Tag Archives: energy

Policies to Make the Planet Hotter

August 25, 2025 – 11:32 am

You may think that Trump’s policies are just indifferent to climate change. You would be wrong.

Not so long ago, conventional wisdom said that an administration should focus on one goal at a time. In order to get significant changes through Congress, it was necessary to shepherd public opinion, which would fail to coalesce if you pursued too many initiatives at once.

So if you had wanted the Obama administration to pursue green taxes or a cap-and-trade plan for CO2 emissions, you were out of luck: His priority was ObamaCare, and by the time he got around to climate change, he had lost his majority in Congress.

But things don’t work that way any more, largely because Trump barely needs Congress. If you rule by executive order rather than legislation, use the full power the Supreme Court has granted the unitary executive, don’t worry too much about the letter of the law, and dare the courts to stop you, you don’t need public support. And across the board, Trump doesn’t have it.

In fact, the shoe is on the other foot: It’s the opposition that needs public support to try to stop what Trump is doing. The more things he does at once, the more scattered the opposition gets. And our news cycle tends to fragment issues, making the larger picture harder to grasp.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with regard to climate change and CO2 emissions. You may have heard individual reports about how this offshore wind project was cancelled or those EV subsidies phased out. If you have heard enough such stories, you may have pieced together a general impression that the Trump administration is indifferent to climate change.

But the actual situation is far worse. Across the board, the administration has targeted any effort to take action to reduce CO2 emissions. Worse, the US government is now actively promoting fossil fuels, even in situations where the free market would make a more sustainable choice.

The Trump administration is not indifferent to climate change. It is working hard to make it worse.

Electrification

Fundamentally, the strategy for dealing with climate change has two pieces: electrify everything, and then produce electricity without burning fossil fuels. The Trump administration has attacked both sides of this plan.

Electric vehicles. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts off virtually all subsidies for electric vehicles by the end of this fiscal year, September 30. That’s not just the tax credit for purchasing an EV, but also subsidies for electrifying commercial fleets and installing charging stations.

EVs are a natural fit for fleets of vehicles that have a defined territory and return to base every night, like postal delivery trucks. The Biden administration planned to use such government fleets to jump-start the larger EV market.

But under Trump, EVs have become no-nos within the federal government. Not only are federal agencies not installing any charging stations or buying new EVs, they’re ripping out brand-new charging stations and selling off EVs at a loss. All-in-all, de-electrifying the federal vehicle fleet could cost as much as $1 billion.

Think about that: The government is not just reassessing future EV purchases and deciding they are too expensive. That would be a suspicious calculation, but at least a plausible one. In fact, though, it is spending money to get rid of the EVs and EV infrastructure it has.

Sustainable electrical generation. Trump has long had an animus against wind power, going back at least to 2012, when he thought offshore wind turbines marred the view from his Aberdeenshire golf course. Since then, he has been a font of anti-wind disinformation, charging that wind turbines not only kill large numbers of birds, but that offshore wind farms are driving whales crazy and causing them to beach themselves and die. (The birds claim is exaggerated — birds do run into turbine blades occasionally, but a 2009 study concluded that wind farms kill far fewer birds per kilowatt hour than fossil fuel plants. The connection to whale deaths is entirely imaginary.)

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill terminated a variety of subsidies for sustainable energy, wind and solar alike. But his administration is actively anti-sustainable-power. The Interior Department has created new bureaucratic requirements for wind or solar projects on federal land, and just this week halted work on a wind farm offshore from Rhode Island. The project was scheduled to begin delivering power to Rhode Island and Connecticut homes in 2026.

The order to stop work on the Revolution Wind project is the latest move by the Trump administration targeting the country’s renewable energy industry. President Trump, a longtime critic of the wind industry, in January issued a moratorium on new development of offshore wind projects. The Internal Revenue Service recently put out new guidance that makes it harder for companies building wind and solar projects to qualify for federal tax incentives. And the Commerce Department is investigating whether imports of wind turbines and their components threaten national security.

Wednesday Trump posted to Truth Social:

Any State that has built and relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS. THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY! We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!! MAGA

End-to-end, this post is nutty. Electricity costs are rising because of demand, especially demand for computation related to AI and cryptocurrency mining. The Sustainability By Numbers blog ran the state-by-state numbers and found no correlation, positive or negative, between sustainable energy and prices.

Besides, just take a step back and think this through from economic first principles: Adding supply is not going to raise costs.

Meanwhile, farmers love their windmills and solar installations. The payments give them a source of income that isn’t affected by the usual hazards of drought, insects, or fungus.

Equally nutty is a Trump post that “STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS ARE KILLING NEW JERSEY”. NJ.com fact-checks: New Jersey’s offshore wind project has already been cancelled before coming online, and the state barely has any windmills.

Even worse than the specific projects being cancelled is the chill this sends across the industry. If you are a utility looking for additional generating capacity, wind and solar now entail a political risk that is hard to work into your calculations. If you make a success out of sustainable energy, you are making Trump look bad. He may come after you.

Conservation. One way to partially mitigate the increased demand from AI and crypto — both of which Trump favors — is to use less electricity to power our household appliances. This effort has been going on since the days of Bush Sr., and its flagship has been the Energy Star program. Energy Star certification has helped consumers identify appliances that use less electricity, saving them $500 billion in their utility bills.

Funding for Energy Star was zeroed out in Trump’s original Big Beautiful Bill proposal, but Congress seems to have put it back. Whether or not this money will actually be spent is another question, one that probably depends on what the Supreme Court says about Trump’s previous attempts to impound funds.

Drill, Baby, Drill

While the Big Beautiful Bill was zeroing out subsidies for EVs and sustainable energy, it was increasing subsidies for fossil fuel production. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Equation blog lists the benefits and estimates the cost to the taxpayers at $80 billion over the next ten years.

But this week’s most outrageous energy story concerned a coal-fired utility plant in Michigan. Coal is probably the dirtiest form of energy in common use, but the Trump administration loves it.

Donald Trump has made several unusual moves to elongate the era of coal, such as giving the industry exemptions from pollution rules. But the gambit to keep one Michigan coal-fired power station running has been extraordinary – by forcing it to remain open even against the wishes of its operator.

The hulking JH Campbell power plant, which since 1962 has sat a few hundred yards from the sand dunes at the edge of Lake Michigan, was just eight days away from a long-planned closure in May when Trump’s Department of Energy issued an emergency order that it remain open for a further 90 days.

On Wednesday, the administration intervened again to extend this order even further, prolonging the lifetime of the coal plant another 90 days, meaning it will keep running until November – six months after it was due to close.

This order, like so many of the questionable things Trump has done, is justified by a mythical “state of emergency” that he can see but no one else can. The Energy Department says the local electrical grid will be strained by the loss of this plant, but the operating utility doesn’t think so. While it’s not unusual for a utility to seek permission to extend the life of a coal plant that violates pollution standards, extending the life of a plant the operator wants to close is virtually unheard of.

So far, 71 coal plants, along with dozens of other chemical, copper smelting and other polluting facilities, have received “pollution passes” from the Trump administration according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, allowing greater emissions of airborne toxins linked to an array of health problems. Coal is, despite Trump’s claims, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and the leading source of planet-heating pollution.

Information

If you want to assess the current state of the planet and its climate, the federal government does not want to help you.

In accordance with the Global Change Research Act of 1990, the federal government has produced a National Climate Assessment every four years.

The sprawling report is the most influential source of information about how climate change affects the United States.

The National Climate Assessment is widely used by teachers, city planners, farmers, judges and regular citizens looking for answers to common questions such as how quickly sea levels are rising near American cities and how to deal with wildfire smoke exposure. The most recent edition had a searchable atlas that allowed anyone to learn about the current and future effects of global warming in their specific town or state.

Sadly, though, the federal web site that hosts the report has been taken offline. Work on the next report has been halted and the contract to produce it cancelled. It’s up in the air whether any report at all will appear when the next one is due in 2027. Perhaps some fossil-fuel industry think tank will produce one. DoE recently published a climate-change-denying report by five fringe scientists.

The attack on the USGCRP and national climate assessment did not come as a surprise. In the Heritage Foundation’s far-right policy blueprint Project 2025, Russ Vought – now Trump’s head of the office and management and budget – called to end the USGCRP or fill it with pro-oil industry members.

Past climate assessments have been removed from government websites so they can be “updated” to better represent the administration’s anti-scientific views.

“We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports,” [Energy Secretary Chris] Wright told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in an interview on “The Source.”

Wright dismissed the past reports, saying “they weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.”

OK, that change involves assessment and dissemination of new climate info. But what about gathering it in the first place?

President Donald Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 includes no money for the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, which can precisely show where carbon dioxide is being emitted and absorbed and how well crops are growing.

One of the observatories is a satellite launched in 2014, and the other was attached to the International Space Station in 2019. The two systems are

more sensitive and accurate than any other systems in the world, operating or planned, and a “national asset” that should be saved, said David Crisp, a retired NASA scientist who led their development. They helped scientists discover, for example, that the Amazon rain forest emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, while boreal forests in Canada, Russia and places where permafrost is melting absorb more than they emit, Crisp said. They also can detect the “glow” of photosynthesis in plants, which helps monitor drought and predict food shortages that can lead to civil unrest and famine, he said.

The OCO instruments in the space station might just be turned off, while the satellite could be “brought down”, i.e., allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. Needless to say, launching a replacement satellite (assuming the US government ever cares about climate again) will be far more expensive than just maintaining the one already in orbit.

Why make this very wasteful decision?

NASA said in an emailed statement Wednesday that the missions were “beyond their prime mission” and being terminated “to align with the President’s agenda and budget priorities.”

The Trump EPA is also taking steps to make it harder for a future administration to undo its damage. It is trying to reverse a 2009 finding that CO2 is a pollutant that it can regulate under the Clean Energy Act.

The endangerment finding is the basis for rules regulating climate pollution from coal and gas-fired power plants, car and truck exhaust and methane from the oil and gas industry.

Now, the Trump EPA is arguing that the endangerment finding was a mistake and overstepped the EPA’s statutory power. Daren Bakst, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, comments:

If the EPA finds the 2009 endangerment finding is no longer applicable, Bakst says that “would preclude future greenhouse gas regulations.” And he says “it should be easy to repeal existing rules that are predicated on the 2009 finding.”

Foreign policy

The administration is not just seeking to burn more fossil fuels at home, it’s also pushing fossil-fuel exports overseas. For example, the recent trade deal announced between the US and the EU stipulated that the EU buy $750 billion of US energy exports — primarily fossil fuels — over the next three years. Trump got this benefit for US energy companies by threatening Europe with crippling tariffs.

In June, the NYT contrasted the energy styles of the world’s two great powers, the US and China. The Chinese are investing heavily in sustainable energy and leading the world in exports of sustainable-energy technology.

While China is dominating clean energy industries, from patented technologies to essential raw materials, the Trump administration is using the formidable clout of the world’s biggest economy to keep American oil and gas flowing.

In a full reversal from the Biden administration’s effort to pivot the American economy away from fossil fuels, the Trump White House is opening up public lands and federal waters for new drilling, fast-tracking permits for pipelines and pressuring other countries to buy American fuels as a way of avoiding tariffs.

Washington is essentially pursuing a strong-arm energy strategy, both at home and abroad with allies and friends. It’s premised on the idea that the modern world is already designed around these fuels, and the United States has them in abundance, so exporting them benefits the American economy even if solar energy is cleaner and often cheaper.

This month, the International Energy Agency predicted something the Trump administration did not want to hear:

Lately, the I.E.A.’s influential forecasts have suggested that global demand for oil and gas could peak by the end of the decade as electric-vehicle sales grow and the cost of solar panels and battery storage plummets.

The US responded in a typical Trumpian fashion, by threatening the messenger.

Chris Wright, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary and a former fracking executive, has called the agency’s projections of peak oil demand “nonsensical” and has said the United States could withdraw from the global organization if it doesn’t change the way it operates. House Republicans have said the agency is publishing “politicized information to support climate policy advocacy” and have threatened to withhold U.S. funding.

In short, I don’t know what other conclusion to draw: The Trump administration is trying to make climate change worse. I could speculate about why, but that seems like a distraction. The What is more important than the Why. The Trump administration is trying to make climate change worse.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , , | Comments (15)

Peak Oil? Maybe Not

July 23, 2012 – 11:01 am

The hardest thing about living in the reality-based community is that you have to change your mind when new facts emerge. Lately, after a several-year flat period, global oil production has started growing again. The trend has reached the point where people who backed the Peak Oil Theory a few years ago are publicly changing their minds.

Here’s what George Monbiot wrote a few weeks ago in The Guardian:

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. … Peak oil has not happened and it is unlikely to happen for a very long time. A report by the oil executive, Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun.

In Foreign Policy, Steve Levine is proclaiming “new age of fossil fuel abundance” and assessing the global winners (the U.S. and a variety of “new petrostates”) and losers (Russia, Venezuela, and OPEC).

My cynical first reaction was to check the sources for phony Exxon-funded think tanks, but that’s not what I’m finding. This looks legit to me.

Economists vs. ecologists. I view peak oil as one more chapter in the decades-long debate between ecologists (who know that in the natural world exponential growth always ends, and so worry that unlimited economic growth makes unsustainable claims on the planet’s resources) and economists (who have two unshakeable beliefs: handling scarcity is exactly what markets are designed to do, and human ingenuity is the one resource we will never run out of).

It’s an asymmetric debate: The economists are almost always right and we muddle along without catastrophe. But catastrophes being what they are, the ecologists only need to be right once. If civilization does go off a cliff someday, it won’t be much comfort to remember all the previous cliffs we avoided.

So a typical ecologist/economist debate goes like this: The ecologist says, “We only have X amount of commodity Y, and we’re using up Z of it every year. So unless we change our ways, it will all be gone in X/Z years, give or take. And if consumption keeps growing exponentially, it will all be gone even faster.” And the economist says, “Chill. In X/Z years we’ll have so many new discoveries, new technologies, and new ways of doing things that it won’t matter.”

Bad bets. The debate starting getting mass-media attention when the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in 1972. The report didn’t actually predict the world’s oil would run out by 1992, but that was the easiest headline to write. Those headlines generated a lot of panic, and (needless to say) 1992 came and went a long time ago. Every resource-depletion debate since has included an economist crowing about The Limits to Growth.

The classic economist-beats-ecologist story is the Simon/Ehrlich bet. In 1980, economist Julian Simon made the kind of put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge that probably ought to happen more often: Pick any five commodities you want, Simon offered, and I’ll bet you that in 10 years they’ll be cheaper than they are now. Paul Ehrlich took the bet, picked chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten — and lost. All five were more plentiful and cost less in 1990, and Ehrlich paid up.

Peak oil. So why did anybody think oil production would peak?

Production from individual oil fields follows a well-established pattern: It starts slow, ramps up as more wells are sunk, then eventually peaks and declines. The production peak usually happens when about half the oil is still in the ground.

In the 1950s, geologist M. King Hubbard asked the question: What if we think of the United States as one big oil field? He used the single-oil-field model to predict U.S. oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970, which it did.

Hubbard extended his model to predict a world peak in 1995, and his protege Kenneth Deffeyes later updated it to get a peak sometime around 2005-2010, which for a while seemed to be accurate. The prediction graphs looked like this:

But recent production has moved above the Hubbard curve. At least for now, the price spike of 2008 seems to have done what the economists say price spikes are supposed to do: encourage conservation and stimulate production.

So now we’re seeing world oil production graphs like this:

(Notice production flattening out from 2005 to 2009.) Meanwhile, the supply of natural gas in the U.S. is booming (thanks mainly to fracking), and the price has collapsed.

Why didn’t the prediction hold? All along, the speculative part of the Peak Oil theory was that you could extrapolate from the well-supported model of oil field depletion to the depletion of oil on the whole planet. The fact that Hubbard did so well with his U.S. peak prediction made that problem seem smaller than it was.

The economists’ argument was always that as the price went up, new fields and production techniques that hadn’t been tried (because they were too expensive) would come into play. The ecologists responded, “Why didn’t that happen in when U.S. production peaked?”

In retrospect, the answer to that question is obvious: It didn’t happen because there was somewhere else to go. When production peaks in one oil field or even one country, the easiest thing to do isn’t to invent new techniques, it’s to take your old techniques somewhere where they still work. But when there’s nowhere to go, you get creative.

Global warming. In some ways, peak oil was a convenient theory for environmentalists: If we need to shift away from oil anyway, then why not deal with global warming at the same time by developing more sustainable energy sources? (Of course, the debate could have gone the other way: If we’re running out of dirty oil, then maybe we should use even dirtier coal.)

Now, environmentalists who worry about civilization’s carbon footprint are on their own; they won’t get any help from the geologists. Monbiot observes:

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.

More and more it looks like that’s what needs to happen: Somebody who owns a king’s ransom of oil in the ground needs to be persuaded to leave it there. How exactly are we going to do that?

The resource we really do seem to be running out of is the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide while maintaining a biosphere productive enough to support a human population now expected to grow beyond 10 billion. That resource is not conveniently expressible as the price of a commodity, so it’s not clear exactly how markets will deal with it.

So the ecologist/economist debate will continue. And the ecologists only have to be right once.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (4)

Slinging Mud at Clean Energy and other short notes

May 28, 2012 – 12:02 pm

For years, the worst thing you’d hear about wind, solar, and biofuels was that they were impractical; fun to dream about, but when you got serious about energy you’d come back to fossil fuels. Now, though, as more and more farmers plow around the windmills in their fields and businesses and homeowners see real savings from the solar panels on their roofs, the dirty-energy industries realize they’re going to have to get nastier.

The Guardian recently published an internal memo from the American Traditions Institute (a shadowy non-profit apparently funded by the fossil-fuel industry) planning (as the Checks and Balances Project put it) “a coordinated national disinformation campaign against wind energy”.

Among its main recommendations, the proposal calls for a national PR campaign aimed at causing “subversion in message of industry so that it effectively becomes so bad that no one wants to admit in public they are for it.”

ATI denies that the memo is official — no conspiracy, just an ATI senior fellow acting as a lone gunman — but adds “we would be pleased to be part of any education campaign to inform the public about the problems with expensive, unreliable wind energy”.

Put this together with the efforts to manufacture a scandal out of the Solyndra bankruptcy, the twisting of research to claim that windmills actually cause global warming, and congressional Republicans’ attempt to end the Pentagon’s bio-fuels projects. (Some Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee must have sided with Republicans in a closed-session 13-12 vote agreeing with the House.) It’s looking like alternative energy is about to join global warming in the culture wars: If you believe that clean energy is actually clean and provides energy, you must be one of those radical Marxists.

This Memorial Day, I’m proud of Vice President Biden. Speaking to a group of family members of fallen American troops, Biden recalled the day he heard that his wife and daughter had been killed in a car accident.

For the first time in my life I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, but because they’d been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart that they’d never get there again. …

There really is hope. … I promise you (and you parents as well) when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye — it will happen. … The only thing I have more experience than you in is this: I’m telling you, it will come.

On the surface, it looked like President Obama was doing nothing substantial for same-sex marriage: He said he favors it personally, but that it should be a state issue rather than an action item for his administration.

Sometimes, though, that bully-pulpit thing really works. It’s not obvious how much influence Obama’s statement had on the NAACP passing a resolution framing marriage equality as an “equal protection under the law” issue, but between the two of them, they seem to have dramatically shifted the opinion of the African-American community.

Middle Class Economist observes: “Romney to Replace Obamacare with…Essentially Nothing”

Mitt Romney seems to think that criticizing his record as a vulture capitalist is the same as criticizing the free enterprise system.

Grist calls attention to the way the fossil-fuel industry games the academic system. A fracking-is-getting-safer report from the University of Buffalo actually came from somewhere else:

Large chunks of the report appear to be lifted verbatim from a document previously published by three of the report’s four authors for a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute. This matters because the university study fails to cite the think tank. In this case, it’s very relevant: The Manhattan Institute receives financial support from oil and gas companies heavily invested in fracking, like ExxonMobil. Instead, the study released this month is stamped only with the University of Buffalo’s academic imprimatur.

Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, put it bluntly:

The report’s inaccurate and biased analysis and the authors’ conflicts of interest suggest that the University at Buffalo is being used as an academic front for gas industry misinformation, rather than as a venue for independent, informative analysis.

I’ve talked about this kind of thing in more detail before. There needs to be a name for it, preferably something related to money laundering: information laundering? research laundering? I’m still working on it.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Comments (3)