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Five years from the emergence of the disease, the world — and the climate — is still grappling with its effects.
Five years ago this month, the novel coronavirus that would eventually become known as Covid-19 began to spread in Wuhan, China, kicking off a sequence of events that quite literally changed the world as we know it, the global climate not excepted.
The most dramatic effect of Covid on climate change wasn’t the 8% drop in annual greenhouse gas emissions caused by lockdowns and border closures in 2020, however. It wasn’t the crash in oil prices, which briefly went negative in April 2020. It wasn’t the delay of COP26 and of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. And it wasn’t, sadly, a legacy of green stimulus measures (some good efforts notwithstanding).
Rather, it was in the way the world’s governments (especially the largest and most powerful) responded to the virus, which undermined the very idea of multilateralism, climate action included. This took place along three main vectors: inertia on global financial rules, even as long-acknowledged failings turned catastrophic; a renaissance in industrial policy that may prove transformative for domestic fiscal policy; and, at the intersection of both, deterioration of what we might call geopolitics or “global solidarity.”
Evidence of this phenomenon can be found in nearly every aspect of the global order. The World Bank in October pointed to Covid as chief among a “polycrisis” of “multiple and interconnected crises occurring simultaneously, where their interactions amplify the overall impact.” Development gains have almost slowed to a halt. Extreme poverty has increased overall in low-income countries since 2014, after decades of improvement, according to the World Bank’s analysis.
None of this, however, was an inevitable effect of Covid. Poor countries got poorer, for the most part, because of norms and hard rules in global finance that they have little control over — what a group of researchers last year termed “financial subordination.”
To understand why, a brief history: Developing countries during the 2010s were seeking new avenues of finance as traditional sources like multilateral development bank loans, official development assistance, and commercial bank loans waned. Many turned to the U.S. dollar sovereign bond markets, and also to China; a few countries also turned to commodity traders like Glencore and Trafigura, taking on opaque debts to be repaid with their own oil and other commodities.
When the pandemic response shut down many kinds of economic activity in 2020, what World Bank researchers called a “fourth wave” of debt followed. After a continuous series of debt surges from 1970 to 1989, 1990 to 2001, and 2002 to 2009, global debt markets had been relatively stable for the preceding decade. What was different about this fourth wave was that it was largely in developing countries.
With Covid, the fourth wave turned into a tsunami. Countries everywhere were paralysed by the pandemic, but the poorest ones lost critical revenue from tourism, remittances, and some exports. On top of that, they suffered the same lockdowns and illness that depressed local economic activity and drained government budgets in many countries. Unlike rich countries, developing countries had limited ability to dip into reserves or raise money from the bond markets to keep their citizens safe and tide over those who lost work.
Wealthy countries and lenders did little to ameliorate this stress. A “Debt Servicing Suspension Initiative” facilitated by the G20 provided some relief for 46 countries; China participated, too, granting deferrals to some of its debtor countries. But private bondholders (who were earning returns as high as 9%) and multilateral banks did not. The debts still had to be paid, and by 2023, aggregate net capital flows were negative for developing countries — that is, more money flowed from poorer countries to richer ones than the other way around.
Numerous governments defaulted on their debts in the wake of Covid, including Ghana, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Suriname. But perhaps just as bad, many, many more countries continued to pay their debts by slashing their health and social welfare budgets just as they were needed most. Low- and middle-income countries spent more on debt servicing in 2022 than they spent on health in 2020, during the height of the pandemic.
Tensions between the U.S. and China, meanwhile, became even more overt around Covid, helped in part by accusations and recriminations over the source of the disease. The two great powers were themselves deeply changed. China emerged from its Covid Zero measures with public discontent at a nearly unprecedented pitch and its engines of economic growth — domestic infrastructure and residential property — faltering as vast local government debts became unmanageable. The country’s central government renewed its focus on an export-led growth model, but this time instead of cheap, low-tech consumer goods, it was semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicles.
It quickly became clear that the Biden administration would not be much less hawkish towards China than Trump’s was. It largely focused inwards, on tackling the disenfranchisement of formerly solid Democratic working class constituencies that Trump had exploited and Covid deepened. These were largely seen as an outcome of untrammelled free trade — especially with China. But Covid lockdowns and the rush to regain normalcy in the re-opening choked complex supply chains and logistics networks, driving up prices around the world and helping to spark a global inflation crisis that has yet to meaningfully abate in many parts of the world.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, energy prices shot up, particularly in those countries reliant on imported oil and natural gas. This shook the global fossil energy economy. Exports of liquified natural gas by the United States to Europe skyrocketed, as European countries desperately sought alternatives to Russian piped gas. Those same desperate Europeans also bought LNG shipments that had been bound for countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan, outbidding the poorer countries which then endured blackouts and further hits to their financial reserves as they struggled to match the new EU price.
Global energy price rises compounded the Covid supply-chain pressures and monetary policymakers decided hiking interest rates was unavoidable. While Russian troops tried to capture Kyiv in March of 2022, the U.S. Federal Reserve — perhaps the most powerful U.S. entity for the rest of the world — began hiking interest rates, taking them from just a quarter of a percent before the invasion to more than 5% by mid-2023. This strengthened the U.S. dollar, heaping more pressure on developing countries trying to pay dollar-denominated debts. Meanwhile, in rich and poor countries alike, the jump in living costs has helped drive backlashes against incumbents, and a surge in far-right populism.
Perhaps years ago, if we’d known that we’d see a spike in temperatures, droughts, and storms alongside a flood of cheap solar panels and EVs, technological breakthroughs in batteries, and a renewed interest in industrial policy, it might have seemed that more urgent climate action was assured. Instead, divisions have worsened. The agreement text from this year’s United Nations climate conference is actually slightly watered down from the last year’s statement on fossil fuel phaseout. A special conference on biodiversity Cali, Colombia, finished last month only when delegates had to catch flights home, and a desertification conference hosted by Saudi Arabia finished this month with no group statement.
Rachel Kyte, the UK special envoy for climate change, told an event hosted by the Overseas Development Institute think tank that even as it approached its 10-year anniversary, the 2015 Paris Agreement was more fragile than it had ever been. Countries like the UK, she said, had been inflicting “paper cuts” on developing countries for so long that the ill will was becoming impossible to wave away.
“[W]e’ve also cherry-picked which international laws we want to stand behind and then, which conflicts we believe the international law is important for and not,” she added. “And you sit in the climate negotiations and they know that you know that they know that you know.”
And yet a hopeful note sounding out of all of this has been the central role of clean energy in many countries’ responses to the increasingly fractious global landscape. Responses to Covid, as chaotic as they were, demonstrated that governments can take decisive action. Although the vast majority of Covid stimulus was climate-neutral at best; about a trillion dollars’ worth of investments really were green. Efforts to boost cycling gained ground in some cities, including in Paris, where bike trips now outnumber car trips in and around the city center.
Renewed interest in energy security sparked by the Ukraine invasion has been largely supportive of clean energy. Europe’s combined wind and solar generation rose 10% in the first year after the invasion as the bloc made its emissions reduction target more ambitious. Green industrial policy introduced by the Biden administration has encouraged other countries to see decarbonization as a competitive opportunity rather than an obligation. And China’s doubling down on its manufacturing of the “new three” — batteries, EVs, and solar panels — has created an oversupply that spurred rapid uptake of clean energy in many countries.
Fractures, however, are rife. Too many countries have steep tariffs on clean energy imports preventing them from taking advantage of cheap Chinese components, adding to other barriers to clean energy generation, such as the restrictive planning rules in Japan, where renewable energy generation lags; even wind power, where the country has ample potential, was virtually flat for the decade to 2022. Tariffs on imports to the U.S., while helping to build a domestic industry, also slow the rate of deployment. Globalized supply chains tend to be cheaper; a study in Nature estimated that they saved the U.S. up to $31 billion in the 12 years leading up to 2020, while China saved up to $45 billion, compared to a scenario in which domestic suppliers were prioritized. Even with its rapid expansion in clean tech manufacturing thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, it will take years for the U.S. to catch up to China’s capabilities, while in the meantime, tariffs will slow down installations.
For those in wealthier and more powerful countries, there’s at least a chance of political shift. For countries under financial subordination, there are hard limits to what can be achieved.
Geopolitical alignment is an increasingly sensitive question for countries trying to avoid the pitfalls of appearing to be too close to either China or the U.S. Auto manufacturing has become the site of intense competition and tension, with the U.S. and EU putting punitive tariffs on Chinese EV imports to compensate for “state subsidies.” The introduction of the European carbon border adjustment mechanism this year, which penalizes high-carbon imports so they don’t undermine the continent’s carbon pricing regime, has introduced a new source of tension around trade, particularly for African countries that rely on exports to Europe and are nowhere near having their own carbon accounting scheme that is a prerequisite to avoiding the surcharges.
We may only know in retrospect, but the supply bottlenecks and inflationary surges associated with the Covid lockdowns and reopenings may have been a kind of masked transition phase into a new, more permanently supply-constrained world. Researchers at Potsdam Institute and the European Central Bank published new research in March showing that climate change impacts will raise general inflation by more than a percentage point by 2035.
The damage could be seen in the recent COP29 in Azerbaijan. Trust was close to an all-time low over negotiations for a new target for finance flows from wealthy to poor countries. After it ended with a controversially low $300 billion target, Fiona Harvey of the Guardian called it the second worst COP of the 18 she’s attended, surpassed only by the disastrous 2009 COP15 in Copenhagen, which ended with no agreement at all. It can also be seen in the rebound in emissions since 2021.
While some hopeful shifts have emerged from the Covid era, the increasingly febrile global atmosphere risks endangering our already slim chances of protecting the habitable atmosphere. As climate impacts worsen, pushing back on that axiom will be more difficult, but more urgent. Combating climate change is such a monumental undertaking that collaboration – in technology, manufacturing, knowledge, and diplomacy – will be vital.
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The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.
The federal government is poised to put solar and wind projects through strict new reviews that may delay projects across the country, according to a widely circulating document reviewed by Heatmap.
The secretarial order authored by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Gregory Wischer is dated July 15 and states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Burgum’s office and Interior’s Office of the Deputy Secretary.
This new layer of review would span essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction on a project can commence — a milestone crucial for being able to qualify for federal renewable energy tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists more than 68 different activities newly subject to higher-level review, including some basic determinations as to whether projects conform with federal environmental and conservation laws, as well as consultations on compliance with wildlife protection laws such as the Endangered Species Act. The final item in the list sweeps “any other similar or related decisions, actions, consultations, or undertakings” under the order’s purview, in case there was any grey area there.
In other words, this order is so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage. In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.
“This is the way you stall and kill projects. Intentionally red-tape projects to death,” former Biden White House clean energy adviser Avi Zevin wrote on Bluesky in a post with a screenshot of the order.
The department has yet to release the document and it’s unclear whether or when it will be made public. The order’s existence was first reported by Politico; in a statement to that news outlet, the department did not deny the document’s existence but attacked leakers. “Let’s be clear: leaking internal documents to the media is cowardly, dishonest, and a blatant violation of professional standards,” the statement said.
Interior’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heatmap about when this document may be made public. We also asked whether this would also apply to transmission connected to solar and wind. You had better believe I’ll be following up with the department to find out, and we’ll update this story if we hear back from them.
Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted — Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.