The current administration is not a supporter of “clean energy” alternatives
Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens report on the Trump/Republican aim to end the “clean energy boom” that occurred during the Biden administration (https://nytimes.com/2025/05/13/climate/ira-republican-tax-bill-clean-energy.html).
“The party’s signature tax plan would kill most Biden-era incentives,” they write. Overlooked by the Republicans, “G.O.P. districts have the most to lose.” They refer to “wind farms in Wyoming, to a “huge solar factory expansion in Georgia. Lithium mines in Nevada. Vacuums that suck carbon from the air in Louisiana.”
The funding for such project comes from Biden supported tax credits for clean energy provided by the 2022 Inflation Adjustment Reduction Act. The act authorized more than $843 billion for the creation of such projects. However, Plumer and Stevens write, “only about $321 billion of that money has actually been spent, with many projects still on the drawing board, according to data made public on Tuesday by the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project of the Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
The Republican dominated Congress and Senate and are unlikely to allocate the remaining $522 billion as they search for ways to pay for a multi-trillion-dollar tax cut favoring the rich and wholly supported by President Trump.
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It’ not surprising that under Trump, Republicans show no inclination to spend money on clean energy or to reduce support for fossil fuels, the most important drivers of global warming. Historically, the U.S. has led the world in spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and remains only second to China today. China is also the largest producer of clean energy.
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The U.S. as a leader in causing the planet to get ever-more warm
Robert Hunziker writes on the U.S.’s major role in causing global warming and how Trump and the Republicans ignore or deny this growing existential problem (https://counterpunch.org/2025/05/16/americas-impact-on-the-global-thermostate).
The energy and environmental policies of the Trump administration and Republican controlled Congress and Senate assure that in the meantime this climate-denying or -evading will go on. Hunziker points out that the Trump administration’s “push for 100% fossil fuels and as much coal burning as possible while trashing mitigation of climate change, which is characterized by the right-wing White House and U.S. Congress as an expensive hoax, a farce, a threat to the U.S. economy, plus massive roll backs of environmental regulations that force American businesses to spend more to keep America’s environment clean.”
Consistent with this position, Trump is pulling the U.S. “out of the Paris ’15 climate accord.” Consequently,
“Under the Trump administration, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions levels are estimated to rise up to 36 percent higher than current policy by 2035.” (The Trump Administration’s Retreat from Global Climate Leadership, Center for American Progress, Jan. 21, 2025). This certainly helps guarantee a hotter planet.
There is more from Hunziker. The Trump administration is also signaling “its intent to go one step further and withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, est. 1992). This is the underlying framework, “the father of international cooperation on climate change” that led to meetings such as Paris ’15. Abandonment will freeze-out the U.S. from any future global climate change negotiations and set a dangerous precedent. This could trigger a domino effect among nations questioning climate obligations and destabilizing the global consensus the Paris Agreement represents.”
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Fossil fuels take priority
Bill Mckibben offers other examples of how the Trump administration “[c]ares More About Growing Fossil Fuel Profits Than Shrinking Your Energy Bill,”
(https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-waste-energy). The article was published on May 20, 2025. His central point: “Many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil.”
McKibben continues, “the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: It became increasingly clear this week that the Republican congressional majority is all too willing to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.”
The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register last week: Their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: Either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech.
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Trump is the only climate denier among national leaders
David Gelles writes on Trump as the only climate denier internationally (https://nytimes.com/2025/05/14/climate/trump-climate-denial.html).
Gelles notes, “The administration is not only allowing more greenhouse gases. It is undermining the nation’s ability to understand and respond to a hotter planet.”
The evidence.
“When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago [early May] that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.
“But [Gelles adds] President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its consequences.
“The administration has dismantled climate research, firing some of the nation’s top scientists, and gutted efforts to chart how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and what that means for the economy, employment, agriculture, health and other aspects of American society. The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.”
“‘By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming,’ said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The notion of there being any shared factual reality just seems to be completely out the window,’ he said.”
“At the same time, through cuts to the National Weather Service and by denying disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration has weakened the country’s ability to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather that is being made worse by climate change.”
“The president is also moving to loosen restrictions on air pollution, which experts say will lead to more planet warming emissions, and to overturn the government’s legal authority to regulate those gases.”
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Cutting rules on energy efficiency
Rachel Frazin reports on May 12, 2025 that the Energy Department is proposing to cut 47 rules on energy efficiency and other rules as the “largest deregulatory effort in history” (https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5296169-energy-department-proposes-to-cut-47-rules-in-largest-deregulatory-effort-in-history/?tbref=hp). Frazin offers the following examples.
“The department plans to ax a long list of efficiency regulations, including those pertaining to stoves, ovens, showerheads, clothes washers, dishwashers and microwaves.
“The rules also apply to a smattering of other policies ranging for guidelines under which the department buys oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to nondiscrimination requirements for grant recipients.”
“‘While it would normally take years for the Department of Energy to remove just a handful of regulations, the Trump Administration assembled a team working around the clock to reduce costs and deliver results for the American people in just over 110 days,’ Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a written statement.”
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Trump’s Order to Expand Logging Threatens to Increase Climate-Fueled Wildfires
Curtis Johnson considers the implications of Trump’s order to expand logging and how it will increase climate-fueled wildfires in an article published on May 17, 2025 (https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-order-to-expand-logging-threatens-to-increase-climate-fueled-wildfires).
“On March 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” The order claimed “onerous Federal policies have hindered domestic timber production and that expanding logging was a matter of protecting “national and economic security.”
It ordered the secretary of the Interior and head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), who oversee the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) respectively, to develop a plan to expand timber targets and streamline permitting “to suspend, revise, or rescind all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, settlements, consent orders, and other agency actions that impose an undue burden on timber production.”
The responsible departments and agencies were instructed to find categorical exclusions to the National Environmental Policy Act and use “emergency regulations” to circumvent the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
“In April, USDA head Brooke Rollins directed the stripping of forest protections on more than half of all national forests and called for expanding timber production by 25 percent to address a ‘wildfire emergency,’ and restore forest ‘resources.’ A report from the Associated Press says the directive “exempts affected forests from an objection process that allows outside groups, tribes and local governments to challenge logging proposals at the administrative level before they are finalized.”
“A map of forests Rollins has targeted includes all national forests in Washington State and California, and large sections throughout the west and other parts of the country. It even includes some wilderness areas. These forests contain some of the most cherished old-growth and mature forest ecosystems remaining in the U.S.
“In the Pacific Northwest, millions of acres of older and mature forests and old-growth dependent species like the northern spotted owl were finally protected by the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) in the 1990s after a century of logging that had reduced the forest to about a fourth of its historical extent. The NWFP happened as a result of intense forest defense and protest by Earth First! and many other environmental groups, studies by forest ecologists and court injunctions. The idea that these forests of immense trees, stunning natural beauty, rich biodiversity and crucial reserves of carbon sequestration could now, once again, be opened to logging is stomach-turning.”
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Trump Guts FEMA and NOAA?
Robert Kuttner writes in the American Prospect on Trump’s gutting of FEMA and NOAA, The American Prospect, June 4, 2025
(https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-06-04-why-would-trump-gut-fema-and-noaa).
Today on TAP: Destroying American weather science will create a perfect storm of disaster.
“June 1 marked the beginning of hurricane season, a period whose existence was news to Trump’s head of FEMA, David Richardson, who had no prior experience managing disaster relief. Richardson was appointed to replace FEMA acting chief Cameron Hamilton, who was fired summarily after telling a congressional subcommittee that he didn’t think FEMA should be shut down.
“Trump’s attack on FEMA goes beyond even the Project 2025 design, which proposed to cut FEMA and turn some of its functions over to the states. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in March that she wanted FEMA shut down entirely (she later backpedaled and spoke of shrinking and reforming it). But most states have nothing like FEMA’s capacity or experience, and don’t want FEMA reduced or closed.
Kuttner - “Due to actions early in Trump’s term, FEMA has lost an estimated 2,000 employees out of about 6,100, according to The Wall Street Journal. Many of these were nominally probationary employees, but due to the agency’s need to quickly staff up in an emergency, these tended to be experienced staffers who work for FEMA part of every year.
Kuttner - “More damage is coming in the Big Beautiful Budget Bill. Trump’s budget request called for cutting FEMA by $646 million.
Kuttner - “This is occurring as FEMA’s much-depleted sister agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is predicting as many as 19 hurricanes this summer and fall, including three to five major ones likely to cause massive damage. To add injury to insult, Trump has rejected bipartisan requests to continue the Biden policy of covering 100 percent of the costs of relief and recovery operations after major disasters. The usual split is 75 percent federal, matched by 25 percent state.”
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The economic costs of rolling back clean energy
Marianne Lavelle refers on June 12, 2025 to a study that finds clean energy rollbacks will cost the economy $1.1 trillion by 2035 (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12062025/clean-energy-rollbacks-will-cost-trillion-by-2035). Here are a few excerpts from Lavelle’s article.
“In a week when the Trump administration moved forward on multiple fronts to repeal U.S. climate policies, a new analysis quantified the potential costs for public health, households and the economy—including a stunning $1.1 trillion reduction in U.S. gross domestic product by 2035.
“The study by the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability found that any economic benefits to the policy retreat—which Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin placed at $1.2 billion a year from the power plant regulatory rollback alone—would be overwhelmed by the negative effects of greater air pollution and contraction in new manufacturing and jobs associated with an energy transition.
“‘Overall, there are more GDP losses if we roll back clean energy policies,’ said Alicia Zhao, research manager at the center and lead author of the report. ‘It means even if some of the states are getting gains from the fossil fuel industry, it’s being offset by the losses in clean energy benefits.’”
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Millions of American breath unhealthy air
Rebecca Dzombak reports on research that finds almost half of Americans breath unhealthy air (https://nytimes.com/2025/04/23/climate/american-lung-association-air-report.html). Here are excerpts from her article.
“At least 156 million Americans, about 46 percent of the population, live with unsafe levels of ozone, particulate pollution or both, according to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report.
“Plans by the Trump administration to loosen environmental regulations and cut funding for air quality research would make matters worse, the report says.”
“Air quality in the United States has been generally improving since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, with levels of key pollutants dropping by nearly 80 percent. But millions of Americans still breathe polluted air every day, leading to both acute and chronic health conditions that, in some cases, increase the risk of early death.”
“The Biden administration aimed to improve air quality with measures like tighter rules for vehicle emissions and on mercury and carbon emissions from power plants. The Trump administration is already working to reverse those regulations.”
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Concluding thoughts
The evidence clearly indicates that the Trump administration is doing its best to undermine efforts to develop and expand clean energy sources, especially those based on solar and wind and expand our use of climate-destroying fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases. Trump not only wants to expand domestic production of gas, oil, and coal but also to export liquified natural gas to other countries.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis worsens and the ability to reverse it is limited and being reversed.
Ben Noll reports on the high rates of high temperatures and humidity to come across the U.S., Washington Post, June 17, 2025 (https://washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/06/17/extreme-humidity-heat-city-forecast-maps). His major point:
“Over the next two weeks, extreme levels of humidity are forecast to hit around 40 states, with the first wave of very muggy weather building in central and eastern states through Thursday. Across the country, around 170 million people will also experience temperatures above 90 degrees.”