Then candidate Donald Trump at an October campaign event in Pennsylvania.
Alex Brandon / AP
hide
tilting legend
Alex Brandon / AP
President Trump wants to redirect the federal government far from the climate agenda of former president Joe Biden and to an even deeper embrace of fossil fuels.
“We are going to drill, baby, forest,” said Trump to the applause of supporters during his inauguration speech on January 20.
Its bursting of decrees on climate and energy was quickly complimentary of the groups of the fossil fuels industry and their supporters, who see a better future under Trump for oil and gas, coal and plastics.
Repeating a policy of his first mandate, Trump began the one -year process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, in which countries agreed to limit climate pollution and avoid the worst effects of global warming. Trump has also declared an emergency of national energy and has temporarily stopped new wind energy projects on federal lands and in federal waters.
With the wave of activity, it may be tempting to think that a large part of the American climate and energy landscape has changed since January 20. But this is really not the case. Indeed, climate change of human origin and the energy system of the United States are massive and complicated systems that do not change quickly, even if a president wants it.
The energy and climate policy is “like an aircraft carrier”
Biden left his duties having set up the most ambitious climate program of any previous president. In 2022, with the help of the Democratic legislators, he signed the law on the reduction of inflation. The law directs hundreds of billions of dollars to stimulate renewable energies, electric cars and cleaner manufacturing. Its administration has also written new rules to clean the pollution of cars and power plants.
He described the package as “the most important action of all time on the climate of world history”. None of this can be easily canceled by a Trump decree.
Instead, the orders of the new president arouse financing the law on the reduction of inflation and another law known as the bipartite law on infrastructure. Trump also ordered agencies to search for what they can do to implement his priorities and have ordered his administration to start long processing of rules to reverse the regulations of the Biden era.
He will have to work with the Republicans at the Congress to reverse certain parts of the Act on the Reduction of Inflation to which he opposes. Even it will be difficult because a large part of the money goes in the republican districts of the Congress, where the members put pressure to maintain these advantages.
“The energy and climate policy, which is complex, is not a speed boat,” explains Amy Myers Jaffe, director of energy, climate justice and the laboratory of sustainability at the University of New York. “You don’t turn the wheel and the boat turns immediately. It’s more like an aircraft carrier.”
And just like a giant carrier, the development of policies is slowly traveling.
Jaffe highlights the estimates that much more electricity will be necessary to supply data centers and manufacturing in the coming years. “You might think that it means that we have to build, build, build natural gas,” said Jaffe. But it takes years to design, allow and build a new gas plant, especially if a pipeline must be built to provide it.
She says that other climatic user -friendly technologies are faster to deploy. Consumers can opt for what is called the response to demand, which, according to Jaffe, allows public services to reassemble or reduce thermostats to use less energy when electricity is necessary on the network. “These types of systems can be put very quickly, and more and more public services examine them,” she said.
This means that even if Trump could prefer a coal or gas power station to produce electricity, Jaffe says that market forces could always lead public services to choose a cleaner and cheaper option.
The complexity to which Jaffe is referring works in both directions. Despite Biden’s climate program, the production of American oil and gas increased spectacularly during its mandate. Now the United States produces more oil than any country in history.
And despite Trump’s call to “drill, baby, forest”, most oil companies show little interest in producing more concerns for the increase in supply would reduce the cost of oil.
Trump’s executive orders send a message
During his first mandate, Trump was a booster of the coal industry. In 2019, he tried to save an individual coal power plant operated by Tennessee Valley Authority owned by the federal government. Despite Trump’s intervention, the plant closed. The public service saved money by replacing it with the electricity generated by natural gas and renewable energies.
For its second term, Trump’s administration seems more organized in the pursuit of an agenda of fossil fuels, according to Jackson Ewing, director of energy and climate policy at the Nicholas Institute of the Duke University.
“They went out at the very beginning of the administration with a burst of different decrees which all have a certain degree of consistency with each other, in terms of their efforts to prioritize oil and gas and the priority of other forms electricity, “explains Ewing.
Ewing says there are limits to the federal government that could hinder Trump. “States and municipalities … still have a lot of power over what is happening at these infringing levels,” he said.
Many governments of states and premises have their own climatic plans. And, as for the first Trump administration, these governments have come together to tell other countries that they are still serious about the achievement of the objectives of the Paris Agreement.
Companies in the private sector also have climate plans that they are unlikely to abandon.
“They make investments and decisions at the decadal level that transcend presidential administrations,” explains Ewing. “They see political risks in the functioning as if decarbonization and climate commitments have disappeared forever.”
Ewing says there are a lot of uncertainty about the management of these Trump decrees because they contain little details. As these details emerge, he says, there will probably be legal challenges. Ewing says that for the moment, orders can be considered as sending a message.
“And this message is that we are no longer in this energy transition company as a federal government, and that if you are going to stay in the good graces of our administration, you have to follow suit,” said Ewing.
He thinks that the country which turns to fossil fuels could be contrary to the long -term interests of the country. Ewing indicates a trajectory towards cleaner energy forms in the world.
“There is enormous potential in the energy transition for both American and global environmental health, but also for job creation and economic vitality and global competitiveness,” said Ewing. Focusing on fossil fuels could now make it more difficult for the United States to dominate these emerging industries in the future.
