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The U.S. is too enmeshed in the global financial system for the rest of the world to solve climate change without us.
The United States is now staring down the barrel of what amounts to a full repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy tax credits and loan authorities. Not even the House Republicans who vocally defended the law, in the end, voted against President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” To be sure, there’s no final outcome yet — leading Republican senators don’t seem satisfied with the bill headed their way, and energy sector lobbyists are ready to push harder. But the fact that House Republicans were willing to walk away from billions of dollars of public spending for their districts and perhaps $1 trillion worth of economic growth is a flashing red sign that Trump’s politics have capsized the once-watertight argument that the IRA would be too important to American businesses and communities to be destroyed.
The Biden Administration touted the IRA as the United States’ marquee investment not just in reducing emissions and promoting economic development, but also in bringing back American manufacturing to compete against China in the market for advanced technologies. The Trump administration takes this apparent conflict with China seriously ― the threat of economic decoupling looms large ― but seems to have no desire to compete the way the Biden administration did. Rather than commit to the solar, wind, battery, grid, and electric vehicle investments that are laying the foundation for a manufacturing revival, the Trump administration has doubled down on the conjoined ideas that America should be self-sufficient and should play to its strengths: critical minerals, nuclear, natural gas, and even coal. Never mind that Trump’s tariff policy and his party’s deep cuts to energy-related spending will stop these plans, too, in their tracks. “Energy dominance” has always been a smokescreen ― of fossil fuels, by fossil fuels, for fossil fuels.
While Republicans attempt to shut down America’s entire scientific research apparatus, the rest of the world moves on. The demise of the Inflation Reduction Act would decisively surrender the global market for all types of commercialized clean energy sources (and nuclear energy, too) to Chinese companies. Chinese companies already dominate the input sectors for these technologies, whether it’s processing and refining mineral products such as polysilicon, gallium, and graphite, or producing infrastructure commodities such as steel and aluminum. The end of Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws will also leave the American car industry in the dust, as the rest of the world shifts gears toward purchasing more efficient and cheaper electric vehicles ― particularly Chinese brands such as BYD. (Ford’s CEO drives a Xiaomi electric vehicle and “doesn’t want to give it up.”) Consider it a sign of the times that Ethiopia recently banned the import of gas-powered vehicles. Electrification is in, combustion is burnt out.
It’s not just China that benefits. In November, the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins estimated that the repeal of the IRA leaves up to $80 billion in clean technology manufacturing investment opportunities for other countries to seize between now and 2032, the law’s intended sunset year. Those countries aren’t just the likely (read: wealthier) suspects such as Japan, South Korea, or the European Union. The abdication of U.S. leadership would also boost electric vehicle and battery manufacturing capacity in Morocco, Mexico, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere across Southeast Asia; solar power-related manufacturing further across Southeast Asia; and wind power-related manufacturing in Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, India, and Canada.
These countries won’t just benefit from investors looking to build outside the United States. A Trump-induced fall in American imports of these technologies and their inputs may also drive some degree of global disinflation, insofar as these countries can secure input goods no longer flowing into the American market at cheaper prices. The writing has been on the wall since the early Biden administration that failing to invest meant investing in failure. This is what the Trump administration is poised to do, to the detriment of American technological capabilities and standards of living.
Just because the United States might be dropping out of the race for global decarbonization, however, does not mean that the rest of the world can choose to ignore the United States in return. The Trump administration can still play spoiler with every other country’s efforts to decarbonize ― even China’s ― for one overarching reason: the mighty dollar. The United States may be hemorrhaging the political capital that coordinating the energy transition requires, but it still controls the currency of decarbonization itself.
It’s hard to overstate how central the management of the U.S. dollar is to the management of global decarbonization. Let’s sketch out some of the key dynamics. First, the dollar is the world’s primary trade currency. Because most global trade is denominated and invoiced in dollars, fluctuations in the value of the dollar relative to the value of other currencies will affect the price of importing both essential commodities and capital goods in other countries. Any volatility in the prices of oil, critical minerals, food, or machinery ― including the inputs to energy systems ― is most likely measured in a currency that every other country needs to earn through trade or borrow from investors. Efforts to denominate commodity trade in other currencies, such as the Chinese renminbi, are not likely to scale up rapidly, however, thanks to the network effect of the dollar system: Market actors will only ditch the dollar if most of their counterparties do.
Second, then, the dollar is the world’s dominating financial currency. Countries seeking foreign investment must issue debt at rates and on terms that foreign investors, many of whom measure their returns in dollars, judge as safe relative to the returns on U.S. Treasury bonds, conventionally the world’s premier “safe asset.” How the U.S. Federal Reserve moves interest rates influences how every other central bank does; higher rates in the U.S. usually push up Treasury bond yields and, as other central banks also raise rates or stockpile dollars, make borrowing for investment and for refinancing debt more expensive across the whole world ― particularly for large-scale energy and adaptation infrastructure projects. The U.S. Federal Reserve also manages the dollar swap lines and repurchase (or “repo”) facilities that provide dollar liquidity to the rest of the world during a financial crisis, as in the Great Recession and the subsequent Eurozone financial crisis, or a sudden dollar cash shortage, as in 2019.
Finally, the United States maintains a comprehensive sanctions regime that operates through cross-border dollar payments systems and “clearing-house” facilities such as SWIFT, which processes interbank payments, and CHIPS, which handles over 90% of all dollar-denominated transactions globally. When the United States wants to cut target companies and whole countries out of the dollar financial system, it prevents SWIFT from processing targeted entities’ cross-border transactions and U.S.-based financial institutions from accepting them.
The Obama administration and first Trump administration used U.S. control over SWIFT and CHIPS to administer sanctions against Iran, and the Biden administration did the same to Russia. The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Commerce also administer what’s known as a “secondary sanctions” regime that imposes these financial penalties on unrelated third-parties that violate initial sanctions. And the Department of Commerce enforces export controls that restrict technology transfer to foreign targets. The Biden administration combined these authorities to limit the ability of both U.S. and foreign companies to export certain technologies to targeted Chinese companies.
Perhaps ironically, some of these dynamics don’t bite the way they used to during the Biden administration, when the dollar was expensive relative to other currencies. Trump’s inflationary and growth-destroying budget, trigger-happy tariffs, and neglect of the fracking sector have driven a sharp depreciation in the dollar and destabilized the market for U.S. Treasury debt. Some cuts to U.S. interest rates are likely given the elevated probability of a recession. All of these factors ― undeniably a bad look for the United States ― should support emerging market financial conditions by lowering the cost of commodity imports, raising the attractiveness of sovereign debt to foreign investors, and help stave off potential debt crises.
But easier global financial conditions in the short term do not diminish the threat the Trump administration continues to pose to global economic stability. The danger that the Trump administration expands the American sanctions regime implemented via the global dollar invoicing system and export controls remains undiminished. What’s more, the tension between the president and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell should alert foreign central banks that their access to the American dollar liquidity facilities is ultimately contingent on the Federal Reserve’s independence from Trump’s influence. During the first Trump administration, the European Union and China alike started strategizing how to derisk their dependence on the dollar; U.S. policymakers should not be surprised if those governments are now dusting off those playbooks.
The dollar’s dominance is in part an effect of the gargantuan size of the U.S. consumer market. Trump’s tariff threats had governments across the world scrambling to cut deals with the United States to preserve their market access ― including by promising to purchase U.S. natural gas.
The view outside the U.S. seems to be that there is no easy replacement for the U.S. consumer. As the Australian Strategic Policy Institute put it, “US household spending in 2023 reached $19 trillion, double the level of the European Union and almost three times that of China. … there are no obvious markets to replace [U.S. consumers].” Indian journalist M. Rajshekhar notes that China, too, needs external markets to absorb its products, and that it cannot count on other Global South countries to let Chinese goods flood their markets. Americans are the motor that keeps the global economy spinning.
The inability to sell goods to the United States is a threat to decarbonization abroad not just because it gives Trump an avenue to hawk natural gas, but also because U.S. consumer spending provides the world with a source of the dollars with which decarbonization is financed in the first place. And to the extent that the IRA would have supported U.S. consumer demand for clean energy technologies and electric vehicles, its de facto repeal ― while a source of potential disinflation for Global South producers ― snuffs out a key demand signal for the production of inputs to those sectors across the Global South.
Where the Global South’s clean energy transition is concerned, natural gas unfortunately remains an important alternative to coal in the absence of widespread renewable energy deployment. The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas, the use of which has doubled since 2009 as global demand for the fuel rose sharply. Countries across Europe and Asia depend on U.S. gas for domestic power and industrial uses ― particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Large energy importing countries like India increasingly rely on gas to meet energy demand spikes. Over the longer term, industry leaders expect LNG demand to rise 60% by 2040, particularly on the back of persistent Asian demand. Although planned U.S. LNG export capacity is already on track to double between now and 2028, the Trump administration is supporting the buildout of even more capacity to meet this expected global demand.
Becoming dependent on “molecules of U.S. freedom” for industrial growth and for transitioning off of coal may once have seemed like a smart decision across emerging markets, particularly when prices were lower. But it has now left dependent Global South countries uniquely vulnerable to energy import price and power market shocks caused by erratic U.S. policy and volatile (dollar-denominated) natural gas prices. Will the gas-dependent countries in Europe and Asia be able to access enough Chinese imports, invest sufficiently in local clean technology, and kick their LNG fix in time to meet their emissions reduction goals? Europe might; for the rest, this question is one worth following over the coming years.
The truth is that the United States has always had a unique opportunity to weaponize these aspects of dollar dominance in the interest of playing global spoilsport. As Chen Chris Gong, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, argues in her forthcoming (not yet peer-reviewed) paper on “The geoeconomics of transitioning to the post-fossil world,” Global South countries have an urgent reason to decarbonize built into their politics, whether their governments recognize it or not. So long as much of the Global South is dependent on imported fossil fuels for energy, “local people’s livelihood and firms’ survival are made vulnerable to compound cycles of dollar capital flow and cycles of basic commodity trade.” If the Global South cannot fully avoid the United States, their governments can at least sidestep it. Countries powered by clean energy, importing less fuel, and generating their own power are far more insulated from the dollar cycle and the dollar system, simple as that.
In contrast, as Gong highlights, the only incentives for the United States to pursue decarbonization come from the pressure of competing with China ― a competition that Republicans, for all their bluster, may not actually want to win ― or the pressure of mass consumer demand for a clean economy ― for which Democrats are not exactly fighting tooth and nail ― and the profits both promise. It’s darkly funny that the Inflation Reduction Act’s defenders are seizing on these exact reasons in their attempts to protect the law in the Senate when neither sufficiently moved House Republicans to reconsider.
For posterity, then, we should add another reason, even if it won’t convince Republicans to change tack: The looming repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act portends a future where Trump and his Republican party happily use their control over the global economy to drag the rest of the world down with the United States. “Energy dominance” may always have been formless bluster, but the United States’ financial dominance remains sharp enough to cut ― if not global emissions, then global standards of living.
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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.