The week the US president's vendetta against renewables went global

The Guardian

2 days ago

The inner workings of Donald Trump's mind have long provoked bemusement and speculation, with his often erratic opinions driven seemingly by grievance and anecdote rather than evidence.
But on one topic Trump has remained resolutely consistent: he hates wind turbines – and, more latterly, renewable energy in general. This enmity burst into view in 2011 – four years before he descended his golden escalator to announce he was running for US president – when Trump waged an unsuccessful battle to halt 'ugly' offshore turbines visible from his Scottish golf course.
In a sort of circular moment, Trump was back in Scotland earlier this week to fulminate once again about wind energy.
'Wind is a disaster,' the US president said in a press conference at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, beside a doleful-looking Keir Starmer. 'You are paying massive subsidies to have these ugly monsters all over the place.'
Starmer, for his part, said that 'we believe in a mix' that includes wind but did not mention the pressing reason for clean energy – a climate crisis that is unleashing its fury in increasing bursts in the UK, US and elsewhere. Instead the British prime minister embraced the more Trump-friendly theme of energy security.
But Trump's distress at wind turbines now holds global, rather than merely golfing, implications. As president he has banned renewable energy projects from federal lands and signed a spending bill that kills off tax credits that were fostering a boom in new, clean energy supply.
The amount of new clean energy additions is now expected to be half of what it would have been over the next decade as a result, with the added loss of several hundred thousand jobs and billions of dollars of investment that was set to gush into rural and exurban America. 'It's an expensive energy, it's an ugly energy and we won't allow it in the United States,' Trump boasted at his Scottish summit with Starmer.
As the world's second-largest carbon emitter, the US's decision to bring the hammer down on renewables has major implications for a rapidly warming planet. Around 7bn tonnes of extra greenhouse gases are set to be added to the atmosphere in just the next five years – more than double India's annual emissions – as American utilities turn to gas and coal rather than cleaner sources of energy.
Clean energy still remains remarkably attractive – wind and solar have plummeted in cost over the past decade and are now almost always cheaper than fossil fuels even without subsidies, as the United Nations pointed out last week. Almost all new electricity capacity in the US is set to come from renewables this year – after all, it's not only cheaper but far quicker to start up a windfarm than a gas plant.
But the climate crisis has always been a timed challenge. Even as renewables advance, they must do so far faster if the world has a chance of fending off spiralling climate disasters. The fixation of one man in the White House is stamping on the brakes at the very moment when scientists are urging accelerated cuts in emissions.
The backtracking on renewables also poses geopolitical, as well as environmental, questions. China, which Trump often disparages as a rival, is already streaking ahead of the world in erecting wind and solar facilities and envisions a future run on clean energy that it will then sell to other countries – a Chinese EV in the garage overlooked by a Chinese-made windfarm in the hills.
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The US is making a very different bet: that the world will continue to run, as it has for more than a century, on the burning of fossil fuels and it will look to America's vast supply of oil and gas for sustenance. 'This is the most pro-combustion administration since Nero,' as one environmental group put it this week as Trump unveiled plans to eliminate a foundational finding that greenhouse gases harm human health and set about demolishing pollution limits for cars and oil and gas drilling sites.
The pathway that the world chooses will not only shape our shared climate but also, potentially, the fortunes of the world's two superpowers in the decades ahead. 'This marks a new chapter in the global climate story, it will significantly reposition these two major powers,' as Li Shuo, an expert in China's climate policies, told me. 'The last chance for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has left the station.'
Read more:
Tilting at windmills? Trump's claims about turbines fact-checked
'Shooting ourselves in the foot': how Trump is fumbling geothermal energy
Trump effort to ditch greenhouse gas finding ignores 'clearcut' science, expert says
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