Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Ideas

Trump Is Not the End of the Climate Fight

The next battle begins today.

Donald Trump and clean energy.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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.

Yellow

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

Keep reading...Show less
Adaptation

Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

Keep reading...Show less
Green