There was at least some sliver of plausible deniability behind the “all-of-the-above” sloganeering. If we were really in some sort of “energy emergency,” as Donald Trump declared on his first day in office, then cutting red tape for any and all energy sources could be viewed, from a distance and around a corner and bounced off various cracked mirrors and prisms, like a sound idea. Drilling down at all into the country’s actual situation laid bare the preposterous and dangerous lie in a hot minute, of course, but “we need all possible energy sources” maintained that veneer of reasonableness to the extremely casual observer. Yeah, we’re done with that.
“For too long, the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar,” reads the latest Trump energy EO, issued on Monday. “The proliferation of these projects displaces affordable, reliable, dispatchable domestic energy sources, compromises our electric grid, and denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape.”
Basically none of that is true. But no matter, we seem to have dispensed with the illusion: no longer does the “emergency” require a “diversified” energy supply; instead, it’s time to try and kill off clean energy entirely. The Order takes the damage done to renewables in the recently-passed Republican budget bill and accelerates it, trying to phase out subsidies even quicker than the deadlines contained in the bill. The legislation required that wind and solar facilities start producing electricity by 2028, or start construction within the next year, in order to receive the subsidies promised in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Trump is now instructing the Treasury department to “ensure that policies concerning the ‘beginning of construction’ are not circumvented, including by preventing the artificial acceleration or manipulation of eligibility and by restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.” It also tells the Department of the Interior to examine its various energy-related policies to see “whether any provide preferential treatment to wind and solar facilities,” and then eliminate them.
The combined assault from Congress and the White House will completely kneecap the renewable energy industry in the US, just as China is pulling far, far ahead in that field. An analysis of the bill from experts at the Princeton University ZERO Lab put some numbers on it: Cumulative new solar capacity will drop by 29 gigawatts over the next five years, and wind will fall by 43 gigawatts; through 2035, those numbers are 140 gigawatts and 160 gigawatts, respectively; and clean electricity generation will dip by more than 820 terawatt-hours, or more than nuclear or coal power’s entire contribution to the grid today.
The impacts of this will in a sense create their own emergency. We will add 190 million extra metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere in 2030, and 470 million extra in 2035. The total household and business energy expenditures in 2030 will go up by $28 billion; it will exceed $50 billion five years later. For an average household, that means about $165 extra on energy in 2030, and $280 in 2035, jumps of 7.5 percent and 13 percent. More expensive, and much dirtier, for entirely fabricated and false reasons.
As with so many of the Trump administration’s policies, there is a pretty good chance an average American would hate it if they understood what it means. Which “denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape” more — a wind turbine or a solar panel, or the smokestacks of a coal-fired power plant forced to stay open past its retirement, a new fossil gas plant leaving a trail of methane leaks in its supply chain wake? The US was installing massive amounts of our cleanest sources of power up until Trump took office; the worst people in the country have decided that needs to stop.
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