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Donald Trump first took the office of the president in January 2017, having called climate change a Chinese-invented hoax and promising to “end the war on coal.” He quickly went to work reversing the climate policy of the previous administration, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and tossing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which restricted greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. He opened up public lands for oil and gas development and jacked up tariffs on solar panels. His budgets continually called for slashing energy research and development done by the federal government’s national laboratories.
And yet emissions fell. In 2016, U.S. annual emissions from industry and energy were 5.25 billion tonnes. In 2021, after Trump left office and in spite of all his many major policy reversals, they were 5.03 billion, more than 4% lower than when he started.
Can it happen again? Trump is returning to Washington amidst a vastly different energy, economic, and climate moment. To meet even looser versions of international climate goals (the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit set in Paris is now essentially dead) requires drastic emissions cuts, beyond the business-as-usual reductions Trump oversaw in his first four years in office. Even those passive cuts may be harder to come by this time around, however, as the dirtiest fuels now make up a smaller portion of the energy mix and electricity demand looks to grow quickly for the first time in decades.
One reason for the steady reductions during Trump’s first term was that the “war on coal” continued apace, driven as much by market forces as anything else. Buoyed by the availability of natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables and depressed by the mounting costs of maintaining aging plants and directed activism against coal investment, plants shut down by the thousands of megawatts every year of Trump’s presidency.
“You have Trump promising to bring back coal: Not only do emissions continue to decline over the course of the Trump administration, on autopilot — to some degree, coal plants close faster in the Trump administration than the Obama administration,” Alex Trembath, deputy director of the energy-focused environmental group The Breakthrough Institute, told me, though he added: “These are secular trends in the short term that the presidency does not have a lot of influence over.”
While Trump has promised to aggressively pursue more drilling and fracking for oil and gas — and nominated an oil-and-gas state governor and a fracking executive to be his Secretaries of the Interior and Energy, respectively — there has been little to no talk of coal this time around. That’s not for lack of specificity. When Trump announced Chris Wright’s nomination to be Secretary of Energy, he mentioned nuclear, solar, geothermal, oil, and gas by name. When Burgum was announced, there were references to “liquid gold” and “ALL” forms of energy.
The coal industry sees hope in the new Trump administration, but its savior from senescence may be rising demand for electricity as much as public policy.
Even as the occupant of the White House changed in 2017, one thing that did not change was the continued slow growth in electricity demand. For about the first 20 years of this century, electricity load growth averaged about half a percent a year, including from 2017 to 2021. This made coal-to-gas switching easier to pull off.
“There was effectively no load growth — not just in those four years, from effectively 2008 to 2022,” Dennis Wamstad, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me.
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions stopped meaningfully rising in the early part of this century and finally peaked in 2009, according to Global Carbon Budget and Our World In Data, thanks to slow load growth, the recession, and the ascendance of natural gas in electricity generation. With next-to-no demand growth, utilities and energy companies could afford to retire their least efficient plants — and indeed, “declines in coal generation appear to be the largest driver of power sector emissions reductions” during the first Trump term, John Bistline, an energy analyst at the Electric Power Research Institute, told me in an email.
Since 2020 when electricity use dipped due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a combination of economic growth, electrification of home heating and transportation, new factories, and data centers have boosted five-year energy demand growth projections from 2.6% to 4.7%, a figure that the energy policy consulting firm Grid Strategies says may still be an underestimate.
This has meant some stalling on emissions reductions from burning fossil fuels. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has projected that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will flatten out in this year and next “because of small, counteracting changes in emissions from coal, natural gas, and petroleum products.” The EIA has also projected a slowdown in coal plant retirements, with this year on pace for the fewest since 2011. Several utilities and electricity markets have pushed out retirement dates to maintain reliability on the grid in the face of sudden demand spikes, including those in Georgia, Maryland, and possibly Indiana.
The chief financial officer of Duke Energy, which owns utilities in the Southeast and Midwest, told Bloomberg that the company’s plans to convert coal plants to co-fire with natural gas could be scrapped or delayed based on the new Trump administration’s plans for the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant emissions rules. “The pace of the energy transition could change,” he told Bloomberg.
Large coal retirements are still forecast for the rest of the decade, but planned shutdowns have shrunk from 34.2 gigawatts of coal capacity retired over the next three years to 30 gigawatts, a greater than 12% reduction, according to data from S&P Global Commodities Insights.
“American citizens cast their votes for change, a change for the working class, a change that will improve the economy, a change for thoughtful approaches to our energy future,” Emily Arthun, the chief executive officer of the American Coal Council, told me in an e-mailed statement. “Coal is a critical resource needed for the well-being of our economy and the well-being of our citizens.”
Wamstad, the energy analyst, argues that this slowdown is just that: a slowdown, and that the economic case against coal is still overwhelming. “We actually think that structural change is going to continue in the 2020s, regardless of demand growth,” Wamstad told me. “Our findings are more aggressive than EIA or S&P. We expect by end of decade we will have retired another 100,000 megawatts of coal capacity, and by 2030 or 2031 we’ll have retired two-thirds of all capacity.”
Trembath was a little more circumspect about the ability of renewables to meet the lost capacity from shut-down coal, especially if Trump takes an ax to the Inflation Reduction Act and permitting difficulties persist, especially for wind.
“There are quite a few bottlenecks on current trends that will make sustained decarbonization more difficult than it was [from] 2017 to 2021,” Trembath told me. Load growth will put pressure on renewables and other non-carbon sources to keep up, while natural gas turbine providers
are seeing orders double. “You have big announcements about small and advanced nuclear reactors, but a lot has to happen for new steel in the ground or Three Mile Island to reopen,” he said, referring to the splashy announcement Microsoft and Constellation made about restarting the 835-megawatt facility. “I think the most likely thing to meet a bunch of that load growth is natural gas.”
Even that may be a glass-half-full perspective, however.
“We have gas that is cheaper and we have renewables that are clearly cheaper and available now,” Wamstad said. Even if coal plants are kept open for another few years due to higher demand, “that’s a bad thing,” Wamstad said. “That doesn’t really change the direction we’re going — it changes the end date.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct the time horizon for Grid Strategies’ load growth projections
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.