You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
How 2023 marked a renewed push for public power.
Voters in Maine were confronted with an unusual decision when they went to the polls this November. Question three on the ballot asked Mainers if they wanted to eliminate the two private utilities that delivered electricity to 97% of the state. A new, nonprofit utility called Pine Tree Power would take over the service, and it would be overseen by a publicly-elected board.
Though the proposal may sound radical, it’s not unheard of. Since the dawn of the electric grid, communities have periodically decided to municipalize their utilities. The city of Sacramento, California, took over PG&E’s local electric distribution franchise in 1946. Winter Park, Florida, took over electric service from a company called Progress Energy in 2005. But a takeover at the state level has only been attempted by Nebraska, where the entire state’s electric service went public in the 1940s and has remained that way ever since.
Unlike in Nebraska, the campaign in Maine failed. Seventy percent of voters said “no” to question three. But the ballot measure wasn’t a one-off. This year marked a renewed push for public power that’s growing around the country in light of the challenges of tackling climate change.
Investor-owned utilities have used their vast financial resources and political influence to delay and block the transition off of fossil fuels, in ways large and small, for decades. Activists, tired of trying to work within that system, are turning their attention to what they see as the more systemic root cause — the perverse incentives created by having utilities that need to turn a profit.
Americans often refer to their electricity or gas providers as “public utilities.” But only about 15% of the population is served by a government-owned, customer-owned, or member-owned electric utility. The other 85% are beholden to private companies that were granted monopolies to sell electricity decades ago.
What started as a smattering of independent campaigns to change that ratio started to coalesce into a nationally coordinated movement this year. A few weeks before the vote on the ballot measure, some 70 delegates from about 40 grassroots climate groups from around the country convened for a workshop at the Press Hotel in Portland, Maine. For three days, they exchanged notes and strategies for how to get public power on the agenda in their own cities and states, and reform public utilities in places that already had them. By the end, they had cemented a more energized, organized coalition.
The guiding theory behind the push for public power is that public utilities don’t need to generate returns for shareholders, theoretically enabling them to make investments guided by other priorities, like reducing emissions — and charge customers less in the process.
“We’ve seen time and time again that the market is not going to correct this,” Greg Woodring, a workshop participant from Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me. “Public power gives us the ability to choose where our energy is coming from, the ability to directly make that change without having to ask or plead or beg or incentivize a corporate entity that, at the end of the day, is only making a decision based on what’s going to make the most profit possible.”
But public power is divisive in the larger climate movement. While not necessarily ideologically opposed, critics are concerned about wasting time and money. Private utilities don’t go without a fight, and communities can get bogged down in legal battles for years. The city of Boulder, Colorado, famously tried to wrest control over its electric service from the utility Xcel for a decade, and gave up.
In Maine, the Conservation Law Foundation, a prominent environmental group, warned that the cost of a transition to public power was too uncertain, that it could mire the state in litigation, and that having a publicly-elected board could subject critical energy decisions to “partisan political maneuvering.” Instead, the group made a case for strengthening laws and regulations. However, it also conceded that if the utilities don’t meet metrics of affordability and sustainability they should face stiffer fines, or even lose their ability to operate in the state.
Defenders of investor-owned utilities argue that they have advantages over nonprofits when it comes to building the clean grid of the future. “The investor-owned business model enables companies to raise and deploy massive amounts of capital in an efficient and cost-effective manner, and their purchasing power helps to minimize costs to customers,” said Sarah Durdaller, a spokesperson for the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for private electric utilities. She told me that the organization’s members’ “commitment to delivering resilient clean energy to our customers has never been stronger, and our focus on affordability has never been more important.”
The Maine campaign was not the first time a shift to publicly-owned utilities has been pitched as a climate strategy. One of the main motivations for Boulder’s effort, which started in 2010, was Xcel’s unwillingness to help the city meet its climate goals. But the increased momentum behind public power in 2023 signaled a new direction for climate activism more broadly, which had seemed to stagnate after the rise and fall of the youth-led Sunrise Movement and the election of Joe Biden.
“This is a site where we can practice democracy,” Isaac Sevier, one of the workshop organizers, told me. “I think that’s something that energizes people, it gives them more hope, it gives them something to be a part of and fight for and struggle for in a time when so many people are turning away.”
The workshop in Maine was convened by a handful of national organizations, including the Climate and Community Project, a progressive think tank, Lead Locally, a group that works to elect progressive candidates, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s Green New Deal Campaign Commission.
The DSA has been a major force behind the recent surge in interest in public power. At the start of this year, it kicked off a new campaign called “Building for Power” focused on trying to strengthen public institutions at the local level. In addition to public power, DSA is advocating for green public housing and transit, and improved public spaces.
“We want to rebuild, and in some cases, build anew, public sector capacity,” Matt Haugen, one of the organizers of the workshop, told me. “Through decades of neoliberalism, the public sector has been hollowed out in the U.S., and we’re seeing in all these areas that it’s clear the private sector just cannot meet these human needs.”
Many of the participants at the workshop were DSA members, but there were also local organizers affiliated with national environmental organizations, like 350 and the Sierra Club, and others from smaller, grassroots groups. There was a freshman in college, a seasoned activist in his 80s, and many ages represented in between. While almost everyone there was from a left-leaning city, they hailed from every corner of the country, including California, Montana, Michigan, Tennessee, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.
Some, like Woodring of Ann Arbor, were from cities that were already in the early stages of considering a public power takeover. His group had convinced the city council to complete a feasibility study on municipalization. Others, like Marta Meengs, from Missoula, Montana, were trying to figure out how to win smaller battles, like the right to have community-owned solar farms. Others wanted to reform existing public power agencies, like Amy Kelly from Tennessee, where the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority runs the grid — but is investing heavily in natural gas, and offers few avenues for civic engagement.
One such group had already seen some success. The New York chapter of the DSA passed the Build Public Renewables Act earlier this year after four years of campaigning. The law directs the New York Power Authority, an existing state-owned power provider, to shut down all of its fossil fuel plants by the end of 2031, and expands its mandate to include building renewable energy projects. Most residential customers in New York are actually served by private utilities, but proponents saw the law as a way to get more clean energy built, faster, and with high labor and equity standards.
The Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law signed by President Biden last year, is one reason the tides turned for the New York campaign. It enabled government agencies and nonprofits to take advantage of tax credits for renewable energy projects for the first time, improving the economics of public power.
“It really opens up a huge amount of additional space for public power to be a part of the answer,” Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Project, told me.
Though few of the participants had ever met or even heard of each others’ campaigns, the stories that led them to advocate for public power shared a number of common themes: Worsening power outages due to extreme weather. Alarm over the insufficient pace of emission reductions. Outrageously high bills. But perhaps most of all, frustration with constantly coming up against utilities wielding money and influence to fight clean energy.
Woodring, of Ann Arbor, cited a 2022 analysis that found that more than 90% of sitting legislators in Michigan at the time took money from groups and individuals affiliated with DTE, the biggest utility in the state. The company was also tied to more than $200,000 in donations to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who’s responsible for appointing the state’s utility regulators. As a result, according to the workshop participants from Michigan, the company has been able to restrict the growth of residential solar, which would eat into its profits.
Mikal Goodman, a 23-year-old city councilmember from Pontiac, Michigan, told me his interest in public power stemmed from DTE’s high rates and failure to invest in modernizing its transmission system. Some of its poles and wires dated back to before World War II, he said. Last winter, storms knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of households in southeast Michigan, leaving some families in the dark for over a week. But the day after one especially bad storm in February that left 450,000 people without power, DTE’s CEO Gerardo Norcia bragged to Wall Street analysts about the company’s “strong financial results” due to budget cuts and delayed maintenance.
In Pontiac, Goodman said, outages are life-threatening. He described the city as a donut hole — a poor, majority minority community surrounded by much wealthier, whiter towns. Most Pontiac residents don’t have the resources to run backup generators, replace rotting food, or flee to hotels if they need to, like many of their well-off neighbors, he said.
The idea that energy is a human right, and should not be treated as a commodity, came up repeatedly at the workshop. Many of the participants were drawn to public power by the desire to see an energy transition that benefits everyone, not just those who can afford clean energy.
Sevier, who has done a lot of work related to decarbonizing buildings, was frustrated that other advocates in the field were ignoring the growing energy affordability crisis. One in six households are behind on their utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, and gas and electric utilities are increasingly disconnecting customers that are in arrears. A January report from Bailout Watch, a nonprofit watchdog of fossil fuel companies, estimated that the 12 utilities that perpetrated the vast majority of shutoffs between 2020 and the fall of 2022 could have forgiven the debt with just 1% of their spending on shareholder dividends.
“If we require that everything in your life become electric, but at the same time, we don’t transform a system that guarantees that everyone actually can have electricity,” Sevier told me, “then I ask, who are we building this ‘electrify everything’ system for?”
Other advocates questioned a system where the public is often forced to pay for a company’s mistakes, but which the public has no say over. Travis Gibrael, an organizer with a group called Reclaim Our Power in northern California, which is working on a public takeover of PG&E, described the hypocrisy of the state’s relationship with the company. Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration helped the company emerge from bankruptcy after it was found responsible for wildfires that destroyed whole towns and killed more than 100 people. Now the company is raising rates by 13% to pay for wildfire prevention measures like burying power lines.
“They burn down the state, they kill a bunch of people. And yet all of those liabilities are just put on us, including the people who lost family members,” Gibrael told me. “It’s like, we’re already paying for the cost of the system and all the crises that are coming from it. So for us to just own it, because we’re already paying for it, makes sense.”
Reclaim Our Power has allies in the city government of San Francisco, which is in the early stages of trying to purchase the local electric grid from PG&E.
In some ways, Maine seemed to be an ideal testing ground for such sweeping reforms. Central Maine Power and Versant, the two private electric companies in Maine that would have been ousted, are consistently rated the worst for customer satisfaction in the Northeast. CMP has faced multiple investigations and fines over its billing system, customer service, and delays connecting new solar projects to the grid. Mainers additionally hate the company due to a controversial power line it is building to deliver hydropower from Canada into the U.S.
Advocates also appealed to nationalist views by highlighting the fact that both companies have “foreign owners,” and that they are funneling ratepayer dollars out of the country rather than back into Maine’s communities. (CMP is owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish company. Versant is owned by Enmax, a Canadian company owned by the city of Calgary.)
Public power advocates attributed their loss largely to the nearly $40 million the incumbent utilities spent fighting the campaign. “They outspent us 37 to one,” Lucy Hochschartner, the deputy campaign manager for Pine Tree Power, told me. “We were persuading people one by one, as they were getting absolutely inundated by messaging on the television, in their mailbox, on the radio, over digital.”
But she also said the campaign was successful in that it got a lot more people talking about the issue — it made national headlines for weeks — which could make it easier for future campaigns.
Reflecting on the loss, John Qua, a campaign manager at Lead Locally, told me it showed that running a ballot initiative is probably one of the most difficult ways to win public power. Another path is to try and win an electoral majority to enact legislation. “While it takes longer, you can cement a stronger, usually progressive majority in support,” he said.
Workshop attendees were clear-eyed about the fact that public ownership would not, in itself, be a silver bullet. They were quick to acknowledge the shortcomings of many existing public institutions, and that a publicly-owned utility will only be as strong as public participation in elections and decision making — a tall order when so few people today even understand the basics about where their energy comes from. Grace Brown, a researcher at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who studies public power movements, said it’s a much harder proposition in the U.S. than in Europe, where people are used to relying on the government for services, and socialism isn’t such a dirty word.
“That’s not just about winning votes, it’s about changing the mindset of this whole country,” she told me. “It’s trying to change these huge ideological ideas of how this country understands what the state should be and what the government should do.”
Public power isn’t the only idea out there for breaking the inertia and corporate capture of the energy system. This year, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed laws that will prevent utilities from charging ratepayers for their lobbying efforts. Several states are experimenting with new, performance-based regulations, whereby utilities’ compensation is tied to specific goals, including emission reductions.
There’s also evidence that the existing channels for democratic engagement with the energy system aren’t totally broken. California and Michigan both recently made big strides on the climate and equity issues that public power advocates care about. This summer, the Golden State passed a law requiring utilities to design progressive rates tied to customers’ incomes. Michigan passed a law requiring utilities to use 100% clean energy by 2040.
The revitalized push for public power is about more than clean energy. To proponents, it’s about shaping this new, green energy system in a way that benefits a wider public. Whether or not they see more victories, the questions they are raising about who decides when and how we transition to this hypothetical clean energy future are already infiltrating the wider climate discussion. And as past public power movements, like the one in Boulder, have shown, even when the campaigns fail, the threat they pose to utilities is usually enough to get the companies to change their approach.
If there’s one thing I took away from the workshop, it’s that the movement is just getting started. Expect to see more high-profile campaigns — perhaps in San Francisco or Ann Arbor — in the coming years.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The Ways and Means Committee released its proposed budget language, and it’s not pretty for clean energy.
The House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy, released its initial proposal to overhaul the nation’s clean energy tax credits on Monday afternoon. These are separate and in addition to the extensive cuts to Inflation Reduction Act grant programs proposed by the Energy and Commerce Committee, Transportation Committee, and Natural Resources Committee in the past few weeks.
Here’s a rundown of the tax credit proposal, which, at first glance, appears to amount to a back-door full repeal of the climate law. There’s a lot that could change before we get to a final budget, let alone have a text head to the Senate. We’ll have more analysis on what these changes would mean in the days and weeks to come.
The text proposes ending the tax credit for new EVs (that is, 30D) on December 31, 2025 — with one exception. The credit would remain in effect for one year, through the end of 2026, for vehicles produced by automakers that have sold fewer than 200,000 tax credit-qualified cars between 2010 and the end of this year. That means that no Teslas would qualify for the tax credit next year, as the company has sold far more than 200,000 tax credit-eligible vehicles. A new entrant to EVs, like Honda with its Prologue model, will likely still qualify.
The committee also proposes ending the tax credit for used EVs (25E) and commercial EVs (45W) by the end of this year. This would effectively end the “leasing loophole” that allowed Americans to redeem the tax credit on vehicles that didn’t qualify for 30D because they didn’t meet domestic content requirements, meaning consumers could get discounts on leases of a wide range of makes and models.
Lastly, the draft proposes terminating the tax credit for residential EV chargers (30C) at the end of this year.
The GOP has proposed an early phase-out of the technology-neutral production and investment tax credits, which subsidize zero-emissions power generation projects including wind, solar, energy storage, advanced nuclear, and geothermal. It also proposed significant changes for the years they remain in effect.
Currently, new clean electricity projects can earn a 2.75 cents for every kilowatt-hour they produce for the first 10 years under section 45Y of the tax code. Alternatively, project developers can get a 30% investment tax credit (48E) on new projects. The Inflation Reduction Act scheduled both of these programs to phase out beginning in 2032, and expire at the end of 2035. It included a major caveat, however: that this phase-out would only happen if greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power generation fell below 25% of 2022 levels. Otherwise, the tax credits would be maintained at their initial amounts until this target was met.
Under the GOP proposal, both credits would start to phase down in 2029, and new projects would no longer be eligible for either credit beginning in 2032. The proposal also cuts out a key provision that would have grandfathered many more projects into the tax credit. Under current law, a project only has to start construction within a certain year to qualify for that year’s tax credit amount. The draft text changes this, requiring a project to be “placed in service” before 2032 in order to qualify.
A separate tax credit for existing nuclear power generation (45U) would also phase down on the same timeline, despite Trump and other Republicans’ interest in boosting nuclear energy.
“Transferability” supercharged the nation’s clean energy tax credits by allowing project developers with low tax liability to sell their credits to another entity that stood to benefit from them. Previously, developers could only monetize their unusable tax credits through complicated tax equity deals.
Recipients of a wide range of tax credits, including those for clean manufacturing, clean fuels, carbon capture, nuclear power, and hydrogen, can all take advantage of transferability. The provision channeled new capital into the climate economy as corporations looking to reduce their tax liability began scooping up tax credits, indirectly helping to finance clean energy projects. It also helped lower the cost of wind and solar, as developers could earn a premium on tax credits compared to what they got for tax equity transfers, because the whole transaction was cheaper to do.
The proposal would get rid of this option across all of the tax credits beginning in 2028.
The proposal would also impose new sourcing requirements across all of the tax credits, prohibiting developers from using components, subcomponents, or critical minerals sourced from “foreign entities of concern,” a term that applies to companies based in China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. The consequences would be huge, as China dominates global markets for refined lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths — key materials used in clean energy technologies.
The draft text would also terminate the clean manufacturing credit (45X) in 2032 — one year earlier than under existing law. Wind energy components such as blades, towers, and gearboxes would lose their eligibility sooner, in 2028.
The text proposes repealing three tax credits for residential energy efficiency improvements at the end of 2025. Starting next year, homeowners would no longer be able to claim the Energy Efficiency Home Improvement Credit (25C), which provides up to $3,200 per year for home energy audits, energy-saving windows and doors, air sealing and insulation, heat pumps, and new electrical panels.
It also proposes killing the Residential Clean Energy Credit (25D), which offered homeowners 30% off the cost of solar panels and battery systems to store energy from those solar panels. This credit also subsidizes geothermal home heating systems.
Both of these tax credits have existed in some form since the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
The third credit that would end this year is an up to $5,000 subsidy for contractors who construct new, energy efficient homes (45L).
The proposal would not repeal the energy efficiency tax deduction for improvements made to commercial buildings (179D).
The Inflation Reduction Act created a technology-neutral tax credit for low-carbon transportation fuels, like sustainable aviation fuel and biodiesel (45Z). It operates on a sliding scale, depending on how carbon-intensive the fuel is. The credit is set to expire after 2027, however the GOP proposal would extend it for four years, through the end of 2031.
That said, it would also make a significant change to how the credit is calculated, making it much easier for projects with questionable emissions benefits to qualify. Under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department issued rules that said producers had to account for the emissions tied to indirect land use changes resulting from fuel production. That meant that corn ethanol producers, for example, had to account for the expansion of croplands resulting from the increase of biofuel production and use — which would, in most cases, disqualify corn ethanol from claiming the tax credit. But under the GOP proposal, producers would explicitly not have to account for indirect land use changes.
The GOP proposal would deal a rapid and ruthless death blow to the 45V clean hydrogen production tax credit, requiring developers to begin construction before the end of this year if they want to claim it.
Other than ending transferability, the text makes no changes to the 45Q carbon capture and sequestration tax credit.
Most of the tax credits have provisions that allow project developers to qualify for higher amounts if they pay prevailing wages, hire apprentices, build in a qualified “energy community” or a low-income community, or use a certain percentage of domestically-produced materials. This initial draft from the GOP would not change any of those provisions.
The Energy and Commerce Committee dropped its budget proposal Sunday night.
Republicans on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce unveiled their draft budget proposal Sunday night, which features widespread cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act and other clean energy and environment programs.
The legislative language is part of the House’s reconciliation package, an emerging tax and spending bill that will seek to extend much of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with reduced spending on the IRA and Medicaid helping to balance the budgetary scales.
The Energy and Commerce committee covers energy and environmental programs, while the Ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction over the core tax credits of the IRA that power much of America’s non-carbon power generation. Ways and Means has yet to release its draft budget proposal, which will be another major shoe to drop.
The core way the Energy and Commerce proposal generates budgetary savings is by proposing “rescissions” to existing programs, whereby unspent money would be yanked away.
The language also includes provisions to auction electromagnetic spectrum, as well as changes to Medicaid.Overall, the Congressional Budget Office told the committee, the recommendations would “reduce deficits by more than $880 billion” from 2025 to 2034, which was the target the committee was instructed to hit. The Sierra Club estimated that the cuts specifically to programs designed to help decarbonize heavy industry would add up to $1.6 billion.
The proposed rescissions would affect a number of energy financing and grant programs, including:
And that’s just the “energy” cuts. The language also includes a number of cuts to environmental programs, including:
Lastly, the proposal would also repeal federal tailpipe emission standards starting in the 2027 model year. These rules, which were finalized just last year, would have provided a major boost to the electric vehicle industry, perhaps pushing EV sales to over half of all new car sales by the beginning of the next decade. The language also repeals the latest gas-mileage standards, which were released last year and would have applied to the 2027 through 2031 model years, eventually bumping up miles-per-gallon industry-wide to over 50 by the 2031 model year.
What the Council on Foreign Relations’ new climate program gets drastically wrong.
Let’s start with two basic facts.
First, the climate crisis is here now, killing people, devastating communities, and destroying infrastructure in Los Angeles and Asheville and Spain and Pakistan and China. And it will get worse.
Second, Donald Trump is the President of the United States. He began the process to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on January 20, 2025, his first day in office in his second term. (He, of course, did this in his first term as well.) He illegally froze funding for climate programs that had passed and became law during the Biden administration, and his administration continues to ignore court orders to unfreeze these monies. He has signed numerous executive orders, including onreinvigorating clean [sic] coal,reversing state-level climate policies, “Zero-based regulatory budgeting to unleash American energy,” and “unleashing” American energy, the last of which revoked more than a dozen Biden era executive orders.
How do we address a world that is increasingly shaped by these two facts?
One attempt can be seen in the Council on Foreign Relations’s new “Climate Realism Initiative.” Its statement of purpose attempts to make climate action palatable to MAGA world by securitizing it, framing climate change as a foreign threat to Fortress America. It calls for investing in next-generation technologies and geoengineering in the hopes of leapfrogging the Chinese-led clean energy revolution that is beginning to decarbonize the world today is the best realistic way forward.
This attempt is doomed to failure. Real climate realism for the United States is to stop the destruction of American state capacity, and then to reflect and build on areas of core strength including finance and software.
CRI’s launch document does not call for the U.S. to reduce its own emissions. I’ll say that again: There is no call for the U.S. to reduce its own emissions in the essay establishing the mission and objectives of the Climate Realism Initiative. Written by Varun Sivaram, formerly chief strategy and innovation officer at wind energy developer Orsted and now the leader of the initiative, the essay proposes that four dug-in “fallacies” are getting in the way of effective policy-making: that climate change “poses a manageable risk” to the U.S.; that “the world’s climate targets are achievable;” that the clean energy transition is a “win-in for U.S. interests and climate action;” and that “reducing U.S. domestic greenhouse gas emissions can make a meaningful difference.” For Sivaram, the problem is always other places and their emissions.
He then goes on to propose three “pillars” of climate realism: the need for America to prepare for a world “blowing through climate targets;” to “invest in globally competitive clean technology industries;” and to “lead international efforts to avert truly catastrophic climate change.” How an America that does not commit to reduce its own emissions will have any credibility or standing to lead international efforts is left unstated.
Sivaram attempts to trick the reader into overlooking America’s emissions by ignoring the facts of the past and focusing instead on guesses about the future. It’s true that in 2023, China produced more than a quarter of new global carbon pollution — more than the United States, Europe, and India combined. But no country has contributed more to the blanket of pollution that traps additional heat in our atmosphere than the United States, which has emitted over 430 billion tons of CO2, or 23% of the world’s total historical emissions. Even in 2023, the U.S. remained the world’s number two carbon polluter.
Sivaram goes further than merely minimizing the U.S. role in creating our current climate problems. Indeed, he sets up climate change as a problem that foreign countries are imposing on Americans. “Foreign emissions,” he writes, “are endangering the American homeland,” and the effects of climate disasters “resemble those if China or Indonesia were to launch missiles at the United States.” There is something to this rhetoric that is powerful — we should think about climate-induced disasters as serious threats and respond to them with the kind of resources that we lavish on the military industrial complex. But the idea that it is foreign emissions that are the primary source of this danger is almost Trumpian.
The initiatives proposed in the Climate Realism launch are the initiatives of giving up. Investing in resilience and adaptation is needed in any scenario, but tying this spending on adaptation to Trumpian notions of protecting our borders reeks of discredited lifeboat ethics, which only cares to save ourselves and leaves others to suffer for our sins. And while supporting next-generation technologies is an appropriate piece of the policy puzzle, they should be like the broccoli at a steakhouse: off to the side and mostly superfluous compared with the meat and potatoes of deployment and mitigation to decarbonize today.
Sivaram may argue that there’s no point in trying to compete against China in the technologies of today when Chinese firms are so dominant and apparently willing to make these products while earning minimal profits. And from a parochial profit-maximizing perspective, there is a business case that firms should not be building lots of new solar cell manufacturing facilities given global manufacturing capacity.
But if American automotive firms simply ignore the coming EV wave and hope against hope that some breakthrough in solid state batteries will allow them to leapfrog over the firms vying today, they are fooling themselves. Electric vehicle giant BYD and world-leading battery manufacturer CATL have both announced batteries that can charge a car in five minutes. Both are also moving in the solid state space, and CATL is pushing into sodium ion batteries.
The notion that U.S. firms ought to sit out this fight for strategic reasons also ignores how China has come to dominate these sectors — by investing in today’s state of the art and pushing it forward through incremental process improvements at scale. The Thielian notion that “competition is for losers” leads to an immense amount of waste as wannabe founders search for unbreakable technological advantages. If venture capitalists want to fund such bets, I’m not going to stop them. But as a policy prescription for climate realism, it fails.
The final gambit of the essay is to advocate for America-controlled geoengineering. This, too, is an area where research may be needed. But regardless, it is the kind of emergency backup plan that you hope that you never need to use, rather than something that should be central to anyone’s policy strategy. Trump is currently decimating American capacity to research hard problems, whether they be cancer or vaccines or social science or anything else, so it is difficult to imagine that this administration is likely to spend real resources to investigate geoengineering.
The Climate Realism Initiative pitches itself as “bipartisan.” But where is the MAGA coalition that supports this? Even simple spending on adaptation and resilience seems unlikely to find much of a political home given the Trump administration’s drastic cuts in weather and disaster forecasting. Sivaram even mentions the need to balance the budget as part of climate realism, which must be a sick joke. For all of the fanfare over cuts to the federal government under Trump, the budget deficit is the last thing that they care about. Tax cuts remain the coin of the realm, with the House budgetary guidelines expanding the deficit by $2.8 trillion. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, similarly, has a distorted notion of government efficiency, ignoring the returns to government investments and gutting the tax collection capacity of the IRS.
The Biden administration had plans — “all of the above” energy among them — that were coherent, if not necessarily the most appealing to the world. They were based on the idea that a resilient climate coalition in the U.S. required more than just deploying Chinese-made products.
CRI seems to want to engage instead in a fantasy conversation where anti-Chinese nationalism can unite Americans to fight climate change — an all-form, no-content negative sum realpolitik that does little to address the real, compelling, and deeply political questions that the climate crisis poses.
Alternative visions are possible. The American economy is services based. Americans and American firms will inevitably make some of the hardware components of the energy transition, but the opportunities that play to our strengths are mostly on the software side.
It is critical to remember that the clean technologies that power the energy transition are categorically different from the fossil fuels that the world burned (and still burns) for energy. We do not require a constant stream of these technologies to operate our economy. The solar panels on your roof or in the field outside of town still generate electricity even if you can’t buy new ones because of a trade war. Same with wind turbines. In fact, renewables are a source of energy security because the generation happens from domestic natural resources — the sun and wind. Yet smart thinkers like Jake Sullivan fall into the trap of treating “dependence” on Chinese renewable technologies as analogous to European dependence on Russian natural gas.
Even China’s ban on U.S.-bound rare earth exports won’t make much of a dent. Despite the name, rare earths aren’t that rare, and while China does dominate their processing, it’s a tiny industry; in making fun of the “critical” nature of rare earths, Bloomberg opinion writer Javier Blas noted that the total imports of rare earths from China to the U.S. in 2024 was $170 million, or about 0.03% of U.S.-China trade. That being said, the major concern is if supplies fall to zero then major processes that require tiny amounts of rare earths (like Yttria and turbine construction) could be completely halted with serious fallout.
The American government should carefully choose what industries it would like to support. Commodity factories that have little-to-no profits, like solar cells, seem unattractive. There are many more jobs in installing solar than there are in manufacturing it, after all.
On the other hand, sectors with a much larger existing domestic industry, such as wind turbines and especially automobiles, should not be left to wither. But rather than a tariff wall to protect them, the U.S. auto firms should be encouraged to partner with the leading firms — even if those firms are Chinese — to build joint ventures in the American heartland, so that they and the American people can participate in the EV shift.
But the core of real climate realism for the United States is not about new factories. It’s about playing to our strengths. The United States has the best finance and technology sectors in the world, and these should be used to help decarbonize at home and around the world. This climate realism agenda can come in left- and right-wing flavors. A leftist vision is likely state-led with designs, guides, and plans, while the right-wing vision relies on markets.
Take Texas. On May 7, 2020, the Texas grid set a record with 21.4 gigawatts of renewable electricity generation. Just five years later, that figure hit 41.9 gigawatts. Solar and batteries have exploded on the grid, with capacity hitting 30 gigawatts and 10 gigawatts respectively. They have grown so rapidly because of the state’s market-based system, with its low barriers to interconnection and competitive dynamics.
Of course, not every location is blessed with as much wind, sun, and open space as Texas. But there’s no reason why its market systems can’t be a template for other states and countries. This, too, is industrial policy — not just the factory workers building the technologies or even the installers deploying them. There is lots of work for the lawyers and power systems engineers and advertisers and policy analysts and bankers and consultants, as well.
Yet instead of seizing these real chances to push climate action forward at home and abroad, the Trump administration is eviscerating American state capacity, the rule of law, and global trust in the government. The whipsawing of Trump’s tariffs generates uncertainty that undercuts investment. The destruction of government support for scientific exploration hits at the next-generation moonshots that Sivaram is so enamored of, as well as the institutions that educate our citizens and train our workforce. Trump’s blatant disregard for court orders and his regime’s cronyism undercut belief in the rule of law, and that investments will rise and fall based on their economics rather than how close they are to the President.
But it’s not just Trump. Texas legislators are on the verge of destroying the golden goose of cheap electricity through rapid renewables deployment out of a desire to own the libs. Despite the huge economic returns to rural communities that have seen so much utility-scale expansion in the state, some Republican legislators are pushing bills that would stick their fingers into the electricity market pie, undercutting the renewable expansion and mandating expensive gas expansion.
The Trump business coalition, which was mostly vibes in the first place, is fracturing. There are conflicting interests between those who want to fight inflation and those who see low oil prices as a problem. Pushing down oil prices by pressuring OPEC+ to pump more crude and depressing global economic outlooks with the trade war (Degrowth Donald!) has hurt the frackers in Texas. Ironically, one way to lower their costs is to electrify operations, so they don’t have to rely on expensive diesel.
Climate change is here, but so is Donald Trump. Ignoring either one is a recipe for disaster as they both create destructive whirlwinds and traffic in uncertainty. The real solution to both is mitigation — doing everything possible today to stop as much of the damage as possible before it happens.