-heavy activity has simply been outsourced—along with the energy realities that sustain modern economies.

Nowhere is this clearer than in cement, one of the most carbon-intensive yet indispensable materials in the global economy. China dominates global cement production, followed by India, with Vietnam a distant third. Among the world’s top ten cement producers, no European country appears at all. The United States is the only Western nation on the list, ranked fourth, producing roughly 90 million tons in 2023—compared with China’s staggering 2 billion tons.

This pattern is not new. Over 30 years of outsourcing heavy industry from the West to the East has underpinned China’s economic rise and fueled growth across Asia, including India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Türkiye. More recently, as noted in an Oilprice.com discussion of Reuters columnist Gavin Maguire’s work, this trend has begun extending into Africa. As a result, a widening divide has emerged between countries that consume industrial goods and those that must produce them—along with the hydrocarbons required to do so.

In 2024, global spending on energy transition technologies reached $2.4 trillion, covering grids, renewables, electric vehicles, batteries, and efficiency. China alone accounted for 49% of that total, with most of the remainder coming from wealthy Western economies. These are the countries that can afford to invest heavily in moving away from oil, gas, and coal. Yet China and other heavy-industry-dependent economies are not abandoning hydrocarbons. On the contrary, they remain structurally reliant on them.

Europe’s emissions reductions, the piece notes, rest on two often-overlooked realities. First, a large share of heavy-industry emissions has been exported abroad. Second, carbon pricing has made much of Europe’s own heavy industry globally uncompetitive, shrinking output rather than transforming it. The result is lower domestic emissions—but not necessarily lower global ones.

A third factor is even more consequential. The energy transition itself depends on vast quantities of cement, steel, and other materials produced using cheap, coal-fired energy. Wind turbines require massive concrete foundations and large volumes of steel. Solar farms, batteries, and power grids rely on similarly carbon-intensive supply chains. In this sense, the transition is actively fueling demand in hydrocarbon-dependent economies across Asia, Africa, and South America.

This helps explain why global coal demand continues to hit records. Despite unprecedented net-zero investment, coal consumption reached an estimated 8.8 billion tons in 2024 and is projected by the International Energy Agency to rise further in 2025. Additional demand is coming from rapid data center construction, driven by AI and Big Tech—sectors that now anchor Western economic growth but remain deeply dependent on energy-intensive materials and round-the-clock power, often supplied by hydrocarbons.

As the piece concludes, a stark divide is emerging between economies betting on AI and services and those anchored in basic material production. Yet beneath the surface, it is the latter that power the former. The uncomfortable truth is that the energy transition, much like every industrial revolution before it, still depends on cheap, abundant energy—even in a supposedly post-industrial, net-zero world.

By Sabina Mammadli