On the day our oil-stained president returned to the White House, he began an all-out assault on clean energy. Today, 16 months later, he and his party are paying a significant political price while American consumers are stuck with the bill.
That bill, according to one scholarly estimate, totals $1,508 per household since President Trump took office for the second time (in after-tax dollars). And as the president does not need reminding, that’s with the congressional elections six months away and the cost of living the voters’ top concern.
As if that were not enough, these same voters, when they fill up their cars, are confronting the costs of Trump’s choice to go to war with Iran, at a national average of $4.52 a gallon — that’s $90.40 for a 20-gallon tank.
Trump has severely, but not fatally, wounded the American renewable energy industry, which is falling further behind China. At the same time, he is doling out tax dollars by the millions to keep dilapidated coal-fired power plants open.
What gives?
The Clean Economy Works Project Tracker maintained by E2, an organization that describes itself as “a national, nonpartisan group of business leaders, investors and others who advocate for smart policies that are good for the economy and good for the environment,” working in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council, found that during the Biden administration 10 renewal energy projects were canceled, closed or downsized in 2023, with an investment value of $1.02 billion and 2,122 lost jobs; in 2024, it was 15 projects, with a value of $2.47 billion and 8,346 lost jobs.
In 2025, Trump’s first year back in office, the number of closed, canceled or downsized projects rose to 61, with a value of $34.76 billion and 38,031 lost jobs.
The barrage of executive orders and memorandums Trump issued on Jan. 20, 2025, demonstrated the intensity of his prioritization of fossil fuels while gutting federal support of clean, renewable energy.
In a presidential memorandum, Trump ordered the withdrawal “from disposition for wind energy leasing all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf” and the “temporary cessation and immediate review of federal wind leasing and permitting practices.”
In a separate executive order, Trump declared that “it is the policy of the United States” to
encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf, in order to meet the needs of our citizens and solidify the United States as a global energy leader long into the future.
The new official policy was also to eliminate the “electric vehicle mandate” and terminate “where appropriate, state emissions waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles.”
The order did not stop there. It rescinded 12 executive orders issued by President Joe Biden calling for the adoption of pro-environmental and pro-renewable energy policies and for reducing dependence on oil, gas, coal and other fossil fuels.
Another executive order issued that day declared that the national policy of the United States was to “expedite the permitting and leasing of energy and natural resource projects in Alaska” while rescinding all Biden actions calling for protection of Alaskan land.
And to “prioritize the development of Alaska’s liquefied natural gas (L.N.G.) potential, including the sale and transportation of Alaskan L.N.G. to other regions of the United States and allied nations within the Pacific region.”
Trump clearly took office fully armed to conduct his attack on clean energy. He issued another executive order calling for the immediate withdrawal of the United States “from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
The attack has been relentless.
Last July 4, Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which terminated over time seven clean energy tax credits while phasing out tax credits for wind and solar projects and clean hydrogen production.
Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at the University of California-Santa Barbara who calculated the total household cost I mentioned earlier, replied to my queries with a detailed accounting of how she reached the $1,508 per household cost of Trump’s energy policies and concluded her email by saying:
The big story here is corruption. Trump is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and enriching his friends because they got him elected.
I cannot fathom why else he’s keeping open these old, dirty, expensive coal plants that were otherwise slated to close in places like Michigan. Someone is getting very rich off these decisions, and everyday Americans are paying the price.
Among the increased household expenses Stokes listed:
Electricity bills: Trump’s war on clean energy is raising energy costs for American families. Princeton’s REPEAT Project projects annual household energy costs rising up to $415 by 2035. Electricity prices rose more than twice as fast as overall inflation in 2025.
Keeping uneconomical plants online: In some regions of the country, Trump has jacked up electricity bills even more by keeping old, expensive and dirty coal plants running when they were supposed to shut down. Using emergency grid powers, Trump has ordered utilities to keep uneconomical coal plants running that were slated for retirement.
Already, $308 million has been spent keeping these plants online. The Campbell coal plant in Michigan alone costs $615,000 a day to keep running. Indiana plants forced to stay open are costing utilities roughly $200,000 a day. In Colorado, the Craig plant was already broken down when the order was issued; Grid Strategies estimates it will cost $85 million per year to keep running. If the administration extends these orders to more plants, Grid Strategies estimates the total cost to customers is $3-6 billion per year. Trump has issued a government mandate to keep expensive, outdated, dirty plants alive — and then sent households the bill.
Gas. According to Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, everyday people have already paid an extra $37 billion for gasoline and diesel — about $285 per household — because of Trump’s war.
In addition to direct increases in household expenditures, Stokes described a wide range of adverse consequences brought about by Trump’s energy policies, including
Investment: $29 billion in canceled manufacturing investments and more than 39,000 jobs lost in 2025 alone. E2’s Clean Economy Works Project Tracker, which includes deployment projects beyond manufacturing, estimates $34.8 billion canceled in 2025, with nearly three dollars canceled for every one dollar newly announced.
China: The United States is ceding leadership in solar, batteries, E.V.s and grid storage at the same moment China is doubling down on clean technology through its new Five-Year Plan. China announced 101 new clean-tech demonstration projects in March 2025.
Tariffs: Trump’s tariff policy is raising costs in both directions — blocking cheap clean energy while making it more expensive to build. Tariffs on solar cells and modules from Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia — which together supplied roughly 80 percent of U.S. solar photovoltaic imports — now range from 14 percent to 3,500 percent. At the same time, tariffs on transformers, cables, and grid equipment are driving up utility capital costs that get passed directly to ratepayers.
Climate damages: Trump’s policies will add an extra seven billion tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere through 2030 compared to the U.S. Paris Agreement target. Using the Biden EPA’s own social cost of carbon, that will result in $1.6 trillion in global climate damages.
Jeff Colgan, director of the Climate Solutions Lab and a professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown, added another cost to Trump’s attacks on clean energy: diminished national security.
“For the second time in five years,” he wrote by email,
geopolitics is creating a crisis for fossil fuels — but the price of sunshine and wind remain free. Renewables have a national security advantage over fossil fuels, in addition to environmental advantages. People talk about renewables as “unreliable” because they are intermittent (no sun at night, variable wind speeds) but it sure looks like geopolitics makes fossil fuels less reliable rather than more.
Atlas Public Policy, a consulting firm that advises clients on clean and renewable energy strategies and infrastructure, released a report this month, “The Race for Clean Energy Leadership.”
A subhead clearly states what Atlas found: “China Builds Clean Manufacturing While the United States Falls Further Behind.”
China, according to Atlas,
has built enormous manufacturing capacity domestically, and increasingly, grown production abroad to skirt trade restrictions and assert itself as the global leader in the future of energy. After China ($509.7 billion), the United States ($236.1 billion) is second for announced investment.
The analysis cited the 2024 annual report issued by the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was created by (and reports to) Congress.
The commission report found that not only is the United States falling way behind China on energy, but that the United States is becoming increasingly dependent on China. As a result, Atlas continued:
The strength of Chinese manufacturing and innovation in many parts of the clean energy supply chain, including battery components and solar components, means countries are increasingly reliant on China.
Policies that discourage clean energy manufacturing and deployment in the United States risk weakening the country’s position in the global clean energy supply chain, creating space for China to consolidate its market leadership.
The United States, the report continued, “has seen a drop in clean manufacturing investment in recent years,” which “coincides with Congress removing demand-side incentives such as tax credits for electric vehicles, solar and wind turbines as well as the Trump administration terminating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund and reorienting the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office toward fossil fuels.”
A May 10 Substack post by Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, where he heads the energy program at the Environmental Change Institute, reveals the stubborn shortsightedness of Trump’s policies.
While America’s energy costs surge, over the past quarter century the wholesale cost of energy in Spain has fallen from the top ranks in Europe to the lowest ranks. How so?
Twenty-five years ago, a third of Spain’s electricity came from coal. Today, coal is effectively gone. Gas, which surged in the 2000s as the replacement, peaked above 30 percent of generation in the late 2000s and has since been pushed back to roughly 19 percent. Nuclear has held steady around 19 percent, hydro and bioenergy together around 14 percent and the remaining capacity” — around 45 percent — “has been steadily filled by wind and solar.
Rosenow concluded:
This is the clearest example in Europe of the price effect that renewable advocates have been describing for years finally arriving in the data. More wind and solar on the grid means fewer hours when gas is the marginal plant. Fewer of those hours means a wholesale price that is decoupled from the gas market for most of the day. And a wholesale price decoupled from gas, in 2026, is a cheap one.
Spain is now a working demonstration that you can take an electricity system that was 33 percent coal a generation ago, 30 percent-plus gas a decade ago, and run it on roughly 44 percent wind and solar with the resulting wholesale prices among the lowest in Europe.
What makes Trump’s energy policies so egregious is that there is no credible justification for them.
Instead, three factors appear to be driving his decisions.
The first is Trump’s “deal” (his word) with the fossil fuel industry in April 2024 that he would gut Biden administration policies restricting the oil, gas and coal industries if the companies and their executive ponied up $1 billion for his election campaign.
The second is that Trump and many elected Republican officials see green energy as a liberal attempt to weaken oil and gas industries, or, as Trump put it, “This is all a scam, a giant scam.”
The third is the most petty. From 2006 to 2014, Trump bitterly fought plans to install wind turbines a mile from his Scotland golf course in Aberdeen. At an April 2012 hearing before the Scottish Parliament, Trump warned:
Windmills are so unattractive, so ugly, so noisy and so dangerous that, if Scotland does this, I think that it will be in serious trouble. I think that you will lose your tourism industry to Ireland and lots of other places that are laughing at what Scotland is doing.
In February 2014, a Scottish civil court judge, Lord Doherty, ruled against Trump and granted approval for Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm Ltd. to go forward with the project. The ruling left a deeply bitter taste in Trump’s mouth that lingers on.
He was unable to block the wind turbines in Aberdeen Bay, but he is determined to make such projects here as difficult and costly as possible.
A key element of Trump’s reward to oil companies for their contribution to his and other Republican campaigns has been his effort to cripple the electric vehicle industry.
In doing so, Trump is trashing free-market principles treasured by traditional conservative Republicans. He has adopted a MAGA industrial policy that goes beyond government propping up one group of special interests to include a deliberate effort to snuff out competing industries.
Julie McNamara, federal energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote by email that Trump, simply on the basis of personal grievances and political ideology, “is ceding opportunity after opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global clean energy transition, and all the benefits such leadership can afford.”
Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s science office, elaborated:
Trump’s efforts to block clean energy solutions could not have come at a worse time for American consumers. With surging electricity demand and higher costs at the pump due to a war in the Middle East, Americans need access to low-cost, efficient and clean energy options now more than ever.
The administration’s war on clean energy has undermined U.S. energy independence (making the country more vulnerable to the kinds of oil price shocks we’ve seen these past two months), contributed to higher energy costs for U.S. households and weakened the country’s global standing and industrial competitiveness.
Why has Trump been so focused on undermining the electric vehicle industry?
Michael Gerrard, a law professor at Columbia who focuses on climate, environmental and energy law, provided the rationale in an email responding to my queries:
The greatest threat to the demand for oil is electric vehicles. Trump has — through the One Big Beautiful Bill — eliminated the tax credits for E.V.s and charging stations.
Through the Congressional Review Act, he has killed (for now, at least) the California waiver — the use of a provision of the Clean Air Act that allows California to adopt stronger emission standards than the federal standards.
Gerrard suggested another motive behind Trump’s energy policies:
He sees the fossil fuel industry as central to American dominance, and its workers as the heart of his base; he loves to pose in front of coal miners, see here, and calls them to many of his bill-signing ceremonies.
He sees fossil fuels as manly and renewables as woke.
Where does all this leave the country?
Stuck with a president committed to policies that amount to national self-sabotage, a man driven by personal grievance and reckless promises to campaign contributors, devoid of any real concern for America’s long-term energy needs.
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