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New York’s Attentive Energy is now on pause, meaning more pollution, stalled plans, and a tighter margin for error.
As soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of November’s presidential election, climate advocates vowed to continue making progress at the state and local level. But some local projects may still depend too much on federal policy to move forward.
The president-elect’s influence has already put a highly anticipated plan to convert New York City’s biggest power plant into a renewable energy hub on shaky ground. Central to the conversion is a 1,400-megawatt offshore wind farm called Attentive Energy developed by TotalEnergies. Trump, a longtime critic of the industry, has made vague threats to “end” offshore wind “on day one.” While that overstates his capabilities, his administration will, at the very least, have the power to slow the processing of permits.
The regulatory uncertainty was enough to convince Patrick Pouyanne, the CEO of TotalEnergies, to put Attentive Energy on pause, he said at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London, according to Bloomberg — though he left open the possibility of reviving it “in four years.”
That’s bad news for the Ravenswood Generating Station in Long Island City, Queens. Ravenswood consists of three steam turbines built in the 1960s that run mostly on natural gas, though sometimes also on oil, plus a natural gas combined cycle unit built in 2004. Together, they emitted nearly 1.3 million metric tons of CO2 in 2023, or about 8% of the city’s carbon emissions from electricity production, while representing more than 20% of the city’s local generating capacity. Ravenswood is also situated across the street from the largest public housing project in the country, and has spewed pollution into the area colloquially referred to as “asthma alley” for decades.
Rise Light and Power, the company that owns the plant, has said it will redress those harms to the community by transforming the site into “Renewable Ravenswood.” The aspiration includes retiring the three 1960s-era generators and replacing them with offshore wind, battery energy storage, and additional renewable energy delivered from upstate New York via a new transmission line. Long term, the company says it will repurpose the plant’s cooling infrastructure to provide clean heating and cooling to buildings in the neighborhood.
Members of the community and local political leaders celebrated the proposal and showed up at rallies and public hearings to support it. Rise Light and Power also incorporated clean energy job training into the plan and earned the support of the union workers who operate the plant. The environmental group Earthjustice recently cited Renewable Ravenswood in a state filing as a shining example of “a more community-centered approach to energy planning.”
The website for Renewable Ravenswood declares that the plan “starts with offshore wind,” and says that “Attentive Energy One is the first step.” When Attentive Energy submitted its initial bid for a power contract with the state last year, Rise Light and Power CEO Clint Plummer told the local outlet City Limitsthat the wind farm “essentially unlocks ‘Renewable Ravenswood.’”
Now, it's unclear when the promised air quality benefits and jobs will materialize.
When I hopped on the phone with Plummer, the Ravenswood CEO, last week, he downplayed the implications of the pause.
“I don’t think it changes that much,” he told me, stressing that “project delays don't impact our commitment to the vision” and that “it’s simply part of the process of developing these large scale energy infrastructure projects.” Plummer said the company could continue to make progress on permitting, engineering, and other related work on the site and in the community in the meantime. Since New York state has significantly more control over onshore renewables and transmission, he said, it may be possible to move more quickly on those.
The pause on Attentive Energy may have come with or without Trump — the project, which is a joint venture between Rise Light and Power, TotalEnergies, and Corio, had already withdrawn its revised bid for a contract to sell power into New York’s energy market in October. When I asked Attentive for clarification, however, representatives didn’t respond.
The wind farm pause is the third big setback to the company’s replacement plans in as many years.
The first effort to bring clean energy to Ravenswood was a 316-megawatt battery project the New York Public Service Commission approved in 2019. It was slated to be completed by April 2021, but by January of that year, the company had not yet secured an offtake agreement with Con Edison, the local utility, and so asked for a three-year extension. The development still has not broken ground. “Our project, and most like it that have been proposed in New York City, are awaiting the State’s expected battery procurement next year,” a spokesperson told me when I asked for a status update. “We expect that projects that received State incentives through that program will likely be able to proceed to construction quickly.”
The company also submitted a bid to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority in May of 2021 to build a transmission line called the Catskills Renewable Connector that would be capable of delivering 1,200 megawatts of renewable energy from upstate solar and wind farms to the Ravenswood site, meeting up to 15% of the city’s electricity needs. But the agency passed over the proposal in favor of two other transmission lines — Clean Path New York, which would bring renewable power to the city from Western New York, and the Champlain Hudson Power Express, which would deliver hydropower from Canada. (While construction on the latter project is well underway, Clean Path was cancelled the day before Thanksgiving.)
“We weren't selected then, but we’ve continued to mature and advance that project,” Plummer told me, regarding the Catskills line. “All these projects take a very long period of time to realize.”
The only aspect of Renewable Ravenswood that’s still alive and kicking, at least publicly, is the Queensborough Renewable Express, a set of high-voltage power lines that would connect the site to any future offshore wind farms in New York Harbor. The company is currently awaiting approval on a key permit for the line from the New York Public Service Commission. But while much of the project is located within the jurisdiction of New York, part of it will also need federal approvals.
Plummer may not be too concerned about the wind farm’s delay, but a freeze on offshore wind development for the next four years would further stretch New York’s already strained climate goals.
New York law requires the state to get 70% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% from zero-emissions sources by 2040. The most recent progress report on those goals, compiled by the New York Power Authority, found that the state had enough renewable energy operating and contracted so far to supply about 44% of expected demand in 2030.
A separate state analysis showed that offshore wind would play a key role in reaching the target, with an expected 6 gigawatts of offshore wind generation getting New York about 15% of the way there. But so far, the state has finalized contracts for only about 1.7 gigawatts. Though New York has several additional contracts pending awards, none of those potential projects has yet submitted construction plans to the federal Bureau of Ocean Management. If that office freezes its offshore wind work for the next four years, it’s possible none of them will be able to start construction until the 2030s at the earliest.
“Four years may not be significant for project development time frames,” Daniel Zarrilli, the former chief climate policy advisor for the city of New York, told me. “But the state has these 2030 and 2040 goals, and so many pieces of what makes up the ability to hit those goals are under stress. So it’s certainly not good news.”
New Yorkers aren’t the only ones who will be affected by the pause. Attentive Energy was also working on two additional offshore wind projects that would send power to New Jersey. The developer had already secured a contract to sell power into that state from a 1.3-gigawatt project called Attentive Energy Two. In July, it submitted a bid to New Jersey’s fourth offshore wind solicitation for an additional, unnamed 1.3-gigawatt project. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is expected to reach a decision on that solicitation this month.
I reached out to TotalEnergies to ask whether all three projects were paused or just the New York one, but the company said it would not comment on Pouyanne’s speech. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities also did not respond as to whether Attentive had pulled either its awarded contract or bid.
It’s true that developing these projects takes a long time, and that anyone excited about Renewable Ravenswood should not have expected any new clean power to come into the site until the end of this decade, anyway. But further delays could have real consequences. “Any of these projects faltering is just going to keep New York City reliant on an aging and dirty fossil fleet,” said Zarrilli. The city is in a hole, he said, after the Indian Point nuclear plant closed and made it even more reliant on natural gas for electricity.
On my call with Plummer, he emphasized several times that the city has “the thinnest reserve margins we’ve had in decades” — in other words, it doesn’t have much wiggle room to meet increases in electricity demand. Rise Light and Power has already shut down 17 small gas “peaker” plants that were previously part of Ravenswood to make room for new renewable energy infrastructure. The city will be in better shape in 2026, assuming the Champlain Hudson Power Express finishes on time, according to the New York grid operator NYISO. But by the early 2030s, when additional peaker plants are expected to be shut down due to pollution regulations, New York could be back on thin ice.
By then, the steam turbines at Ravenswood will be nearly 70 years old. Unless significant additional generation comes online by then, Rise Light and Power could be forced to re-invest in those gas generators rather than retire them. “It’d be terrible if they were forced to make that choice in the future,” said Zarrilli.
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The Ways and Means Committee released its proposed budget language, and it’s not pretty for clean energy.
The House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, released its initial proposal to overhaul the nation’s clean energy tax credits on Monday afternoon. These are separate and in addition to the extensive cuts to Inflation Reduction Act grant programs proposed by the Energy and Commerce Committee, Transportation Committee, and Natural Resources Committee in the past few weeks.
Here’s a rundown of the tax credit proposal, which, at first glance, appears to amount to a back-door full repeal of the climate law. There’s a lot that could change before we get to a final budget, let alone have a text head to the Senate. We’ll have more analysis on what these changes would mean in the days and weeks to come.
The text proposes ending the tax credit for new EVs (that is, 30D) on December 31, 2025 — with one exception. The credit would remain in effect for one year, through the end of 2026, for vehicles produced by automakers that have sold fewer than 200,000 tax credit-qualified cars between 2010 and the end of this year. That means that no Teslas would qualify for the tax credit next year, as the company has sold far more than 200,000 tax credit-eligible vehicles. A new entrant to EVs, like Honda with its Prologue model, will likely still qualify.
The committee also proposes ending the tax credit for used EVs (25E) and commercial EVs (45W) by the end of this year. This would effectively end the “leasing loophole” that allowed Americans to redeem the tax credit on vehicles that didn’t qualify for 30D because they didn’t meet domestic content requirements, meaning consumers could get discounts on leases of a wide range of makes and models.
Lastly, the draft proposes terminating the tax credit for residential EV chargers (30C) at the end of this year.
The GOP has proposed an early phase-out of the technology-neutral production and investment tax credits, which subsidize zero-emissions power generation projects including wind, solar, energy storage, advanced nuclear, and geothermal. It also proposed significant changes for the years they remain in effect.
Currently, new clean electricity projects can earn a 2.75 cents for every kilowatt-hour they produce for the first 10 years under section 45Y of the tax code. Alternatively, project developers can get a 30% investment tax credit (48E) on new projects. The Inflation Reduction Act scheduled both of these programs to phase out beginning in 2032, and expire at the end of 2035. It included a major caveat, however: that this phase-out would only happen if greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power generation fell below 25% of 2022 levels. Otherwise, the tax credits would be maintained at their initial amounts until this target was met.
Under the GOP proposal, both credits would start to phase down in 2029, and new projects would no longer be eligible for either credit beginning in 2032. The proposal also cuts out a key provision that would have grandfathered many more projects into the tax credit. Under current law, a project only has to start construction within a certain year to qualify for that year’s tax credit amount. The draft text changes this, requiring a project to be “placed in service” before 2032 in order to qualify.
A separate tax credit for existing nuclear power generation (45U) would also phase down on the same timeline, despite Trump and other Republicans’ interest in boosting nuclear energy.
“Transferability” supercharged the nation’s clean energy tax credits by allowing project developers with low tax liability to sell their credits to another entity that stood to benefit from them. Previously, developers could only monetize their unusable tax credits through complicated tax equity deals.
Recipients of a wide range of tax credits, including those for clean manufacturing, clean fuels, carbon capture, nuclear power, and hydrogen, can all take advantage of transferability. The provision channeled new capital into the climate economy as corporations looking to reduce their tax liability began scooping up tax credits, indirectly helping to finance clean energy projects. It also helped lower the cost of wind and solar, as developers could earn a premium on tax credits compared to what they got for tax equity transfers, because the whole transaction was cheaper to do.
The proposal would get rid of this option across all of the tax credits beginning in 2028.
The proposal would also impose new sourcing requirements across all of the tax credits, prohibiting developers from using components, subcomponents, or critical minerals sourced from “foreign entities of concern,” a term that applies to companies based in China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. The consequences would be huge, as China dominates global markets for refined lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths — key materials used in clean energy technologies.
The draft text would also terminate the clean manufacturing credit (45X) in 2032 — one year earlier than under existing law. Wind energy components such as blades, towers, and gearboxes would lose their eligibility sooner, in 2028.
The text proposes repealing three tax credits for residential energy efficiency improvements at the end of 2025. Starting next year, homeowners would no longer be able to claim the Energy Efficiency Home Improvement Credit (25C), which provides up to $3,200 per year for home energy audits, energy-saving windows and doors, air sealing and insulation, heat pumps, and new electrical panels.
It also proposes killing the Residential Clean Energy Credit (25D), which offered homeowners 30% off the cost of solar panels and battery systems to store energy from those solar panels. This credit also subsidizes geothermal home heating systems.
Both of these tax credits have existed in some form since the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
The third credit that would end this year is an up to $5,000 subsidy for contractors who construct new, energy efficient homes (45L).
The proposal would not repeal the energy efficiency tax deduction for improvements made to commercial buildings (179D).
The Inflation Reduction Act created a technology-neutral tax credit for low-carbon transportation fuels, like sustainable aviation fuel and biodiesel (45Z). It operates on a sliding scale, depending on how carbon-intensive the fuel is. The credit is set to expire after 2027, however the GOP proposal would extend it for four years, through the end of 2031.
That said, it would also make a significant change to how the credit is calculated, making it much easier for projects with questionable emissions benefits to qualify. Under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department issued rules that said producers had to account for the emissions tied to indirect land use changes resulting from fuel production. That meant that corn ethanol producers, for example, had to account for the expansion of croplands resulting from the increase of biofuel production and use — which would, in most cases, disqualify corn ethanol from claiming the tax credit. But under the GOP proposal, producers would explicitly not have to account for indirect land use changes.
The GOP proposal would deal a rapid and ruthless death blow to the 45V clean hydrogen production tax credit, requiring developers to begin construction before the end of this year if they want to claim it.
Other than ending transferability, the text makes no changes to the 45Q carbon capture and sequestration tax credit.
Most of the tax credits have provisions that allow project developers to qualify for higher amounts if they pay prevailing wages, hire apprentices, build in a qualified “energy community” or a low-income community, or use a certain percentage of domestically-produced materials. This initial draft from the GOP would not change any of those provisions.
The Energy and Commerce Committee dropped its budget proposal Sunday night.
Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce unveiled their draft budget proposal Sunday night, which features widespread cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean energy and environment programs.
The legislative language is part of the House’s reconciliation package, an emerging tax and spending bill that will seek to extend much of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with reduced spending on the IRA and Medicaid helping to balance the budgetary scales.
The Energy and Commerce committee covers energy and environmental programs, while the Ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction over the core tax credits of the IRA that power much of America’s non-carbon power generation. Ways and Means has yet to release its draft budget proposal, which will be another major shoe to drop.
The core way the Energy and Commerce proposal generates budgetary savings is by proposing “rescissions” to existing programs, whereby unspent money would be yanked away.
The language also includes provisions to auction electromagnetic spectrum, as well as changes to Medicaid.Overall, the Congressional Budget Office told the committee, the recommendations would “reduce deficits by more than $880 billion” from 2025 to 2034, which was the target the committee was instructed to hit. The Sierra Club estimated that the cuts specifically to programs designed to help decarbonize heavy industry would add up to $1.6 billion.
The proposed rescissions would affect a number of energy financing and grant programs, including:
And that’s just the “energy” cuts. The language also includes a number of cuts to environmental programs, including:
Lastly, the proposal would also repeal federal tailpipe emission standards starting in the 2027 model year. These rules, which were finalized just last year, would have provided a major boost to the electric vehicle industry, perhaps pushing EV sales to over half of all new car sales by the beginning of the next decade. The language also repeals the latest gas-mileage standards, which were released last year and would have applied to the 2027 through 2031 model years, eventually bumping up miles-per-gallon industry-wide to over 50 by the 2031 model year.
What the Council on Foreign Relations’ new climate program gets drastically wrong.
Let’s start with two basic facts.
First, the climate crisis is here now, killing people, devastating communities, and destroying infrastructure in Los Angeles and Asheville and Spain and Pakistan and China. And it will get worse.
Second, Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He began the process to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on January 20, 2025, his first day in office in his second term. (He, of course, did this in his first term as well.) He illegally froze funding for climate programs that had passed and became law during the Biden administration, and his administration continues to ignore court orders to unfreeze these monies. He has signed numerous executive orders, including onreinvigorating clean [sic] coal,reversing state-level climate policies, “Zero-based regulatory budgeting to unleash American energy,” and “unleashing” American energy, the last of which revoked more than a dozen Biden era executive orders.
How do we address a world that is increasingly shaped by these two facts?
One attempt can be seen in the Council on Foreign Relations’s new “Climate Realism Initiative.” Its statement of purpose attempts to make climate action palatable to MAGA world by securitizing it, framing climate change as a foreign threat to Fortress America. It calls for investing in next-generation technologies and geoengineering in the hopes of leapfrogging the Chinese-led clean energy revolution that is beginning to decarbonize the world today is the best realistic way forward.
This attempt is doomed to failure. Real climate realism for the United States is to stop the destruction of American state capacity, and then to reflect and build on areas of core strength including finance and software.
CRI’s launch document does not call for the U.S. to reduce its own emissions. I’ll say that again: There is no call for the U.S. to reduce its own emissions in the essay establishing the mission and objectives of the Climate Realism Initiative. Written by Varun Sivaram, formerly chief strategy and innovation officer at wind energy developer Orsted and now the leader of the initiative, the essay proposes that four dug-in “fallacies” are getting in the way of effective policy-making: that climate change “poses a manageable risk” to the U.S.; that “the world’s climate targets are achievable;” that the clean energy transition is a “win-in for U.S. interests and climate action;” and that “reducing U.S. domestic greenhouse gas emissions can make a meaningful difference.” For Sivaram, the problem is always other places and their emissions.
He then goes on to propose three “pillars” of climate realism: the need for America to prepare for a world “blowing through climate targets;” to “invest in globally competitive clean technology industries;” and to “lead international efforts to avert truly catastrophic climate change.” How an America that does not commit to reduce its own emissions will have any credibility or standing to lead international efforts is left unstated.
Sivaram attempts to trick the reader into overlooking America’s emissions by ignoring the facts of the past and focusing instead on guesses about the future. It’s true that in 2023, China produced more than a quarter of new global carbon pollution — more than the United States, Europe, and India combined. But no country has contributed more to the blanket of pollution that traps additional heat in our atmosphere than the United States, which has emitted over 430 billion tons of CO2, or 23% of the world’s total historical emissions. Even in 2023, the U.S. remained the world’s number two carbon polluter.
Sivaram goes further than merely minimizing the U.S. role in creating our current climate problems. Indeed, he sets up climate change as a problem that foreign countries are imposing on Americans. “Foreign emissions,” he writes, “are endangering the American homeland,” and the effects of climate disasters “resemble those if China or Indonesia were to launch missiles at the United States.” There is something to this rhetoric that is powerful — we should think about climate-induced disasters as serious threats and respond to them with the kind of resources that we lavish on the military industrial complex. But the idea that it is foreign emissions that are the primary source of this danger is almost Trumpian.
The initiatives proposed in the Climate Realism launch are the initiatives of giving up. Investing in resilience and adaptation is needed in any scenario, but tying this spending on adaptation to Trumpian notions of protecting our borders reeks of discredited lifeboat ethics, which only cares to save ourselves and leaves others to suffer for our sins. And while supporting next-generation technologies is an appropriate piece of the policy puzzle, they should be like the broccoli at a steakhouse: off to the side and mostly superfluous compared with the meat and potatoes of deployment and mitigation to decarbonize today.
Sivaram may argue that there’s no point in trying to compete against China in the technologies of today when Chinese firms are so dominant and apparently willing to make these products while earning minimal profits. And from a parochial profit-maximizing perspective, there is a business case that firms should not be building lots of new solar cell manufacturing facilities given global manufacturing capacity.
But if American automotive firms simply ignore the coming EV wave and hope against hope that some breakthrough in solid state batteries will allow them to leapfrog over the firms vying today, they are fooling themselves. Electric vehicle giant BYD and world-leading battery manufacturer CATL have both announced batteries that can charge a car in five minutes. Both are also moving in the solid state space, and CATL is pushing into sodium ion batteries.
The notion that U.S. firms ought to sit out this fight for strategic reasons also ignores how China has come to dominate these sectors — by investing in today’s state of the art and pushing it forward through incremental process improvements at scale. The Thielian notion that “competition is for losers” leads to an immense amount of waste as wannabe founders search for unbreakable technological advantages. If venture capitalists want to fund such bets, I’m not going to stop them. But as a policy prescription for climate realism, it fails.
The final gambit of the essay is to advocate for America-controlled geoengineering. This, too, is an area where research may be needed. But regardless, it is the kind of emergency backup plan that you hope that you never need to use, rather than something that should be central to anyone’s policy strategy. Trump is currently decimating American capacity to research hard problems, whether they be cancer or vaccines or social science or anything else, so it is difficult to imagine that this administration is likely to spend real resources to investigate geoengineering.
The Climate Realism Initiative pitches itself as “bipartisan.” But where is the MAGA coalition that supports this? Even simple spending on adaptation and resilience seems unlikely to find much of a political home given the Trump administration’s drastic cuts in weather and disaster forecasting. Sivaram even mentions the need to balance the budget as part of climate realism, which must be a sick joke. For all of the fanfare over cuts to the federal government under Trump, the budget deficit is the last thing that they care about. Tax cuts remain the coin of the realm, with the House budgetary guidelines expanding the deficit by $2.8 trillion. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, similarly, has a distorted notion of government efficiency, ignoring the returns to government investments and gutting the tax collection capacity of the IRS.
The Biden administration had plans — “all of the above” energy among them — that were coherent, if not necessarily the most appealing to the world. They were based on the idea that a resilient climate coalition in the U.S. required more than just deploying Chinese-made products.
CRI seems to want to engage instead in a fantasy conversation where anti-Chinese nationalism can unite Americans to fight climate change — an all-form, no-content negative sum realpolitik that does little to address the real, compelling, and deeply political questions that the climate crisis poses.
Alternative visions are possible. The American economy is services based. Americans and American firms will inevitably make some of the hardware components of the energy transition, but the opportunities that play to our strengths are mostly on the software side.
It is critical to remember that the clean technologies that power the energy transition are categorically different from the fossil fuels that the world burned (and still burns) for energy. We do not require a constant stream of these technologies to operate our economy. The solar panels on your roof or in the field outside of town still generate electricity even if you can’t buy new ones because of a trade war. Same with wind turbines. In fact, renewables are a source of energy security because the generation happens from domestic natural resources — the sun and wind. Yet smart thinkers like Jake Sullivan fall into the trap of treating “dependence” on Chinese renewable technologies as analogous to European dependence on Russian natural gas.
Even China’s ban on U.S.-bound rare earth exports won’t make much of a dent. Despite the name, rare earths aren’t that rare, and while China does dominate their processing, it’s a tiny industry; in making fun of the “critical” nature of rare earths, Bloomberg opinion writer Javier Blas noted that the total imports of rare earths from China to the U.S. in 2024 was $170 million, or about 0.03% of U.S.-China trade. That being said, the major concern is if supplies fall to zero then major processes that require tiny amounts of rare earths (like Yttria and turbine construction) could be completely halted with serious fallout.
The American government should carefully choose what industries it would like to support. Commodity factories that have little-to-no profits, like solar cells, seem unattractive. There are many more jobs in installing solar than there are in manufacturing it, after all.
On the other hand, sectors with a much larger existing domestic industry, such as wind turbines and especially automobiles, should not be left to wither. But rather than a tariff wall to protect them, the U.S. auto firms should be encouraged to partner with the leading firms — even if those firms are Chinese — to build joint ventures in the American heartland, so that they and the American people can participate in the EV shift.
But the core of real climate realism for the United States is not about new factories. It’s about playing to our strengths. The United States has the best finance and technology sectors in the world, and these should be used to help decarbonize at home and around the world. This climate realism agenda can come in left- and right-wing flavors. A leftist vision is likely state-led with designs, guides, and plans, while the right-wing vision relies on markets.
Take Texas. On May 7, 2020, the Texas grid set a record with 21.4 gigawatts of renewable electricity generation. Just five years later, that figure hit 41.9 gigawatts. Solar and batteries have exploded on the grid, with capacity hitting 30 gigawatts and 10 gigawatts respectively. They have grown so rapidly because of the state’s market-based system, with its low barriers to interconnection and competitive dynamics.
Of course, not every location is blessed with as much wind, sun, and open space as Texas. But there’s no reason why its market systems can’t be a template for other states and countries. This, too, is industrial policy — not just the factory workers building the technologies or even the installers deploying them. There is lots of work for the lawyers and power systems engineers and advertisers and policy analysts and bankers and consultants, as well.
Yet instead of seizing these real chances to push climate action forward at home and abroad, the Trump administration is eviscerating American state capacity, the rule of law, and global trust in the government. The whipsawing of Trump’s tariffs generates uncertainty that undercuts investment. The destruction of government support for scientific exploration hits at the next-generation moonshots that Sivaram is so enamored of, as well as the institutions that educate our citizens and train our workforce. Trump’s blatant disregard for court orders and his regime’s cronyism undercut belief in the rule of law, and that investments will rise and fall based on their economics rather than how close they are to the President.
But it’s not just Trump. Texas legislators are on the verge of destroying the golden goose of cheap electricity through rapid renewables deployment out of a desire to own the libs. Despite the huge economic returns to rural communities that have seen so much utility-scale expansion in the state, some Republican legislators are pushing bills that would stick their fingers into the electricity market pie, undercutting the renewable expansion and mandating expensive gas expansion.
The Trump business coalition, which was mostly vibes in the first place, is fracturing. There are conflicting interests between those who want to fight inflation and those who see low oil prices as a problem. Pushing down oil prices by pressuring OPEC+ to pump more crude and depressing global economic outlooks with the trade war (Degrowth Donald!) has hurt the frackers in Texas. Ironically, one way to lower their costs is to electrify operations, so they don’t have to rely on expensive diesel.
Climate change is here, but so is Donald Trump. Ignoring either one is a recipe for disaster as they both create destructive whirlwinds and traffic in uncertainty. The real solution to both is mitigation — doing everything possible today to stop as much of the damage as possible before it happens.