Trump's second term will devastate the US climate agenda

One of the best things about America is that everyone is entitled to their own opinions. However, what happens when an incoming leader has an opinion so ill-informed that it threatens national security, economic stability, millions of new jobs, public health and the safety of virtually every American?

We’re about to find out, because voters have elected Donald Trump as the next president.

Five months ago, 78 percent of Americans polled by the University of Chicago said climate change is real, including 62 percent of Republicans. More than eight in 10 said they had experienced an extreme climate event. Of those, 68 percent said it was an important issue in the election, and 53 percent wanted the next president to reduce global warming emissions.

But by Nov. 5, those priorities had been eclipsed by other issues — perhaps the worry that Haitian migrants were eating family pets in Ohio.

Now, the man about to take charge of the world's biggest carbon-fuel producer and second-biggest source of carbon emissions thinks climate change is a "hoax" and climate scientists are "alarmists."

Trump has little nice to say about the clean energy technologies necessary to stop climate change from getting worse. He makes wild, unsubstantiated and provably untrue comments about wind and solar energy, perhaps because oil interests give more money to political campaigns. They gave over $75 million to Trump PACs in the 2024 cycle. Trump had asked for a billion.

The media has reported Trump's many plans to unravel the government's environmental protections and decarbonization programs. I needn't repeat them here. However, his first move was to name former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) his EPA administrator. The previous Trump administration modified or scrapped more than 100 environmental protection rules. Joe Biden restored many of them. On Fox News, Zeldin characterized them as "left-wing" regulations and said his primary mission will be to kill them.

Trump has said he wants to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains America's biggest-ever investment in clean energy. If he succeeds, he will gut-punch the economy and job growth, including in Republican-controlled states. At present, red states are benefiting most from renewable energy.

Texas leads the nation in renewable energy capacity. Renewables provide 65 percent of the power consumed in Iowa, more than half the energy produced in Kansas and South Dakota, and more than one-third of the power generated in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Nebraska, Nevada, Maine, and North Dakota.

A Washington Post analysis found that congressional districts Trump won in 2020 have received three times more investment in clean energy and manufacturing than the districts won by Biden.

Another study found that Republicans represent 19 of the 20 congressional districts that have won clean energy investments under the Inflation Reduction Act. These investments are expected to create 110,000 new jobs and leverage at least $126 billion in private investments across 40 states.

Yet another study, published last year in the journal Energy Policy, concluded that decarbonizing the national economy could create nearly 9 million jobs by 2050, accounting for up to 5 percent of the workforce and 90 percent of the energy-sector labor force by then.

Market forces are already putting a strong wind at renewable energy's back. We need the energy. America's power appetite is growing rapidly to support crypto mining, data farms, and artificial intelligence.

Wind and solar power are already less expensive than new fossil-fueled power plants. With market forces aligning behind wind, solar and other clean resources, prolonging fossil energy's dominance and jobs are losing propositions.

"In fact, fossil fuel jobs are likely go away even without any new climate policies or emissions targets, as coal, oil, and natural gas are increasingly outcompeted by ever-cheaper wind and solar," one writer points out. "In the absence of any net-zero policy goals, the number of people employed in fossil fuels would decline by 40 percent, shifting from 60 percent of the energy workforce today to 40 percent in 2050."

Others expect an even more significant shift by 2050, with 84 percent of energy jobs in the renewable sector compared to only 11 percent in fossil fuels and 5 percent in nuclear.

In sum, the job growth in renewables would more than offset the job losses in fossil fuels.

Renewable energy jobs during the Biden years already grew at twice the pace of employment in the overall economy. However, even with markets and necessity favoring clean energy, enlightened public policies are necessary to guide the transition equitably and to accelerate it before climate change becomes unstoppable.

As the world's energy transformation unfolds, Trump's stated policies would leave the United States behind with his anachronistic, ill-advised and ill-fated effort to help the fossil fuel industry sustain its status as America's dominant energy source.

We've made this mistake before by allowing other nations to dominate the clean energy industries made possible by American innovation. An American inventor created the first silicon solar photovoltaic cell in 1883, but China now controls 80 percent of the world's solar supply chain. The U.S. was once the world leader in wind power, but China now dominates wind turbine manufacturing, too.

Trump's misguided plans and misinformed statements had an immediate effect after the Nov. 5 election. The Financial Times noted that his election "dealt a blow to the renewable energy industry, prompting at least half a dozen developers to put projects on hold and investors to dump shares."

If there is a bright spot in the Trump administration, it could be Elon Musk. He appears to have Trump's ear. He takes climate change so seriously that he's racing to create a shuttle to Mars.

What we know for sure is that the U.S. and the world should be redoubling itsefforts to deploy clean energy and speed up decarbonization. Instead, Trump's election will cause another major setback. The American people, and the world's, will suffer for it.

William S. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.