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His intellectual influences include longtime climate action skeptics — and Bill Gates’ favorite author.
Rob sits down in New York with the outgoing head of America’s energy apparatus.
Rob talks Ford and GM with BloombergNEF’s Corey Cantor. Plus, Rob and Jesse dig into the Trump transition.
And for his energy czar, Doug Burgum.
And what renewables can learn from it.
And more on this week’s top policy and energy news.
What a “whole of government” approach to energy looks like for the next White House.
Within days of stepping into the White House in 2021, President Biden introduced his “whole of government” approach to tackling climate change. Now, months out from Trump’s inauguration, it's looking like the returning president may emulate that whole of government strategy for his energy agenda — of course, to much different ends.
Trump announced last week that he would create a National Energy Council (or is it the Council of National Energy?) to “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE.” Doug Burgum, Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Interior, would sit at the helm. Over the weekend Trump announced his nominee for Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, who would also be part of it.
It’s not unusual for presidents to create new councils or offices within the White House to help implement their policy goals. Biden established a National Climate Task Force made up of cabinet secretaries and department heads to facilitate communication and coordination across the federal government. From the little information we have so far about Trump’s plans, it seems he’s creating a similar body to implement his promise of opening up the floodgates for oil and gas production. Here’s what we know.
In a statement announcing Burgum as his nominee for Secretary of the Interior, Trump said Burgum would also be chairman of the “newly formed, and very important, National Energy Council, which will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American Energy.” A few days later, he also named Wright to the council.
Trump has not named other members yet, but the description implies that his EPA pick, Lee Zeldin, his Transportation Secretary nominee, Sean Duffy, and his Secretary of Commerce candidate, Howard Lutnick, are all likely contenders to join Burgum and Wright.
Membership in the group is likely to be similar to that of Biden’s Climate Task Force, with one exception. Biden’s group was chaired by appointed White House climate advisors — his climate “czars,” if you will — Gina McCarthy and John Podesta, rather than Senate-confirmed agency heads. As Interior Secretary, Burgum’s sphere of influence over energy production would typically be limited to oil and gas leasing and solar and wind development on federally-owned lands and waters. But as the head of Trump’s energy council, he could play a larger role orchestrating energy policy across the federal government, Justin Vaughn, a political scientist at Coastal Carolina University who studies presidential cabinets told me.
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Trump's main directive for the council is to cut red tape for energy projects and focus on “INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.” He goes on to describe his vision for “energy dominance” as one where the U.S. can “sell energy to our friends, including all European Nations, which will make the world a safer place.” That may be an allusion to plans for approving new liquified natural gas export terminals and expedite permitting for these facilities — items high on the industry’s wish list for the Trump administration. (Trump intends to give Burgum a role on the National Security Council, in addition to the Energy Council, where Burgum could also have a voice in foreign trade policy.)
Another goal Trump mentions in the Burgum announcement is “dramatically increasing baseload power” for the electric grid, which he says will reduce costs for consumers and businesses. That could mean clearing hurdles to build new natural gas power plants, as well as nuclear and geothermal power plants.
The Energy Council won’t have unilateral authority to do any of this. Its primary power will be the ability to convene leaders from different parts of the executive branch and agencies for regular meetings, Costa Samaras, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as the Principal Assistant Director for Energy during much of the Biden presidency, told me. The meetings might be a place to track progress on Trump’s overarching goals, flag certain rulemakings that are underway, or develop subgroups to work on specific issues like permitting or leasing. At this point, it’s not clear whether the council could do much more than that.
Samaras objected to Trump’s stated goal of “energy dominance,” arguing that the U.S. already is energy dominant. Oil exports reached a record high in 2023. The U.S. has produced more crude oil than any other nation, ever, for the past six years in a row.
If Trump truly wants to cut costs for consumers, his council should focus on increasing the grid’s transmission capacity, which would “unlock clean energy that is waiting in the interconnection queue,” Samaras said. “I see that as the lowest hanging fruit.”
Vaughn cautioned against reading too much into the council at this point. “When presidents create these offices or councils within their White Houses, it is typically symbolic to show that they're prioritizing something,” he said. What will matter is whether the group actually meets regularly or whether it gets staffed up. For example, Biden created a whole new White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy with a full staff to support the Climate Task Force.
“Sometimes they are very influential. Sometimes they basically exist on paper. And so it remains to be seen,” said Vaughn.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
Conditions have changed.
Donald Trump first took the office of the president in January 2017, having called climate change a Chinese-invented hoax and promising to “end the war on coal.” He quickly went to work reversing the climate policy of the previous administration, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and tossing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which restricted greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. He opened up public lands for oil and gas development and jacked up tariffs on solar panels. His budgets continually called for slashing energy research and development done by the federal government’s national laboratories.
And yet emissions fell. In 2016, U.S. annual emissions from industry and energy were 5.25 billion tonnes. In 2021, after Trump left office and in spite of all his many major policy reversals, they were 5.03 billion, more than 4% lower than when he started.
Can it happen again? Trump is returning to Washington amidst a vastly different energy, economic, and climate moment. To meet even looser versions of international climate goals (the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit set in Paris is now essentially dead) requires drastic emissions cuts, beyond the business-as-usual reductions Trump oversaw in his first four years in office. Even those passive cuts may be harder to come by this time around, however, as the dirtiest fuels now make up a smaller portion of the energy mix and electricity demand looks to grow quickly for the first time in decades.
One reason for the steady reductions during Trump’s first term was that the “war on coal” continued apace, driven as much by market forces as anything else. Buoyed by the availability of natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables and depressed by the mounting costs of maintaining aging plants and directed activism against coal investment, plants shut down by the thousands of megawatts every year of Trump’s presidency.
“You have Trump promising to bring back coal: Not only do emissions continue to decline over the course of the Trump administration, on autopilot — to some degree, coal plants close faster in the Trump administration than the Obama administration,” Alex Trembath, deputy director of the energy-focused environmental group The Breakthrough Institute, told me, though he added: “These are secular trends in the short term that the presidency does not have a lot of influence over.”
While Trump has promised to aggressively pursue more drilling and fracking for oil and gas — and nominated an oil-and-gas state governor and a fracking executive to be his Secretaries of the Interior and Energy, respectively — there has been little to no talk of coal this time around. That’s not for lack of specificity. When Trump announced Chris Wright’s nomination to be Secretary of Energy, he mentioned nuclear, solar, geothermal, oil, and gas by name. When Burgum was announced, there were references to “liquid gold” and “ALL” forms of energy.
The coal industry sees hope in the new Trump administration, but its savior from senescence may be rising demand for electricity as much as public policy.
Even as the occupant of the White House changed in 2017, one thing that did not change was the continued slow growth in electricity demand. For about the first 20 years of this century, electricity load growth averaged about half a percent a year, including from 2017 to 2021. This made coal-to-gas switching easier to pull off.
“There was effectively no load growth — not just in those four years, from effectively 2008 to 2022,” Dennis Wamstad, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me.
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions stopped meaningfully rising in the early part of this century and finally peaked in 2009, according to Global Carbon Budget and Our World In Data, thanks to slow load growth, the recession, and the ascendance of natural gas in electricity generation. With next-to-no demand growth, utilities and energy companies could afford to retire their least efficient plants — and indeed, “declines in coal generation appear to be the largest driver of power sector emissions reductions” during the first Trump term, John Bistline, an energy analyst at the Electric Power Research Institute, told me in an email.
Since 2020 when electricity use dipped due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a combination of economic growth, electrification of home heating and transportation, new factories, and data centers have boosted five-year energy demand growth projections from 2.6% to 4.7%, a figure that the energy policy consulting firm Grid Strategies says may still be an underestimate.
This has meant some stalling on emissions reductions from burning fossil fuels. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has projected that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will flatten out in this year and next “because of small, counteracting changes in emissions from coal, natural gas, and petroleum products.” The EIA has also projected a slowdown in coal plant retirements, with this year on pace for the fewest since 2011. Several utilities and electricity markets have pushed out retirement dates to maintain reliability on the grid in the face of sudden demand spikes, including those in Georgia, Maryland, and possibly Indiana.
The chief financial officer of Duke Energy, which owns utilities in the Southeast and Midwest, told Bloomberg that the company’s plans to convert coal plants to co-fire with natural gas could be scrapped or delayed based on the new Trump administration’s plans for the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant emissions rules. “The pace of the energy transition could change,” he told Bloomberg.
Large coal retirements are still forecast for the rest of the decade, but planned shutdowns have shrunk from 34.2 gigawatts of coal capacity retired over the next three years to 30 gigawatts, a greater than 12% reduction, according to data from S&P Global Commodities Insights.
“American citizens cast their votes for change, a change for the working class, a change that will improve the economy, a change for thoughtful approaches to our energy future,” Emily Arthun, the chief executive officer of the American Coal Council, told me in an e-mailed statement. “Coal is a critical resource needed for the well-being of our economy and the well-being of our citizens.”
Wamstad, the energy analyst, argues that this slowdown is just that: a slowdown, and that the economic case against coal is still overwhelming. “We actually think that structural change is going to continue in the 2020s, regardless of demand growth,” Wamstad told me. “Our findings are more aggressive than EIA or S&P. We expect by end of decade we will have retired another 100,000 megawatts of coal capacity, and by 2030 or 2031 we’ll have retired two-thirds of all capacity.”
Trembath was a little more circumspect about the ability of renewables to meet the lost capacity from shut-down coal, especially if Trump takes an ax to the Inflation Reduction Act and permitting difficulties persist, especially for wind.
“There are quite a few bottlenecks on current trends that will make sustained decarbonization more difficult than it was [from] 2017 to 2021,” Trembath told me. Load growth will put pressure on renewables and other non-carbon sources to keep up, while natural gas turbine providers
are seeing orders double. “You have big announcements about small and advanced nuclear reactors, but a lot has to happen for new steel in the ground or Three Mile Island to reopen,” he said, referring to the splashy announcement Microsoft and Constellation made about restarting the 835-megawatt facility. “I think the most likely thing to meet a bunch of that load growth is natural gas.”
Even that may be a glass-half-full perspective, however.
“We have gas that is cheaper and we have renewables that are clearly cheaper and available now,” Wamstad said. Even if coal plants are kept open for another few years due to higher demand, “that’s a bad thing,” Wamstad said. “That doesn’t really change the direction we’re going — it changes the end date.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct the time horizon for Grid Strategies’ load growth projections
The future of U.S. climate policy may depend on things getting dramatic.
Donald Trump does not care much about climate change. By which I mean not just that he does not believe the warming of the planet is a problem, but also that the entire subject is far from the top of his priority list. Unfortunately, that makes his incoming administration even more dangerous.
The implied chaos of the second Trump term is only beginning. In some cases, the operative question is “Is he really going to do that?” Will he actually deport 15 million people, or put a 20% tariff on all imported goods, or prosecute his political opponents?
But when it comes to climate, Trump has offered no attention-grabbing proposals or bizarre promises. He said he wants to “Drill, drill, drill,” but we’re already drilling more than we ever have before. He has a weird obsession with homicidal windmills (“They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales”) and a contempt for electric cars, it’s true. But the real hazard lies in the agenda of those who will run key departments in his government, doing things Trump barely takes notice of.
This may seem counterintuitive to those who view Trump as a uniquely malign force, pushing the federal government in new and disturbing directions. But Trump only cares about a few things — trade and immigration are his primary policy areas of interest, and much of his days will be spent plotting revenge against his enemies — and climate isn’t one of them.
So far, the Trump appointees with influence over climate policy are not the kind of figures who will grab headlines; Americans are unlikely to develop strong opinions about Lee Zeldin (the pick for EPA Administrator) or Doug Burgum (who will be Secretary of the Interior). Below them will be a cadre of unknown and unnoticed officials determined not just to undo every bit of climate progress that occurred under Joe Biden, but also to go much further, purging scientists, stopping environmental enforcement, opening up federal land to fossil fuel production, eliminating pollution regulations, and shutting down every possible office with “climate” in its name or its mission.
So why would it be better if Trump were paying attention? Because the only likely restraint on this assault will be if Trump decides it reflects poorly on him.
That brings us to a crude but useful unified theory of Trump policy outcomes. Expressed as an equation, it would look like this:
Outcome = ((Trump impulses + party agenda) x attention)/political risk
To put it in simpler terms, the relevant questions are: What does Trump want? What do the people around him want? Is this something Trump cares about? And what are the political risks involved?
As an example, let’s take the idea of repealing the Affordable Care Act, which Trump tried and failed to do in his first term. His impulse was to destroy the ACA because it was signed by Barack Obama, whom he hates. His party would also like to destroy the ACA. But Trump himself is not all that interested in the issue of healthcare; he couldn’t be bothered to come up with a plan to replace the ACA, though he regularly promised “something terrific.” Because it’s such a high-profile issue, it won’t move forward without his attention.
Finally — and most importantly — the political risk of repealing the ACA is incredibly high because it is very popular. Repealing it would be cataclysmic for the healthcare system, leading tens of millions of people to lose their health coverage. Put it all together, and the likelihood that Republicans will achieve their longtime goal of ACA repeal is very, very small.
Now let’s plug climate into the equation. Trump’s impulses are uniformly detrimental, but also vague. He told oil executives they should raise him a billion dollars because he’ll give them whatever they want, but if you asked him what specifically it is they want, he probably couldn’t tell you with any specificity.
The Trump officials who will work on environmental issues know exactly what they want — but most of it won’t attract much attention, from the president or the public. When they start gutting PFAS regulations and methane emissions rules, neither Trump nor the average voter will have any idea.
One exception has already been teed up: It now appears that Republicans will try to kill the electric vehicle tax credit. If he wanted to, Elon Musk could stop this: If he told Trump it’s a bad idea, Trump would instruct Republicans in Congress to keep the credit, and it would be most likely be safe. But Musk is of the opinion that while ending the credit might hurt Tesla sales in the short run, his competitors will suffer even more, perhaps getting out of the EV business altogether.
There could be a fight over EV credits when Congress takes up the issue, and it’s even possible that Trump would step in and tell his party to leave them alone if he decided there would be too much of a backlash that would harm him politically. It’s highly unlikely, but the fact that one could at least imagine how it would happen shows how the preferences/attention/political risk dynamic operates.
But to repeat, EV subsidies are the exception of a climate-related policy that will garner some press coverage (though even that may be limited, since the repeal of the tax credits will be part of a gargantuan reconciliation bill with lots of other contentious ideas in it). Most of what happens at the EPA and the Departments of Interior and Energy, where pro-fossil fuel officials will labor every day to undermine environmental protections, will pass by with little notice.
So climate advocates face a difficult task: If they can raise the salience of the climate issue and make a particular Trump administration climate policy unpopular, it would become possible that Trump will notice, perceive some political danger in what his government and Congress are doing, and act to restrain them, for no reason other than his own self-interest.
It’s not much to pin your hopes on, and the idea that Trump himself could be the force of moderation in an administration hell-bent on reversing progress on climate seems crazy. But this is going to be a crazy four years.
And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.
You can turn even the wonkiest policy into a culture war issue if you try hard enough.
“We need a leader,” said JD Vance as he accepted the Republican nomination for vice president, “who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories.” The election, he said, is “about the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying their jobs,” and “the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world, when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in our own country.”
This is the tale Vance tells about energy and climate — one of contempt and betrayal, elitists sacrificing hard-working blue-collar Americans on the altar of their alien schemes. On the surface it may sound like it’s about jobs and economics, but it’s really about the eternal culture war that divides us from them.
This is nothing new. Maintaining this artificial division between environmental and economic concerns is central to the effort to protect the fossil fuel industry, and has been for decades. Voters must be convinced that any attempt to do something about climate change is not just unserious but an assault on virtuous working people waged from Washington and other places controlled by the snobbish liberal elite.
The argument plays on beliefs about environmentalism that go back decades. Beginning in the 1970s, a group of political scientists led by Ronald Inglehart drew attention to a change in public opinion in advanced societies around the world, as “post-materialist values” based on autonomy and self-expression grew in political prominence. The generations that grew up after World War II, they argued, were less focused on material scarcity and more concerned with issues like abortion, equal rights for women and minority groups, and the environment.
The idea that environmental concerns were separate from economics — that they are fundamentally cultural and not material — has always been used by the right to discredit environmentalism and those who advocate for it. As George H.W. Bush said about Al Gore in 1992 when Gore’s warnings about climate change were considered a little wacky, “This guy is so far off in the environmental extreme, we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American.”
Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. But the solutions have also gotten more real.
In Vance’s home state, for instance, an “energy worker” is much more likely to be working in green energy than fossil fuels; as Semafor recently noted, “Clean energy-related companies now employ about 114,000 people in Ohio, compared to 71,000 working in oil and gas.” The state is enjoying something of a solar boom, as well as a significant increase in production of batteries that will power the electric vehicles Vance and his running mate despise. The “great American factories” Vance celebrates apparently don’t include projects like the joint LG-Honda battery plant in Jeffersonville, an hour’s drive from his home town of Middletown, which will complete construction later this year and is slated to employ 2,200 of his constituents.
But in the picture painted by Trump, Vance, and others running on the anti-anti-climate change agenda, there is essentially no such thing as a green job; efforts to lower emissions have only costs and no benefits. And the cost is not just to our economy but to our spirit, making us impotent and weak. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who may well become Secretary of Energy if Trump wins, began his convention speech with a call-and-response to the audience. “Who will make America energy dominant?” he asked three times, to which the audience responded, “Donald Trump!” “Energy dominant” has replaced “energy independent” as the goal for the Trump-era GOP, not surprising given that dominance and submission is one of the central themes of Trump’s life.
“Energy dominance” isn’t so much a practical state of affairs as a feeling, the sense that our heads are held high and others grovel before us, whether that has any relation to reality or not. After all, under Joe Biden the country is about as energy dominant as it could be, and not always for the best. America is not only producing more oil than any country in the world, it’s producing more than any country in human history. We’re also the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas.
Yet according to Burgum, the next four years will bring either an apocalypse of enfeeblement as we huddle together in darkness or an explosion of manly strength, depending on which president we elect. “Imagine: no electricity for your fridge, your lights or air conditioning,” he warned. “President Trump will ensure there’s power for you, and importantly, that we have the power as the United States to beat China in the AI arms race.” You can almost feel the power Trump will give you, like a steroid shot to the national soul — or a dose of something even more potent. “Teddy Roosevelt encouraged America to speak softly and carry a big stick,” Burgum went on. “Energy dominance will be the big stick that President Trump will carry.” To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a stick is just a stick — but not this time, I think.
All that was no doubt music to the ears of the American Petroleum Institute, one of the convention’s sponsors, as well as both Trump and Vance, who has introduced a bill to repeal the EV subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act and replace them with subsidies for internal combustion vehicles. “The whole EV thing is a scam,” Vance has said.
In other words: Don’t be fooled when Democrats tell you that climate change is an economic threat and that transitioning to a green economy will actually increase prosperity. All you need to know is that the “Green New Scam” is being imposed by the people you hate.
Those resisting climate action would prefer that voters continue to see it as solely a cultural issue, as though the environmental conversation were still confined to beautifying highways and picking up litter, something we can set aside with no material cost. But the truth is that culture and economics are entwined, and always have been. The Republicans who took the stage in Milwaukee to rail against green energy and present themselves as the protectors of the working class understand that only too well.
