Today marks the 54^th annual Earth Day—a holiday started in 1970 to mobilize people around the world to protect our environment. We hear A LOT about climate change these days, but really, how are we doing protecting our earth after over 50 years of Earth Days?

On the one hand, the United States has worked hard to become a world leader in lowering emissions and protecting our environment:

• Since 1970, combined emissions of key pollutants have dropped by 78% in the U.S.
• In 2022 alone, the shift to natural gas provided an emissions reduction equivalent to 156 coal-fired power plants operating for a year
• Since 2005, natural gas used for power generation has cut nearly double the emissions that renewable sources like wind and solar have.

Meanwhile, China has also been a leader…in the opposite direction:

• China has had the largest increases in emissions, surpassing any other countries in the world by far
• China supplies 60% of the minerals needed for wind and solar energy and electric vehicles and processes 85% of them—and they create “cancer villages” from polluted mine waste and use slave labor to do so
• China is responsible for 60% of the world’s coal use and two-thirds of the new coal plants that were built in 2023.

Americans do have a good reason to celebrate on Earth Day. We’ve been doing the work to clean our environment for decades and the results show. But, bad actors like China are dragging us backward. The green-at-all-costs crowd needs to focus its agenda where it’s needed—on China—rather than by crushing American energy producers and driving up prices for families and businesses.

For more information about the truth behind the “green” agenda, check out TEA’s Truth about Renewables page.