A Test Drive Through Brazil In Donald Trump’s Worst Nightmare

BELÉM, Brazil — Grip the gear switch, twist, then silently glide into the potholed street. This fully electric, Caipirinha-colored car embodies the hope and confidence that large, developing economies like Brazil have zapped into the COP30 U.N. climate conference — and the anxieties and anger this optimism is generating in the West.

I took a test drive of the BYD Dolphin Mini, the Chinese carmaker’s most popular model in Brazil. It comes with a stripped-down dash, chunky dials and a rotating screen display. Solid, whiz-bang modernity and, at just under 120,000 Brazilian Reals (around $22,500), cheap enough to appeal to a growing market of professionals — a target demographic of the company — even in one of Brazil’s poorest regions.

Bringing all the governments of the world — bar the United States — to Brazil has shown that the doom and gloom over the cost of doing something to stop climate change is a peculiarly Western pathology. For many of the other nations gathered at the conference, whether they’re buying or selling, it’s the opportunity of the age.

Countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia and Pakistan — so long dragged backwards by structural economic problems — are finding new energy and investment, job opportunities and cheap, clean consumer products thanks to the technologies that have grown out of efforts to stop global warming. China is the biggest beneficiary. Beijing is growing its sphere of influence in developing countries like Brazil and building a market for its new tech — as well as rattling the old powers in the West and feeding U.S. President Donald Trump’s allegation that climate efforts are a stalking horse for the Chinese century.

Jobson Machedo was too busy to care about that, though. Machedo, BYD’s tattooed trade and marketing manager for northern Brazil, and I took a drive on Nov. 11, the day after the COP30 summit opened here in the Amazonian city of Belém. He was planning the festivities for the next day’s grand opening of their new showroom in the city. BYD’s current space in Belém had opened less than two years earlier, but it was already way too small. Just up the road was a giant new glass-fronted building, big enough to rival any of those of the American, Japanese and European carmakers in Belém’s moto district.

“BYD in Brazil is trying to make a party,” Machedo said. The concrete was still wet, and workers were thumping down pavers across the vast acreage of the sales lot. But the guests were coming. It was time to sell some cars.

Since opening a showroom in São Paolo in 2022, BYD, China’s biggest carmaker, has opened more than 200 across the country, selling electric and hybrid cars. In Pará, a huge state dominated by farms and rainforest, BYD plans to open four new spaces next year alone, said Machedo. In November, the company began producing cars at its first Brazilian factory — on the site of a former Ford plant.

On an average day on Machedo’s lot, two or three cars get sold. On Saturdays, when he hires a DJ and puts out food — what he calls the “BYD experience” — sales often hit double digits. BYD — marketed under the slogan “Build Your Dreams” — has become one of the top selling brands in the country in just two years.

BYD’s growth in Brazil is a sign of a rapidly shifting world. For the past 150 years or more, the world’s energy system was dominated by fossil fuels. Clean energy and electrification have given that system a competitor.

“This is a turn of events that have a deep historical [and] political meaning” said French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier, author of the recent book Towards the Ecology of War, in which he explores this new paradigm. “It means that it is possible to build power, influence, standing, security on a … ground that is not fossil fuel anymore.”

The United States is the world’s largest fossil fuel producer, which makes the growth of green energy a threat to the country’s economic power and other forms of global dominance. To make matters worse for the United States, China is by far the dominant force in the clean energy space. Trump officials have sought to mitigate this threat by dissuading other countries from pursuing clean energy.

“Climate and geopolitics are the two sides of the same thing,” said Charbonnier.

For a country like Brazil, this new world affords them the opportunity to play both sides. China is Brazil’s largest trading partner. But the U.S. is still its biggest investor. Brazilian officials have been trying to ease tensions with the White House over a jail term handed to Trump ally and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s predecessor Jair Bolsonaro for a Jan. 6-style coup attempt in 2023.

“We [are] quite clear that we don't want to choose sides. We really want to make business with both of them and to have good relations with both of them,” said a Brazilian government official close to Lula, who was granted anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.

On the other side, the benefits of working with China are clear. Getting local factories is a key part of Brazil’s strategy for harnessing Beijing’s enormous global clean energy ambitions. Long before China arrived with its electric cars, Brazil — a country of 213 million people — insisted that access to its market for European and American companies required homegrown manufacturing, said Tim Sahay, co-director of the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University. “This is Brazil’s playbook that other countries would do well to adopt for their own green development goals” he said.

Building the clean energy manufacturing sector at home not only secures employment, but skills and technical expertise. Great Wall Motors, another large Chinese automaker, also opened a new plant in Brazil this year. The Chinese wind turbine maker Goldwind is expanding in the country, too.

This is coming even as some Western manufacturers leave town after sustaining big losses, with some reports blaming high tax, labor and logistics costs.

“They were closing those big factories,” said the Brazilian official, “causing huge unemployment. And now we have the Chinese willing to come and open these big electric car factories and they have all the support of President Lula because they're moving the economy, generating jobs, usually in poor areas in Brazil.”

Other countries are also seizing the opportunity. Since 2022, Chinese companies have announced plans to invest at least $227 billion in green manufacturing projects outside the country, according to a report co-authored by Sahay. It’s a staggering number that the researchers pointed out compared favorably in scale to the U.S. post-war reconstruction funding in Europe under the Marshall Plan. China’s project is equally, if not more, ambitious: to reconstruct the global energy system.

And the benefits go far beyond jobs. Clean cheap energy from solar panels can help make energy affordable to more people and in remote places. It can also build new industrial centers, allowing countries that have been focused on resource extraction to shift toward higher-value, and in some cases less polluting, industries. Chinese firms have poured money into battery projects in Indonesia and Hungary and, in the Gulf, manufacturing for solar and green hydrogen. In Pakistan, the gas price crisis unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set in motion an unplanned solar power boom, with Chinese panels blossoming on factory roofs and homes across the country.

On the opening day of COP30, the Brazilian diplomat running the talks, André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, praised China for “lowering the price of all these essential elements in the transition. If the solar panel now costs 90 percent less than a few years ago, much more people in the developing world can afford them. You need less resources to get this done.”

The U.S. is doing its best to counter these dynamics. A contrast between BYD’s fortunes in Mexico and Brazil shows how the U.S. can and will use its leverage. Mexico was, until recently, BYD’s largest overseas market thanks to liberal trade policies. In September, after pressure from the Trump administration, Mexico said it would raise a 50 percent tariff on Chinese cars. A planned BYD factory project there has also stalled.

The auto industry is “really the battleground for a lot of these superpowers competing in Mexico,” said Rolando Fuentes, an energy professor at the EGADE Business School in Monterrey.

Meanwhile, Europe is caught in the middle, and the political realities of clean industry could not be further from those in Brazil. The continent has in no way embraced the fossil fuel boosterism of the U.S. under Trump, but the conversation on climate has been wrapped into a broader tale of industrial decline, high energy prices and anxiety about Europe losing its place as a leading industrial producer.

The EU is deeply concerned about its clean energy sector, which has lost market share and whole industries to China. Distressed automakers are concerned about the influx of Chinese electric cars, and the EU has raised tariffs on them.

But this has a cost. Trade barriers against Chinese electric vehicles in favor of its own automakers makes cutting emissions more expensive. “From a climate perspective” one of the biggest threats to global progress is “the decision by some countries not to deploy cheap, readily available clean technologies,” said Li Shuo, the director of China Climate Hub at the Washington-based Asia Society Policy Institute.

Here in Brazil, on the other hand, the story of climate change is at least partly one of hope.

The drive in the BYD Dolphin had to be short. Machedo needed to return to party planning.

I asked him about whether recent cultural and political tensions with the United States meant that Brazilians were biased toward Chinese cars. He was confused. Brazilians don’t care about things like that, he said. People still want “confident” American brands like Chevrolet and Ford, he said, because Brazilians “have that mongrel syndrome” — a phrase Brazilians use to describe their collective sense of inferiority compared to the rest of the world. “But today this is changing.”

Back in the showroom, they were playing Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York — one of Trump’s favorite songs. There was little else that would have pleased the president’s ear.

Zia Weise contributed reporting from Belém.