Why Trump 2.0 aims to destroy green energy

Fifteen years ago, American advocates for increasing the use of renewable sources of energy for electricity production offered two central arguments for doing so. The first, obviously, was climate change. The second was strategic: If the U.S. didn’t seize the initiative in building out companies and investing in innovations to drive the green economy, some other country would. And if they did, those other countries would have a significant advantage moving forward.

The U.S. was well positioned to lead, even though it was quickly becoming apparent that other countries, including China, were making the same play. But the evolution of energy production was centrally a technological race, the kind at which the American system excelled. Innovation in fossil fuel energy existed but was largely about improving extraction, as the fracking boom demonstrated. Innovation in renewables — wind and particularly solar — was multi-faceted: smaller, cheaper, easier production, more output.

For a while, the surge in awareness about climate change driven by Al Gore’s 2006 movie on the subject seemed as if it would drive an ozone-layer-like moment of bipartisan agreement. It even seemed as if oil companies that made and maintained huge fortunes selling fossil fuels might spend resources to lead in the green energy space, too. But many Republicans were already skeptical of climate change and used to siding with the oil companies (remember who was president in 2006?) — and therefore inclined against taking action.

This was also a period in which partisan hostility surged. The emergence of the Tea Party was centered heavily on the election of Barack Obama, (who, like his opponent in 2008, promised to take action to combat global warming). The new president ran broadly on a platform of change, but that idea, twisted from its original presentation, freaked a lot of conservative Americans out. They saw in him not just change from the George W. Bush era but a change toward something exotic, foreign and un-American, with all of the subtext that suggests.

This, not the stuff about protecting oil companies, is where Donald Trump got folded in. As was the case with the Iraq War, Trump’s view of climate change (to the extent that he expressed one) mirrored the conventional assessment. In 2009, in the period before backlash to Obama and climate activism reached full steam, he was a signatory to a letter calling for action on carbon emissions that was published in the New York Times.

A few months later, Trump had already begun harrumphing along with the rest of the right about efforts to increase renewable energy and cut down on emissions from cars. But what really polarized the future president was that someone planned to build wind turbines off the coast of Scotland, within sight of a golf course he was working on. This was his own fight, engaged in in his own way, with social-media rants, attacks on opponents and baffling misinformation. When he opted to run for president, he applied those same tactics against his opponents.

The broader fight against climate change was also introducing tactics that would be deployed more broadly in the Trump era. Hacked emails selectively leaked to undermine the opponents. Attacking scientists as elitists and suggesting that agreed-upon facts were actually still in contention. Leaning on partisan alignment to combat unhelpful arguments.

(Such consistency has not been uniform. One of the attacks on Obama’s green-energy efforts centered on a federal loan guarantee given to a solar company, Solyndra, that eventually went under. That the program that provided that guarantee ended up making money for the government was generally ignored. The GOP’s voluminous objections to a president “picking winners and losers” in the economy, meanwhile, have necessarily vanished completely.)

Trump and the GOP were destined to land in the same place on climate change because Trump is a product of the right’s information ecosystem as much as its leader. He wasn’t motivated by ensuring that ExxonMobil made money but he was very motivated by the undercurrents that Exxon and its allies leveraged: young vs. old, change vs. the same, elites va. normal people. No one really cares about LED lightbulbs. They care that some kid with a placard or some bureaucrat in a tie is telling them they have to change what they are doing. This, Trump gets.

By the time Trump launched his 2016 bid, climate change was one of the most polarized issues in politics. Republicans rejected its existence and opposed taking action to address it while Democrats (and particularly younger Democrats more likely to see its eventual effects) demanded action. This polarization was so robust that it was essentially a litmus test, weeding out Republicans who might have been sympathetic to action. There are now functionally no defenders of addressing climate change on the American right.

(This happens elsewhere, too. “Wokeness,” for example, is a caricature of diversity issues that’s loathed on the right as a perceived demand that older Americans do something other than what they’ve always done. What was the fight over the “woke” Cracker Barrel logo other than a fight centered around unexpected change? By now, there is essentially no powerful Republican willing to stand in defense of pluralism.)

On Jan. 20, Trump returned to office, determined to use his regained power to settle all of his longstanding grudges like a long-tied Michael Corleone. That meant not only cutting government support for renewable energy projects but actively opposing them. It has meant treating wind and solar projects like they’re DEI initiatives, with whole-of-government efforts to uproot them in favor of coal.

This isn’t picking winners and losers; it’s just picking losers. Despite the U.S.’ general failure to move fast on renewable energy 15 years ago, we’ve seen a dramatic shift away from coal and to wind and solar.

In 2003, nearly every state generated more electricity from coal than from renewable sources.

By 2023, most were generating more from wind, solar and hydroelectric than from coal — despite the first Trump presidency.

Part of this was the replacement of coal-burning power plants with ones that used natural gas, a shift driven in part by the boom in extraction that accompanied fracking.

But every state also saw increases in the percentage of electricity generated by wind and solar over that same period. On average, 17 percent more of state electricity production in 2023 came from wind and solar than did in those states in 2003.

Trump and officials in his administration seem intent on reversing that trend. They claim that wind and solar are somehow only viable when it is windy and sunny, as though mankind has developed no way of storing generated power. Trump insists that fossil fuels are the only way to meet rising electricity demand not because they are but because he has internalized that renewables (and wind in particular) are bad. His base has learned this lesson along with him.

There has been one particular irony to Trump’s rejection of renewable energy over the past five years. One of the reasons he insists that wind and solar not be implemented and that electric vehicles not be encouraged is that so many of the constituent elements of those shifts — the car batteries and solar panels — can only be sourced from Chinese companies. Because China, recognizing the approaching economic battle that renewable energy presented 15 years ago, went all in on winning it.

Our failure to compete then is used as an argument against competing now.

Photo: An illustration from 1985. (National Archives)