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Ideas

Ideas

Global Climate Politics Had a Rough 2024

In 2025, it’s time for stern resolve and bold maneuvers.

Green
Ideas

How Covid Shaped Climate Policy

Five years from the emergence of the disease, the world — and the climate — is still grappling with its effects.

Seeing a glass half full.

Biden’s Climate Law Can’t Die. Wall Street Loves It Too Much.

A cynical optimist’s take on the Inflation Reduction Act.

Green
Ideas

Trump’s Gift to China

Who will benefit most from repealing the Inflation Reduction Act?

Donald Trump.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress</p>

For decades now analysts of various stripes have been predicting the end of America’s reign as the dominant world power. Some thought the war on terror, in which the U.S. spent on the order of $6 trillion turning half the Middle East into a Stygian wasteland, would crack it. Others thought the financial crisis of 2008 would sour the world on America-centered financial capitalism.

Yet nothing of the sort happened. America is simply so rich that it absorbed the burden of 20 years of war without even raising taxes. There was and is simply no alternative to the U.S. dollar for settling international transactions. The 2008 crash caused a run towards dollars, not away from them, and the U.S. Federal Reserve became the lender of last resort for half the planet — a role it replayed during the initial panic of the pandemic.

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Ideas

Trump Is Not the End of the Climate Fight

The next battle begins today.

Donald Trump and clean energy.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

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.

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