Trump Vows to Prevent Wind Energy from Moving Forward

What does the new occupant of the Oval Office think of wind farms? "They litter our country, they're littered all over our country like dropping paper, like dropping garbage in a field,” President Donald Trump said at a news conference before taking office a second time. “They're rusting, rotting, closed, falling down ... And they put new ones next to them because nobody wants to take them down, because why should they take them down? It's very expensive to take them down."

Wind is an energy source that “he has bashed ever since he unsuccessfully tried to stop an offshore wind farm from being built in view of one of his Scottish golf courses,” Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Trump insisted that wind farms ‘obviously’ kill whales, although scientists have said there is no evidence to support that…” Not only that, he has said, they “kill all the birds” and cause cancer.

“We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump declared.

One fervent ally is Republican Congressman Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who said he is working with Trump’s team to draft an executive order that would “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast. “This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a January 13 statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”

Wind provides about ten percent of the nation’s electricity, a portion that is growing. It accounted for 22 percent of new installed electricity capacity in 2022, and the wind energy industry employs more than 125,000 workers.

“The No. 1 state for wind energy is Texas, and it has been for two and a half decades, so this is a bipartisan energy source,” Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told The New York Times. “The fact is that wind energy is cheap and clean American-made power.” 

How much authority does the president have to thwart wind energy? Trump would not be able to control what is built on private land, Friedman and Plumer noted. He would have influence, but not absolute authority, over whether wind power can be produced on federal lands and waters. If the government has already issued leases for wind farms, then legally, companies must be issued permits if they choose to move forward with projects.

Trump has a better chance of thwarting offshore projects than onshore. Coastal wind is a younger industry and requires an array of federal approvals, while land-based wind is a big industry in red states. Largely through delays in permitting, the first Trump administration hobbled what was a fledgling offshore wind industry.

The wind industry is working overtime to fend off the threats from the White House. Instead of touting projects as “clean and affordable,” renewables firms are highlighting their projects’ ability to “meet energy needs,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Some executives say they are pinning their hopes on Trump’s interior secretary, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. North Dakota is a coal and oil state, but under Burgum it also has welcomed wind energy, which provided 36 percent of its power generation in 2023.

The industry hopes that the president will back away from his “no wind” vow because of the nation’s growing appetite for electricity. “It’s all about demand right now,” said Jim Murphy, president and co-founder of Invenergy, a developer of renewables, transmission and natural-gas power. “If you look at the forecasts, we’re going to need everything as fast as we can get it.”

Signs of possible bipartisan progress on carbon pricing

No one would say that bipartisanship is having its moment in Washington. Yet there is at least a sign of it in legislation dealing with climate and trade. 

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana “is making his hardest sell yet on conservative legislation linking climate action with trade policy,” Emma Dumain wrote December 12 in E&E Daily. Along with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Cassidy recently unveiled a slimmed-down, 20-page “discussion draft” of their year-old Foreign Pollution Fee Act. 

GOP leaders are talking about putting together two budget reconciliation packages, and Cassidy believes his bill could be a prime candidate for inclusion. “It’s consistent with what the Trump administration wants to do,” Cassidy told reporters. “It could actually raise revenue for a reconciliation bill, and so therefore we want to get it more into the discussion now.” The legislation’s goal is to leverage data showing that the U.S. produces certain materials “cleaner” than other nations — namely China — and impose a fee on certain imports.

“The fee,” Dumain reported. “would still only affect foreign products, continuing to ignore the argument from many Democrats and advocates that a domestic price on carbon is necessary for any new trade policy to meet compliance with the World Trade Organization.”

The original bill included energy imports like oil, natural gas, hydrogen, minerals, solar panels and wind turbines. So-called “covered products” in the new bill would include only aluminum, cement, glass, iron, fertilizer and steel.

A Cassidy spokesperson said the senator and his team suggested the final list of products was the result of a yearlong listening tour with different industries “to better understand their trade profile and their challenges in countering unfair competition from China.”

Shuting Pomerleau, director of energy and environmental policy at the center-right group American Action Forum, said she noticed a major bright spot in the two-page summary sheet of the measure that Cassidy’s office released: The “polluters’ fee” would be designed to “correlate to the environmental performance of U.S. production and U.S. imports to qualify for the WTO’s environmental policy exceptions.”

“It shows me they are trying to make this a climate bill,” she said. “They are trying to find WTO compliance without a domestic carbon price.”

Some green-oriented groups are somewhat clear-eyed about what Cassidy is hoping to accomplish. Zach Friedman, senior director for federal policy at Ceres, said the bill was always going to be a “trade and competition bill with environmental benefits” rather than strictly a climate measure.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island Democrat who has championed the effort on Capitol Hill to combat climate change, commended his Republican colleagues. “I give [Cassidy and Graham] a lot of credit for what they’ve done,” he said during a forum at Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. “Obviously, there’s a lot of fossil fuel blowback against them, but they’ve stuck to their guns so good on them.”

Whitehouse added that while bipartisan negotiations on carbon pricing are positive developments and the American public is widely supportive of placing the cost of pollution on polluters themselves, “we have to fight through enormous fossil fuel intervention,” including billions in dark money, in order to enact effective climate reform and enforce it.

The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)—a tariff that mainly will affect imported goods from the cement, electricity, fertilizer, some metals, and hydrogen sectors from countries outside the EU—will take effect in 2026. That should create added momentum for Congress to price carbon, noted Catherine Wolfram, a professor of energy economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a former official at the U.S. Treasury. “The economic logic behind product pricing is so potent and so persuasive, I think that the U.S. will come to this realization,” Wolfram said.

Senator Whitehouse agreed but also pointed to obstacles that hinder carbon pricing legislation. Several bills proposing a federal carbon tax have been floated and failed in recent years, but, Whitehouse said, a new wave of them holds some promise.

Whether the U.S. will adopt meaningful carbon pricing legislation depends on whether politicians can understand that “there are now no remaining known scenarios for a pathway to climate safety that don’t include carbon pricing,” Whitehouse said. “…There can be no more quarrel on that.”

Climate Policy May Be About to Make a U-Turn

Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office is likely to mean a U-turn on Biden-era climate and energy policies that are incomplete or under court challenge, Axios reported the day after his victory.  He has vowed to rescind funds under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provides unprecedented support for low-carbon energy and which he has derided as “the green new scam.”

Much of the act’s grant and loan funding remains unspent. However, since 80 percent of the funds so far have flowed to Red districts, creating many jobs, some congressional Republicans will resist wholesale cutbacks in the IRA.

While trying to undo efforts to promote renewable energy sources, the 47th president will also be taking steps to implement his “drill, baby, drill” agenda. In particular, offshore leasing in the Gulf of Mexico is likely to accelerate rapidly.

Unfortunately, an oil-championing American president is likely to embolden other petrostates to take up his “drill baby drill” mantra and weaken environmental protections elsewhere, particularly in developing economies, Somini Sengupta reported in The New York Times. “This may derail focus on renewable-energy projects in emerging markets, incentivizing Nigeria and other oil and gas producers to continue to prioritize oil and gas for short-term economic gain,” said Gbenga Oyebode, a lawyer in Nigeria who follows the energy industry.

Meantime, Trump is widely expected to follow through on his vow to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement, as he did during his first term.

Such a reversal of policy comes at a perilous time. Climate change-worsened disasters have killed hundreds of Americans during the past few months alone and, as ABC reported, recent flooding in Spain has claimed 219 lives so far, with 93 people still missing. Climate scientists are warning that the planet is on track to blow past targets established by the Paris accord. The European climate agency Copernicus announced that 2024 is assured to be the first calendar year where the global temperature rise has averaged 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The president-elect’s plans warm the hearts of some Americans. “Our long national nightmare with the Green New Deal is finally over because energy was on the ballot in 2024, and energy won,” said Daniel Turner, the executive director for Power the Future, a fossil fuel advocacy group.

Of course, those who consider a u-turn on climate a dangerous mistake will not be sitting on their hands. States are now likely to become a bulwark against federal efforts to undo climate policy, wrote The New York Times’ Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman. “The locus of climate action is going to shift to the states,” said Martin Lockman, a fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. 

“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back,” said Gina McCarthy, President Biden’s former climate adviser who now helps lead America Is All In, a coalition of elected leaders, community groups and businesses promoting climate policies. She called any attempt to overturn the IRA “a fool’s errand.”

Many policymakers are expressing optimism that cheap, renewable technologies would be able to displace fossil fuels simply on economic grounds, according to The Washington Post.

Ironically, Trump’s efforts to hobble the transition to clean energy would hand a geopolitical win to our country’s main rival, China, which has spent a decade building up a powerful clean-energy industry and is now increasingly exporting it worldwide.

Climate challenge is at a critical moment

“We are in a very fragile moment,” said Ali Zaidi, President Joe Biden’s national climate adviser. “The inflection point breaks in two very different directions.”

This week, that reality is a subject of intense interest for businesses, climate activists and government officials gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly and related climate events dubbed “Climate Week NYC.” 

American voters will have a major say in which direction the fight against climate change proceeds. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have sought to turn clean energy into “a stalking horse for Chinese dominance, a driver of rising energy costs, or a globalist ploy. Trump promises to cancel Biden’s vehicle-emissions regulations, unlock more oil drilling, and once again take the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, wrote Time’s Justin Worland. Trump has called the shift to EVs a “transition to hell.” He has blasted the Inflation Reduction Act, with its many incentives to spur the move to clean energy, as a “green new scam” and promised to claw back unspent funding from the IRA if he wins the presidency.

Would he succeed? As Worland reported, “Even in some deep-red regions, new jobs making clean technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles are winning the backing of climate-skeptical Republicans.” It’s not unusual, he wrote, to see a Republican lawmaker at a groundbreaking for a solar-panel factory or an EV plant. “Democrats hope—with good reason—that continued investment will broaden support for climate measures.”

But in rural western Michigan, he pointed out, where two major EV-battery plants are planned, “the conversation sounds completely different. Residents have been inundated with mail campaigns and ads from right-wing activists and organizers decrying the plants.” Republican Congressman John Moolenaar spent more than $60,000 of federal funds on a campaign that included an ad claiming that the battery maker “does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party.”

A growing cohort of climate advocates view the simmering anti-climate narrative “with a concern bordering on panic,” in Worland’s words. They have seen versions of the same fight playing out elsewhere, and it hasn’t gone well. In Europe, farmer protests and rising energy costs have put pressure on the European Union’s Green Deal.

The result, amid the hottest year on record, is a sort of climate retreat. Even French President Emmanuel Macron, a supporter of climate initiatives, last year called for the EU to embrace a “regulatory pause” on new environmental rules. 

American officials have argued that “stitching the green transition into the tax code,” as The Hill’s Tobias Burns put it, and incentivizing private business is a good way to insulate the shift away from fossil fuels from political pressures. “This is now the tax code,” White House economist Lael Brainard said. “These rules are complex, they take a very long time to write, and they take a very long time to amend.”

Worldwide, voters still seem to care about climate change. In the EU’s 2023 poll of citizens across the bloc, 93 percent said they believe climate change is a serious problem. “It’s not that they deny the facts,” says Teresa Ribera, a vice president of the Spanish government and minister of ecological transition. “They lack confidence in institutions to shape the proper responses.”

So climate advocates, researchers, and public officials are “scrambling,” wrote Worland. Legislators are tweaking proposals to soften their impact on low-income people, and forward-thinking policymakers are devising creative ways to keep vulnerable communities from being left in the dust. Many other politicians are backtracking, making a counterintuitive bet that by taking a few steps back on climate policy they will help protect climate efforts by keeping right-wing politicians out of office. But slowing down carries grave risks too. The longer we take to cut emissions, the worse warming will be. To get through this moment, leaders will need to thread a needle.

Making that needle tougher to thread are “three big things (that) have shifted since the Paris accord,” wrote Somini Sengupta and Max Bearek of The New York Times: “China has raced ahead of every other country, including the United States, to dominate the global clean-energy supply chain, fueling serious economic and political strains that undermine incentives to cooperate. Rich countries have failed to keep their financial promises to help poor countries shift away from fossil fuels. A widening gyre of war — from Ukraine to Gaza and now, in Lebanon — has become an impediment to global climate consensus.”

“We have this really difficult moment,” Danny Cullenward, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, told The Wall Street Journal. “The election is a giant cliff.”

Americans Discovering Value of Climate-Oriented Tax Credits

The law passed by Congress in 2022 to promote the transition away from fossil fuels contained far more carrots than sticks–and Americans are gobbling them up.

The statute, called the Inflation Reduction Act, provides tax credits  and other benefits for a wide range of actions that citizens and businesses can take to fight climate change. The five most popular credits during the first year were for solar panels, insulation or air sealing, exterior windows and skylights, exterior doors, and central air conditioners.

More than 3 million American households used the act’s subsidies for homeowners last year, collectively saving more than $8 billion, according to an August 7 report by the U.S. Treasury Department. It was the first detailed snapshot of how these more benefits were used in their first full year, by whom and where. The department called the $8 billion a “significant” number that is higher than initially expected, Nadja Popovich reported in The New York Times..

The bulk of the money, more than $6 billion, helped households install rooftop solar panels, small wind turbines and other renewable energy systems. These credits were most popular in sunny states, including much of the Southwest and Florida.

While those are encouraging numbers for tax credits, of the more than 137 million tax returns the government had processed by late May, some 3.4 million of them — or approximately 2.5 percent — took advantage of at least one of these two subsidies. That’s about 30 percent more people than used similar, though less generous tax credits in 2021, but it means that the vast majority of taxpayers are not participating.

Many experts believe that more taxpayers should be taking advantage of these opportunities. So a nonprofit group, Civic Nation, is launching a "Save on Clean Energy" campaign to educate Americans about the law. Civic Nation’s campaign involves more than 40 groups and messengers,  including United Way, Carrier, Sunrun, the League of Conservation Voters, and a bipartisan group of mayors from around the country. The U.S. Department of Energy is also involved.

The intent is to help spread the word through trusted local messengers such as schools and community-based organizations. “It can't just be, you know, press releases,” Civic Nation CEO Kyle Lierman told Axios. “It has to be a kind of surround sound campaign, where folks are hearing about how they can take advantage of these opportunities on their phones when they read the news, but also at their churches, at the supermarket, at the door."

President Biden's top climate diplomat, John Podesta, who is overseeing the rollout of the IRA's clean energy provisions, considers the Civic Nation partnership a new effort in the energy space, whose goal is to make it clear to people that not only are energy rebates available, but also to show them how to complete the process by listing nearby contractors, for example. "Some of this is a lack of general awareness that these general programs are available," he said, but some is also a question of ‘What does it mean for you?’"