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In 2025, it’s time for stern resolve and bold maneuvers.
Five years from the emergence of the disease, the world — and the climate — is still grappling with its effects.
It’s going to be worse than 2008.
A cynical optimist’s take on the Inflation Reduction Act.
I won’t sugar coat this: The election of Donald Trump to a second term with a likely governing trifecta has dealt a devastating blow to U.S. efforts to cut climate-warming pollution.
I’ve spent the past four years analyzing the progress made under the Biden-Harris Administration as leader of the REPEAT Project, which uses energy systems models to rapidly assess the impact of federal energy and climate policies. In that time, the passage of landmark legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — and finalization of key federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, cars and trucks, and oil and gas supply chains put the U.S. on track to more than double its pace of decarbonization and avoid about 6 billion tons of cumulative emissions through 2035. Though even that progress was not enough: Recent policies would do only about half the work required to bend U.S. emissions onto a net-zero pathway by 2035.
A President Harris would have fought to protect and build on the efforts of the past four years. Now that opportunity is lost. One notable climate scientist even declared a second Trump term “game over for the climate.”
With Trump once again ascendant and seemingly committed to dismantling the historic climate progress made by the United States over the past four years, one can be forgiven for feeling anguish about the opportunities we’ve lost, rage about the very real suffering that will result from further delay, or deep despair about the darker days ahead.
But only for a moment. Because the fight to defend that progress begins today, and there is no time to lose.
In 1992, the nations of the world established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and pledged to "prevent dangerous human induced interference with the climate system." As the parties to the UNFCCC gather once again in Azerbaijan this December, one thing should be clear to all: We have failed in that task. This year is virtually certain to be the warmest on record and the first to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. Wildfires and droughts, hurricanes and floods now seem to strike with alarming frequency and terrible ferocity.
Yet the best science tells us that climate change is not like an asteroid hurtling towards earth, an all-or-nothing battle for survival. Rather, scientists tell us that every billion tons of CO2 and every 10th of a degree of warming we prevent will save lives, prevent suffering, and avoid countless damage.
The fight cannot be surrendered, and the project of building a world where the lives and aspirations of 8-going-on-10 billion people can be powered by clean, abundant energy remains essential.
Indeed, I have been in this fight long enough to have experienced several gutting defeats before — and to have witnessed real, transformative progress.
When I began my career nearly two decades ago, a good onshore wind project cost $100 to $200 per megawatt-hour, two to five times the average cost of fossil power. Germany had just launched a subsidy program paying a lavish €400 to €500 per megawatt-hour for solar photovoltaics. And it would be several years still before the first Tesla Roadster would even hit the streets.
Today, either solar or wind power is the cheapest way to generate new electricity almost everywhere in the world, and the International Energy Agency expects solar to overtake nuclear, wind, hydro, gas, and, finally, coal, to become the largest source of electricity in the world by 2033. Here in the U.S., clean electricity and battery storage constitute virtually all of the more than 2.5 terawatts of projects requesting interconnection to our grids. Likewise, electric vehicles (whether two-, three-, or four-wheeled) are now the cheapest and fastest growing mobility solution for those in emerging economies and the rich world alike. One in five cars and trucks sold globally are now electric — in China, that figure is nearing 50%.
Annual U.S. emissions are more than a billion metric tons (or 16%) lower than their peak in 2007, even as the economy is 40% larger. The European Union has cut emissions by 37% from their peak, and by 8% in 2023 alone. Even China, the world’s top polluter, may have seen its emissions peak in 2023 — seven years ahead of schedule.
In sum, the trajectory of global emissions has been wrestled down from inexorable rise to plateau and impending peak. That may not be enough to prevent dangerous climate change, but it is sufficient to transform the outlook from a bleak world of around 4 degrees of warming and put a much more manageable world of 2 degrees within reach.
The truth is that Donald Trump can only slow, not stop the clean energy transition. The U.S. is only responsible for about a 10th of global emissions, and China, not America, is now the world’s largest market (by far) for cars and trucks, electricity, and industrial commodities like steel and cement. Trump cannot wind back the clock on technological innovation or dampen the appetite for EVs and clean energy in the rest of the world. Emerging climate technologies like decarbonized steel, cement and industrial heat can take root elsewhere, even if they face dimmer prospects in America. And a bipartisan consensus to advance technologies like geothermal, nuclear, and carbon capture in the U.S. remains.
While executive actions can be easily repealed, the legislative achievements of the past four years lower energy prices for American consumers and businesses, have sparked a long-promised American manufacturing renaissance, and direct substantial investment and job creation to Republican-represented districts and states. Texas, that paragon of conservatism, is now the undisputed king of clean energy. Factories producing batteries, EVs and solar panels are sprouting across Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and beyond. Clean energy is now big business, and influential companies stand to lose billions if the Inflation Reduction Act is repealed. With Republicans securing razor-thin legislative majorities, these laws could thus prove surprisingly durable.
In times of struggle and defeat, those brave champions of civil rights would remind themselves that, though long, the arc of history bends towards justice. Today, it remains our collective task to continue to bend the arc of global emissions towards net zero.
Vice President Harris began her historic campaign by declaring, “When we fight, we win!” That isn’t always the case, but we can say with absolute certainty that if we give up the fight, we are guaranteed defeat.
There is no “game over” in the fight against climate change. The next battle begins today.
A counter-proposal for the country’s energy future.
American electricity consumption is growing for the first time in generations. And though low-carbon technologies such as solar and wind have scaled impressively over the past decade, many observers are concerned that all this new demand will provide “a lifeline for more fossil fuel production,” as Senator Martin Heinrich put it.
In response, a few policy entrepreneurs have proposed novel regulations known as “additionality” requirements to handle new sources of electric load. First suggested for electrolytic hydrogen, additionality standards would require that subsidized hydrogen producers source their electricity directly from newly built low-carbon power plants; in a Heatmap piece from September, Brian Deese and Lisa Hansmann proposed similar requirements for new artificial intelligence. And while AI data centers were their focus, the two argued that additionality “is a model that can be extended to address other sectors facing growing energy demand.”
There is some merit to additionality standards, particularly for commercial customers seeking to reduce their emissions profile. But we should be skeptical of writing these requirements into policy. Strict federal additionality regulations will dampen investment in new industries and electrification, reduce the efficiency of the electrical grid through the balkanization of supply and demand, and could become weapons as rotating government officials impose their views on which sources of demand or supply are eligible for the standards. The grid and the nation need a regulatory framework for energy abundance, not burdensome additionality rules.
After decades of end-use efficiency improvements, offshoring of manufacturing, and shifts toward less material-intensive economies, a confluence of emerging factors are pushing electricity demand back up again. For one, the nation is electrifying personal vehicles, home heating, and may do the same for industrial processes like steel production in the not-too-distant future, sparked by a combination of policy and commercial investment. Hydrogen, which has long been a marginal fuel, is attractingsubstantial interest. And technological innovation is leading to whole new sources of electric load — compute-hungry artificial intelligence beingthe most immediate example, but also large-scale critical minerals refining, indoor agriculture like alternative protein cultivation and aquaculture, and so on.
In recent years, clean energy has seemed to be on an unstoppable path toward dominating the power sector. Coal-fired generation has been in terminal decline in the United States as natural gas power plants and solar and wind farms have become more competitive. Flexible gas generation, likewise, is increasingly crowded out by renewables when the wind is blowing and the sun shining. These trends persisted in the context of stable electricity load. But even as deployment accelerates, low-carbon electricity supply may not be able to keep up with the surprisingly robust growth in demand. The most obvious — though not the exclusive — way for utilities and large corporates to meet that demand is often with new or existing natural gas capacity. Even a few coal plants have delayed retirement, reportedly in response to rising demand and reliability concerns.
Given the durable competitiveness of coal and especially natural gas, some form of additionality requirement might make sense for hydrogen production in particular, since hydrogen is not just a nascent form of electric load but a novel fuel in its own right. Simply installing an electrolyzer at an existing coal or natural gas plant could produce hydrogen that, from a lifecycle perspective, would result in higher carbon emissions, even if it displaces fossil fuels like gas or oil in final consumption. Even so, many experts caution that overly strict additionality standards for hydrogen at this stage are overkill, and may smother the industry in its crib.
Likewise, large corporate entities and electricity customers adopting additionality requirements for their own operations can bolster investment in so-called “clean firm” generation like nuclear, geothermal, and fossil fuels with carbon capture. In just the past month, Google announced plans to back the construction of new small nuclear reactors, and Microsoft announced plans to purchase electricity for new data centers from the shuttered Three Mile Island power plant, the plant made famous by the 1979 meltdown but which only closed down in 2019. Three Mile Island’s $100-per-megawatt-hour price tag would have been unthinkable just a few years ago but is newly attractive.
Notice the problem Microsoft is trying to solve here: a lack of abundant, reliable electricity generation. Outdated technology licensing, onerous environmental permitting processes, and other regulatory barriers are obstructing the deployment of renewables, advanced nuclear energy, new enhanced geothermal technologies, and low-carbon sources. Additionality fixes none of these issues. Of course, Deese and Hansmann propose “a dedicated fast-track approval process” for verifiably additional low-carbon generation supplying new sources of AI load. Yet this should be the central effort, not the after-the-fact add-on. The back and forth over additionality rules for the clean hydrogen tax credit is a case in point. The rules for the tax credit will (likely) be finalized by January, but lawsuits already loom over them. Expanding this contentious additionality requirement to apply to broad use cases will be even more contentious without solving the actual shortage data center companies care about. Conversations about additionality are a distraction and misplace the energies of policymakers and staff.
Substituting one regulatory thicket for another is a recipe for stasis. Instead of adding more red tape, we should be working to cut through it, fast-tracking the energy transition and fostering abundance.
With such broad requirements, what’s to stop future administrations from expanding them to cover electric vehicle charging, electric arc furnace steelmaking, alternative protein production, or any politically disfavored source of new demand? Could a second Trump Administration use additionality to punish political enemies in the tech industry? Could a Harris Administration do the same? What if a future administration maintained additionality standards for new sources of load, but required that the electricity come from fossil fuels instead of low-carbon sources?
Zero-sum regulatory contracts between sources of electricity supply and demand are not simply at risk of becoming a tool for handing out favors on a partisan basis — they already are one. Two pieces of model legislation proposed at the July meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators that collaborate to write off-the-shelf legislative measures, would require public utility commissions to prioritize dispatchable generation and formally discourage intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind. One of the proposals suggests leaning on state attorneys general to extend the lifespans of coal plants threatened with retirement.
These proposals did not move forward this year, but it is unlikely that the motivating force behind them is exhausted. And whatever one thinks of the relative merits of intermittent versus firm generation, ALEC’s proposals demonstrate just how easily gamed regulations like additionality could be and the risks of relying on administrative discretion instead of universal, pragmatic rules.
This is not how the electric grid is supposed to work. The grid is, if not an according-to-Hoyle public good, a shared public resource, providing essential services to customers large and small. Homeowners don’t have to sign additionality contracts with suppliers when they buy an electric car or replace their gas furnace with an electric heat pump. Everyone understands that such requirements would slow the pace of electrification and investment in new industries. The same holds for corporate customers and novel sources of load.
The real problem facing the AI, hydrogen, nuclear, geothermal, and renewables industries is an inability to build. There are more than enough clean generators queueing to enter the system — 2.6 terawatts at last count, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The unfortunate reality, however, is that just one in five of these projects will make it through — and those represent just 14% of the capacity waiting to connect. Still, this totals about 360 gigawatts of new energy generation over the next few years, much more than the predicted demand from AI data centers. Obstacles to technology licensing, permitting, interconnection, and transmission are the key bottlenecks here.
Would foregoing additionality requirements and loosening regulatory strictures on technology licensing and permitting increase the commercial viability of new or existing fossil fuel capacity, as Deese and Hansmann warn? Perhaps, on some margin. But for the foreseeable future, the energy projects and infrastructure most burdened by regulatory requirements will be low-carbon ones. Batteries, solar, and wind projects make up more than 80% of the queue added in 2023. Meanwhile, oil and gas benefit from categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act, while low-carbon technologies are subject to stricter standards (although three permitting bills recently passed the House, including one that waives these requirements for new geothermal projects).
Consider that 40% of projects supported by the Inflation Reduction Act are caught up in delays. That is $84 billion of economic activity just waiting for the paperwork to be figured out, according to the Financial Times. Additionality requirements are additional boxes to check that almost necessarily imply additional delays. Permitting reform makes them redundant and unnecessary for a cleaner future.
This underscores perhaps the most essential conflict between strict additionality requirements and clean energy abundance. Ensuring that every new policy and every new source of demand allows for absolutely zero additional fossil fuel consumption or emissions will prove counterproductive to global decarbonization in the long run. Natural gas is still reducing emissions on the margin in the United States. Over the past decade, in years with higher natural gas prices, coal generation has ticked up, indicating that the so-called “natural gas bridge” has not yet reached its terminus. Even aggressive decarbonization scenarios now expect a substantial role for natural gas over the coming decades. And in the long term, natural gas plants may prove wholly compatible with abundant, low-carbon electricity systems if next-generation carbon capture technologies prove scalable.
The United States is the world’s energy technology R&D and demonstration laboratory. If policies to prune marginal fossil fuel consumption here stall domestic investment and scaling of low-carbon technologies — as current permitting regulations already do, and proposed additionality requirements would do — then we will not only slow U.S. decarbonization, but also inhibit our ability to export affordable and scalable low-carbon technologies abroad.
Environmental progress’s surest path is in speeding up. For that to happen, we need processes that allow for rapid deployment of clean energy solutions. Expediting technology licensing, fast-tracking federal infrastructure permitting, and finding opportunities for quicker and more rational interconnections should be first and foremost.
The real solution lies in building a regulatory environment where energy abundance can flourish. Clearing the path for clean energy development, we can achieve a future where energy is affordable, reliable, and abundant—a future where the United States leads in both decarbonization and economic growth. It’s time to stop adding barriers and start speeding up progress.
