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A vicious climate-political cycle is developing.
When Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the risk to recent progress on climate policy was immediately obvious: He ran on a promise to increase fossil fuel production, has a long history of denigrating renewable energy, and is hostile to anything with Joe Biden’s name on it, including a raft of policies enacted over the past four years to reduce emissions.
But as unique a character as Trump is, his victory was just one part of an international surge in right-wing populism that has occurred over the past few years, especially in Europe. Right-wing populists focus their appeals on a supposed conflict between ordinary people and what they claim is a corrupt elite; the philosophy is also usually characterized by nativism and a suspicion of international cooperation and integration. All of that comfortably translates into antagonism toward climate action. So if right-wing populists are on the march globally, what are the risks for global climate policy?
The picture is complex — not every populist party puts environmental issues near the center of its agenda. The Alternative for Germany party (also known as AfD) recently gained a high-profile supporter when Elon Musk wrote an op-ed calling it “the last spark of hope” for Germany, citing “cultural integrity” as one of the reasons he supports it. But it was already gaining, even if most Germans find it repellent: In September, it became the first far-right party to win a state election since World War II.
The AfD’s platform (which it has helpfully translated into English) is as full-on denialist as you can find from any major political party; it rejects the idea of anthropogenic climate change and demands an end to German efforts to reduce emissions. “We want to end the perception of CO2 as an exclusively harmful substance and set a stop to Germany’s maverick policy in the reduction of CO2 emissions,” it says.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ PVV is now the largest party in the governing coalition (though after six months of negotiations following the PVV’s showing in the last election, Wilders agreed to let another coalition partner become prime minister). Its platform promised that the Dutch “Climate Act, the [Paris] climate accord and all other climate measures go straight into the shredder.” Austria’s far-right FPO party placed first in elections in September; it opposes most efforts to combat climate change. (Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer, from the center-right OVP or “People’s Party,” resigned Saturday after coalition talks with FPO broke down.)
In last summer’s parliamentary elections in France, the far-right National Rally pledged a rollback of environmental laws, including “slashing the value-added tax on gas, power and fuel from 20 percent to 5.5 percent; freezing all new wind projects; and easing energy efficiency requirements for homeowners looking to sell their properties,” according to Politico. The party failed to win a plurality in the second round of voting, but it displayed a strength that alarmed many environmentalists. And after last year’s European Parliament elections, far-right parties now control a quarter of the seats in the body, more than ever before.
For these parties, the single most important issue is immigration; their appeal is driven by backlash to influxes of newcomers from Syria and northern African countries, which has contributed to a changing demographic picture. But while environmental policies may be secondary, the issues are hardly unrelated. Versions of “Great Replacement” theory are visible everywhere, the idea that liberal elites are importing non-white immigrants to displace native-born whites and transform the nation. In this telling, green policy is one more way the conspiracy of cultural elites tries to control the lives of the nation’s truest citizens.
Far-right parties often get their strongest support in rural areas, just as Republicans do in the U.S., where farmers protest environmental policies imposed from urban capitals and which they see as the brainchildren of cosmopolitan elites who are either indifferent or actively hostile to their needs. Last spring, farmers staged dramatic protests in France, Germany, Belgium, and other countries, protesting environmental policies they said made it difficult for them to earn a living.
In that way, opposition to climate action fits neatly within the rest of the right-wing populist philosophy and agenda, which usually reject international accords like the Paris Agreement and even the existence of the European Union itself. Repealing climate laws can be a way of striking back at experts and cosmopolitan urbanites, whether it’s Trump rolling back EV subsidies or European rightists attacking the EU’s Green Deal, which among other things obligates the continent to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
The far-right populist parties aren’t the only ones pushing back certain kinds of climate action; center-right parties are also playing a part, even if historically they have been far more progressive on climate than the GOP. Consider the European Union’s law requiring that no internal-combustion cars be produced after 2035, which passed in 2022. That law is now under attack from the center-right, especially the European People’s Party, the largest bloc in the European Parliament. The EPP (which includes EU president Ursula von der Leyen among its members) is seeking to have the ban repealed, or at least modified to allow for continued production of plug-in hybrids and ICE cars that run on biofuels.
Nevertheless, far-right parties that want to maximize their power to the point where they can lead governing coalitions have an incentive to moderate their rhetoric on climate. One can see that dynamic in Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni, whose rhetoric on the international stage sounds much more progressive than her party does at home, where it still traffics in climate denial. She has even presented climate as a right-wing issue, saying “The right loves the environment because it loves the land, the identity, the homeland.” This version of environmentalism seeks to combat climate change in order to minimize the numbers of future climate migrants from the Global South, many of whom will wind up seeking refuge in Europe.
However you feel about that motivation, it points to a vicious cycle that could emerge in the future: As global temperatures increase and natural disasters become more frequent, more places become uninhabitable and millions of people become climate refugees. They head north into developed countries, where their presence spurs a right-wing backlash that puts far-right populist parties into power. Those parties then reverse progressive climate policies, making it more difficult to reduce emissions and continuing the cycle.
That might not be our future, and the changes to climate policy advocated by the resurgent populist parties haven’t yet been implemented. It’s also possible that the far right’s political moment could be fleeting. But the next few years will offer plenty of reasons to worry.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect political developments in Austria.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”