President Trump’s first few weeks in office feel like a bad movie remake. He has once again withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement, aggressively sloganeered against renewable energy, frozen government grants and love-bombed fossil fuels. Together, these moves feel ominous for the fight against climate change.
While there’s plenty of well-founded uncertainty about how his administration will shape energy markets, much of what Mr. Trump has done so far amounts to bluster or actions that are unlikely to be sustained. For 20 years, we’ve seen a movement toward cleaner, cheaper sources of energy, and the executive branch’s levers to disrupt it are not powerful enough to overcome it. What’s more, if he tries to stop the substantial clean energy investments flowing from the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law into Republican districts nationwide, as he has threatened, it’s hard to believe that his own party will allow it.
Mr. Trump has inherited a strong energy economy from the Biden administration. America is producing more energy — including oil, gas, wind and solar — than at any other point in history. Exports of oil and gas are also at record highs.
Over the past 20 years, America’s greenhouse gas emissions have dropped through increased efficiency and as wind, solar and natural gas have displaced coal in the power sector. America’s total annual energy consumption has stayed level for over two decades, despite the economy nearly tripling and the population growing about 20 percent. It will be hard for him to disrupt that momentum.
In his first term, Mr. Trump promised to save coal and stop renewables. But he failed; complying with regulations on mercury emissions made it harder for coal plants to operate, and cheap wind, solar and natural gas outcompeted coal in the markets. In fact, wind, solar and battery farms have made up a vast amount of construction in the power sector in the past 15 years, and hundreds of thousands of people nationwide now depend on those facilities for their livelihoods. Clean energy isn’t a niche, mom-and-pop industry of enthusiasts and tinkerers anymore.
Though Mr. Trump has surrounded himself with climate skeptics, many top officials in his administration support geothermal energy, nuclear power and carbon capture projects, all of which help stave off the worst effects of climate change. Last week the secretary of energy, Chris Wright, announced he wants to streamline permitting for new energy infrastructure, expand the energy system rather than shrink it, improve the transmission system to prepare for growing demand for electricity and unleash commercial nuclear power. The secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, is focused on undoing many Biden policies, but he is pushing for a more robust domestic supply chain for minerals used for batteries and renewables, as well. All of these efforts would be beneficial for clean energy.
Mr. Trump’s G.O.P. rank and file might not let him choke off the money flowing to Republican districts; a majority of federal clean energy investments for wind, solar, batteries and clean tech factories are going to those regions. In places like Texas, rural Republicans have been cheerleaders for wind and solar because the projects pay higher wages compared with agricultural jobs, generate royalties for landowners and increase local property tax revenue for schools, parks, libraries and courthouses.
Anticipating potential funding cuts, 18 G.O.P. representatives sent a letter in August to House Speaker Mike Johnson warning him not to end the federal support for clean energy. Several Republican lawmakers also conveyed their support for maintaining several tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act in a Jan. 22 hearing on Capitol Hill.
Another conflict in Mr. Trump’s energy agenda is his push for the United States to dominate the so-called artificial intelligence arms race. Data centers that train and deploy large A.I. models require vast amounts of electricity, and throttling construction of wind and solar installations — the cheapest and fastest kind of energy facilities to construct — will limit their growth and give adversaries the upper hand. Building solar, wind and battery installations buys time while utilities and other companies reopen shuttered nuclear power plants, deploy geothermal energy and build nuclear reactors that will last decades.
It’s not just A.I.: Robotics and factories all run on electricity, which means we need to accelerate the ability to expand the grid to serve all those loads with power. Is Mr. Trump really going to try to block this American industrial renaissance, and will his party let him? I doubt it.
He will most likely claim some victories against renewable energy. Wind power is still growing, but not as quickly as a decade ago because of higher interest rates, congested transmission lines and local opposition. If fewer wind projects go online in the coming years, he may take credit for it. But the market for wind has been tough for a while, and solar and batteries have more than made up the difference.
Maybe he will try to own the success of natural gas. But recent history shows that wind, solar and gas production have grown hand in hand and that they complement one another. They sped coal’s decline. If we keep building efficient natural gas power plants, they will put the nail in coal’s coffin and will often be used to charge electric vehicles, accelerating gasoline’s decline.
Mr. Trump will probably try to sabotage the transition to clean energy by cutting off some federal grants. But his freezes of existing government contracts — for example, at the Environmental Protection Agency — are hitting political resistance and court injunctions. It’s unclear what will turn out to be legal.
Some of his policies might even be helpful. There is bipartisan consensus that the United States needs permitting reform because it takes too long to build energy infrastructure domestically. Congress failed to act on this in December, but Trump administration leaders seem committed to it. In addition, his trade wars could drive up the cost of gasoline, which would accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles.
Americans have an economic, security and moral imperative to clean up our energy system, and the government should continue to support clean options as long as it lets dirty options pollute for free. But the 20-year move toward lower emissions will not stop just because of Mr. Trump’s bully pulpit.
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