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Turning his back on clean energy, the president issued a raft of executive orders in his first few hours in office turning his back on renewable energy and apparently EVs in favour of oil and gas.
“In the short term it’s going to be good for the US economy, with a boom in one sense, with cheap energy and so on,” said Ben Bland, director of the Asia-Pacific programme at Chatham House, at an ON FRONTLINE event in London.”Tap Here To Read Full Details
“In the long term, it’s probably going to start to put the US economy out of the game in terms of developing the green technologies we need for the future, and that probably gives China an advantage,” warns Bland.
Trump has again announced the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Trump signed several executive orders rescinding Joe Biden’s policies, including a halt to federal disbursements to manufacturers and infrastructure developers, funds which the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law had provided. As the Financial Times put it, it sent shockwaves around the clean energy industry.
Declaring a national energy emergency, he gave his new administration greater powers to expedite approvals for fossil fuels, biofuels, nuclear power and critical minerals projects – ostensibly to protect power supplies for data centres providing Artificial Intelligence – but not wind or solar.
Trump also announced he would stop leasing federal land for wind farms and ruled out the sale of new wind leases across all of the nation’s coastal waters. He also ordered the administration to consider eliminating subsidies and other policies favouring electric vehicles.
Trump’s move to halt the funding sent a shockwave through the clean energy sector. But how much difference is it really going to make?
Internationally and visually, it’s not great. “Pulling out one of the world superpowers from COP negotiations to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions is a big deal – as it allows other countries to slow their own decarbonisation and blame the U.S. instead of their own lack of ambition,” said Professor Mark Maslin, Professor of Climatology at UCL.
However, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement – for the second time – is unlikely to have the same sort of impact on international diplomacy, suggests Professor Chris Hilson, Director of the Reading Centre for Climate and Justice, University of Reading.
Negative Energy
“With Elon Musk’s influence, we might have expected a push to position the US as a new energy powerhouse, with a great lithium industry, a resurgent nuclear industry, and an internationally competitive EV auto and battery industry,” said Hilson. “Trump is a businessman. And he likes to win. Sticking to a fossil fuel economy is not likely to position the U.S. economy for the win. That’s not a matter of climate, it’s business.”
It’s unclear how much Trump intends to roll back on EVs. “If his intention is genuine, the U.S. auto industry risks becoming even more left behind in the race against China than it currently is,” Hilson said. “The U.S. could even start to look like Russia and Cuba once did, with a nation of old tech cars not found anywhere else. That would be an odd legacy.”
Trump is perhaps playing into the zeitgeist, agrees Bland. “Green stuff sounded good when economies were booming, and the price of everything was low, but with supply chain issues and war and inflation in the U.K. and other democracies, voters may be thinking ‘we can wait for those zero targets because we’ve got more pressing problems.’”
No Time To Wait:
Arguably, however, most countries can’t afford to wait. China, driven by a critical imperative to reduce its dependence on imported oil and gas, has invested considerably more in greener energy sources, including renewable electricity generation than other countries, including the U.S. which comes second in expenditure on this.
While China remains the world’s largest producer of coal, it is already leading in renewable energy, including wind, solar, hydroelectricity, and geothermal. It produces 31% of its electricity from these renewable sources, compared with the U.S. which produces 22%.
Data from Brookings shows that China drove a 50% rise in global renewable installations in 2023. In 2022, China installed as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined and doubled that amount in 2023.
The danger is that the U.S. will be left so far behind that it fails to be even the second largest player in the green economy.
Nor will Trump 2.0 stop the move towards green energy. The president has little influence on the growth of the global green economy, estimated to be worth over $10trn a year – 10% of the world’s GDP.
Maslin points out that there are at least 10 million jobs in the green economy in the U.S., compared with 300,000 in the fossil fuel industry. “The writing is on the wall both politically and economically for fossil fuels. It is when – not if – fossil fuels cease to be used as an energy source,” he said.
By reducing investment in green energy, the U.S. is not just delaying its own transition to a clean energy economy but also risking its position in the global green tech market.
“The world is in a very different place to what it was when Trump was last in power,” said Dr Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Environmental Policy. “The global move to renewable energy is now happening at an unprecedented pace.
Nothing the US government can do will change the simple fact that renewable energy is cheaper and more reliable than oil, gas and coal. Fossil fuels are a thing of the past. The world is moving on.”
The president may wish to review his policies if China pulls even further ahead of the U.S. in the green tech race.
