{"id":3505356,"date":"2024-11-19T14:06:05","date_gmt":"2024-11-19T14:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3505356"},"modified":"2024-11-19T14:06:05","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T14:06:05","slug":"hell-try-but-trump-cant-stop-the-clean-energy-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2024-11-19\/hell-try-but-trump-cant-stop-the-clean-energy-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"He\u2019ll try, but Trump can\u2019t stop the clean energy revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

“This story was originally published by Grist<\/a>. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here<\/a>.”<\/em><\/p>\n

During his first time around as president, Donald Trump rolled back a bevy of environmental rules, withdrew from the Paris Agreement, and boosted the fossil fuel industry. In his second term, the president-elect is expected to be downright hostile toward clean energy and climate action<\/a>, having promised to rescind the remaining funding in Joe Biden\u2019s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. That $891 billion law provides thousands of dollars for any household to switch to electric appliances like a heat pump, install solar panels, and buy an electric car.<\/p>\n

Looking beyond the IRA, Trump has vowed to increase fossil fuel production and once again withdraw from the Paris Agreement. The man who has called climate change a \u201choax\u201d also can be expected to wreak havoc on federal agencies central to understanding, and combating, climate change. But plenty of climate action would be very difficult for a second Trump administration to unravel, and the 47th president won\u2019t be able to stop the inevitable economy-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewables.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is bad for the climate, full stop,\u201d said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia Business School. \u201cThat said, this will be yet another wall that never gets built. Fundamental market forces are at play.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A core irony of climate change is that markets incentivized the wide-scale burning of fossil fuels beginning in the Industrial Revolution, creating the mess humanity is mired in, and now those markets are driving a renewables revolution that will help fix it. Coal, oil, and gas are commodities whose prices fluctuate. As natural resources that humans pull from the ground, there\u2019s really no improving on them \u2014 engineers can\u2019t engineer new versions of coal.<\/p>\n

By contrast, solar panels, wind turbines, and appliances like induction stoves only get better \u2014 more efficient and cheaper \u2014 with time. Energy experts believe solar power, the price of which fell 90 percent<\/a> between 2010 and 2020, will continue to proliferate across the landscape. (Last year, the United States added three times as much solar capacity<\/a> as natural gas.) Heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces<\/a> in the U.S., due in part to government incentives. Last year, Maine announced it had reached its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule<\/a>, in part thanks to state rebates. So if the Trump administration cut off the funding for heat pumps that the IRA provides, states could pick up the slack.<\/p>\n

\"renewable<\/p>\n

Local utilities are also finding novel ways to use heat pumps. Over in Massachusetts, for example, the utility Eversource Energy is experimenting with \u201cnetworked geothermal,\u201d in which the homes within a given neighborhood tap into water pumped from underground<\/a>. Heat pumps use that water to heat or cool a space, which is vastly more efficient than burning natural gas. Eversource and two dozen other utilities, representing about half of the country\u2019s natural gas customers, have formed a coalition to deploy more networked geothermal systems.<\/p>\n

Beyond being more efficient, green tech is simply cheaper to adopt. Consider Texas, which long ago divorced its electrical grid from the national grid so it could skirt federal regulation<\/a>. The Lone Star State is the nation\u2019s biggest oil and gas producer,<\/a> but it gets 40 percent of its total energy<\/a> from carbon-free sources.<\/p>\n

\u201cTexas has the most solar and wind of any state<\/a>, not because Republicans in Texas love renewables, but because it\u2019s the cheapest form of electricity there,\u201d said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a climate research nonprofit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The next top three states<\/a> for producing wind power \u2014 Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas \u2014 are red, too.<\/p>\n

State regulators are also pressuring utilities to slash emissions, further driving the adoption of wind and solar power. As part of California\u2019s goal of decarbonizing its power by 2045, the state increased battery storage<\/a> by 757 percent between 2019 and 2023. Even electric cars<\/a> and electric school buses can provide backup power<\/a> for the grid. That allows utilities to load up on bountiful solar energy during the day, then drain those batteries at night \u2014 essential for weaning off fossil fuel power plants. Trump could slap tariffs on imported solar panels and thereby increase their price, but that would likely boost domestic manufacturing of those panels, helping the fledgling photovoltaic manufacturing industry in red states<\/a> like Georgia and Texas.<\/p>\n

The irony of Biden\u2019s signature climate bill is states that overwhelmingly support Trump are\u00a0some of the largest recipients of its funding. That means tampering with the IRA could land a Trump administration in political peril even with Republican control of the Senate, if not Congress. In addition to providing incentives to households (last year alone, 3.4 million American families claimed more than $8 billion in tax credits<\/a> for home energy improvements), the legislation has so far resulted in $150 billion<\/a> of new investment in the green economy since it was passed in 2022, boosting the manufacturing of technologies like batteries and solar panels. According to Atlas Public Policy, a research group, that could eventually create 160,000 jobs.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething like 66 percent of all of the spending in the IRA has gone to red states,\u201d Hausfather said. \u201cThere certainly is a contingency in the Republican party now that\u2019s going to support keeping some of those subsidies around.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before Biden\u2019s climate legislation passed, much more progress was happening at a state and local level. New York, for instance, set a goal to\u00a0reduce its greenhouse gas emissions<\/a> from 1990 levels by 40 percent by 2030, and 85 percent by 2050. Colorado, too, is aiming to slash emissions by at least 90 percent by 2050<\/a>. The automaker Stellantis has signed an agreement with the state of California promising to meet the state\u2019s zero-emissions vehicle mandate even if a judicial or federal action overturns it. It then sells those same cars in other states.<\/p>\n

\"heat<\/p>\n

\u201cState governments are going to be the clearest counterbalance to the direction that Donald Trump will take the country on environmental policy,\u201d said Thad Kousser, co-director of the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at the University of California, San Diego. \u201cCalifornia and the states that ally with it are going to try to adhere to tighter standards if the Trump administration lowers national standards.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Last week, 62 percent of Washington state voters soundly rejected a ballot initiative<\/a> seeking to repeal a landmark law that raised funds to fight climate change.<\/p>\n

\u201cDonald Trump\u2019s going to learn something that our opponents in our initiative battle learned: Once people have a benefit, you can\u2019t take it away,\u201d Washington Governor Jay Inslee said in a press call Friday. \u201cHe is going to lose in his efforts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, because governors, mayors of both parties, are going to say, \u2018This belongs to me, and you\u2019re not going to get your grubby hands on it.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even without federal funding, states regularly embark on their own large-scale projects to adapt to climate change. California voters, for instance, just overwhelmingly approved a $10 billion bond<\/a> to fund water, climate, and wildfire prevention projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat will be an example,\u201d said Saharnaz Mirzazad, executive director of the U.S. branch of ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability. \u201cYou can use that on a state level or local level to have [more of] these types of bonds. You can help build some infrastructure that is more resilient.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Urban areas, too, have been major drivers of climate action: In 2021, 130 U.S. cities signed a U.N.-backed pledge<\/a> to accelerate their decarbonization<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving an unsupportive federal government, to say the least, will be not helpful,\u201d said David Miller, managing director at the Centre for Urban Climate Policy and Economy at C40, a global network of mayors fighting climate change. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean at all that climate action will stop. It won\u2019t, and we\u2019ve already seen that twice in recent U.S. history, when Republican administrations pulled out of international agreements. Cities step to the fore.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And not in isolation, because mayors talk: Cities share information about how to write legislation, such as laws that reduce carbon emissions in buildings and ensure that new developments are connected to public transportation. They transform their food systems to grow more crops locally, providing jobs and reducing emissions associated with shipping produce from afar.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf anything,\u201d Miller said, \u201chaving to push against an administration, like that we imagine is coming, will redouble the efforts to push at the local level.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Federal funding \u2014 like how the U.S. Forest Service has been handing out $1.5 billion<\/a> for planting trees in urban areas, made possible by the IRA \u2014 might dry up for many local projects, but city governments, community groups, and philanthropies will still be there.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou picture a web, and we\u2019re taking scissors or a machete or something, and chopping one part of that web out,\u201d said Elizabeth Sawin, the director of the Multisolving Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes climate solutions. \u201cThere\u2019s this resilience of having all these layers of partners.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All told, climate progress has been unfolding on so many fronts for so many years \u2014 often without enough support from the federal government \u2014 that it will persist regardless of who occupies the White House.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis too shall pass, and hopefully we will be in a more favorable policy environment in four years,\u201d Hausfather said. \u201cIn the meantime, we\u2019ll have to keep trying to make clean energy cheap and hope that it wins on its merits.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n