Will Trump kill America's clean future?

RTÉ News​

2 days ago

Donald Trump's campaign pledge to "drill, baby, drill," struck fear into the hearts of climate campaigners, but it was music to the ears of Washington's fossil fuel lobbyists.
And the US President didn't waste any time delivering on his promises to Big Oil.
In a dizzying slew of executive orders on his first day in office, Mr Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, rolled back Biden-era clean energy incentives, stripped away environmental restrictions on oil and gas exploration and threw a lifeline to America's dying coal industry.
Leaving no doubt as to the direction of travel, the administration went on to initiate legal action against states over their climate policies, shutter federal climate research offices, scrub information on extreme weather tracking from government websites and even ban the use of paper straws in federal buildings.
"We're going back to plastic," Mr Trump said as he signed the order, "these things don't work".
The president has made no secret of his disdain for renewable energy projects either, calling wind turbines "stupid" and "unsightly" and freezing approvals for wind and solar projects on federal lands and water.
The administration is now reportedly preparing to eliminate limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants in the United States, which is already the world's second-largest polluter.
For some analysts, Mr Trump's policies could sound the death knell for America's competitiveness in green energy, a field where other countries, like China, are already surging ahead.
"They're really taking a meat axe to the federal government's work, both on the science of climate change and the technology addressing climate change," Harvard professor John Holdren, who was science advisor to former President Barack Obama during his two terms, told RTÉ News.
Others, though, welcomed what they saw as the administration shifting focus to America's own energy security, which they believed would benefit the US in the long term.
Energy security
"I think what we are seeing from President Trump and Republicans in Congress is a strategy that looks to balance a future that has abundant, affordable, reliable and lower emissions energy," said Jeremy Harrell, CEO of ClearPath, a conservative-leaning clean energy organisation, based in Washington DC.
Federal programmes were being reevaluated under President Trump to ensure they were "economically viable" as well as targeted towards technologies in which the US was in pole position to lead, Mr Harrell said, citing geothermal, nuclear and carbon-capture as examples.
Was this an acknowledgment that the US couldn't compete with China in sectors like wind and solar, given that China now makes 80% of the world's solar panels and dominates global wind turbine manufacturing?
There was certainly bi-partisan support in the US Congress, Mr Harrell said, to onshore US energy in an effort "to reduce reliance on China and Chinese supply chains, and position the US as a technology leader globally, in areas where we have some strategic advantage".
But other observers felt the moment for asserting any strategic advantage had come and gone.
"It is a travesty that the United States has not taken a leadership position on the clean energy future," said Caroline Spears head of Climate Cabinet, which advocates for pro-climate policies at the state and local levels.
She was also sceptical that the United States would be able to boost domestic industry and technology under current conditions.
"The amount of uncertainty and volatility being created is wild," said Ms Spears.
And when it comes to massive projects - like nuclear - there was a danger the administration would overpromise and underdeliver, she said.
The push on climate was going to have to come from individual states, she said.
The power of red states
Last week the US House of Representatives passed a major tax bill - dubbed the "Big Beautiful Bill," - which gutted the clean energy credits established in former President Biden's signature piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
The bill is now on its way to the Senate, where it may well be watered down, experts said.
That's partly because much of the financial benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act flowed to Republican-voting areas of the country.
Senators of these so-called "red states" will be reluctant to legislate against large renewable energy plants that have brought jobs to their constituencies and have proven popular with voters, experts told RTÉ News.
A recent poll carried out by the Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation found that 84 percent of Texans were in favour of renewable energy projects.
Although best known for its Stetson-sporting oil barons, Texas is now the nation's leading producer of wind and solar power, having outstripped California some years ago.
Nationally, a long-term study carried out by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication showed that more that three quarters of Americans supported renewable energy infrastructure on public land while 66% of people polled wanted a full transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy by mid-century.
All this leads to a degree of unstoppable momentum, analysts said.
"A lot of the progress we have made in the United States on the ground is not going to be reversed through policy changes," said Anthony Moffa, law professor at the University of Maine.
The deployment of more renewable energy or electric vehicle adoption are trends that are going to continue, he said, even without federal government incentives.
"Automakers have already invested a significant amount of money and time in developing affordable electric vehicles," he said, "and we're seeing them adopted more and more throughout the United States".
Indeed, despite the Trump administration's rollback of the tax credits and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, the US power system began producing more electricity from clean energy sources than fossil fuels in March, according to data released by Ember, a think tank.
That trend has continued for the past three months.
Stalling the energy transition
But while progress may not be halted, it's likely to see a significant slowdown, analysts said.
According to data from E2, a US-based group of business leaders and investors, $14 billion in clean energy projects supporting 10,000 jobs have been cancelled or postponed so far this year.
But this is where individual states can make a difference, Caroline Spears told RTÉ News.
"They can set renewable portfolio standards, for example," she said, "they can create permitting and leasing offices and make it easier to get projects off the ground".
And beyond supporting clean power generation, local governments had a variety of strategies to tackle climate change, she said.
"The biggest source of pollution in the country is increasingly transportation," she said.
"There's a lot that states can do on electric vehicles and on public transport," she said, "and we're seeing progress and movement there as well".
Court battles
As with President Trump's trade tariffs, the US courts have become a major climate battleground too.
In what law professor Anthony Moffa called an "unprecedented move", the administration has thrown its weight behind lawsuits brought by fossil fuel companies against state climate policies.
The department of justice, for example, sued New York and Vermont over their climate "superfund" laws that would force oil and gas companies to pay into a state fund for clean infrastructure projects.
But similarly, climate campaigners are also using the courts to challenge government policies.
A group of 22 young activists filed a lawsuit in Montana this week arguing that President Trump's executive orders suppressed climate science and slowed the transition to renewable energy sources in favour of fossil fuels, "thereby worsening the air pollution and climate conditions that immediately harm and endanger Plaintiffs' lives and personal security".
The spokesperson for the plaintiffs 19-year-old Eva Lighthiser said in a statement that the president's fossil fuel directives were "a death sentence for my generation".
"I'm not suing because I want to, I'm suing because I have to," she said.
"My health, my future, and my right to speak the truth are all on the line. [President Trump] is waging war on us with fossil fuels as his weapon, and we're fighting back with the Constitution," she said.
Earlier this month, 17 states and Washington DC sued the government over its ban on wind power projects. The White House accused the attorneys general of the states of using "lawfare" to thwart President Trump's agenda.
'Spherically senseless'
But whatever the final legal outcome of the various cases before the courts, cuts to climate research have already caused "an enormous amount of damage," that will outlast this administration, according to John Holdren.
The National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy have all seen their budgets slashed, he said.
Key offices that are responsible for climate change monitoring, maintaining the nation's databases related to climate change and for a large fraction of climate education in US schools, colleges and universities have been closed.
Research programs cannot be revived overnight, he said, noting that staff who have been fired may have moved on to other jobs of even other countries.
That early research was the "seed corn" from which future practical advances grew, he added.
"When you cut that off, you're basically killing the future of innovation in all these domains, in terms of environmental and public health and in solutions for climate change," he said.
This was "absolutely a case of shooting the country in the foot," he told RTÉ News.
"It is what the energy analyst Amory Lovins once called 'spherically senseless,'" he said.
"No matter how you look at it, it's crazy".