On Donald Trump‘s first day back in the White House on January 20, he signed several related executive orders that sparked radical climate policy and clean energy rollbacks.
One order declared a “national energy emergency.” Another, titled “unleashing American energy,” blamed “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations” for limiting “reliable and affordable electricity” created primarily from oil, gas and coal.
As promised, Trump also targeted wind energy with an order that temporarily paused all offshore permits and federal leases.
Oil and gas production in the US, the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, actually peaked under the Joe Biden administration. Average electricity prices across nearly all US states were also lower and more stable in 2024 than the previous year, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
This was not only because of low natural gas prices but also cheaper renewable energy in the grid and new battery storage capacity, due in part to decreasing renewable technology costs.
Trump’s order also attacked green energy transition policies for limiting “job creation,” despite the US renewable energy sector employing around three times more workers than the traditional fossil energy industry.
Job growth in the clean power sector rose at more than twice the rate of the “strong” overall US labour market in 2023.
The year before, renewable energy technologies, including solar panels, wind turbines, hydropower and geothermal energy systems, already made up over 84% of net new electricity generation jobs.
‘A dagger through the heart of climate-change religion’
This month, the new head of the Environment Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, announced 31 regulatory and funding rollbacks related to climate and environment protection, and clean energy funding.
“We are living up to our promises to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry,” Zeldin said in a video posted on social media platform, X. “We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion,” he added.
In addition, he announced the termination of $20 billion (€18.3 billion) worth of clean power and climate grants issued by the outgoing Biden administration under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, also known as the “green bank.”
Zeldin highlighted “programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse” when announcing that the EPA had frozen the funding pending a review.
But on Tuesday, a US federal judge said the EPA’s “vague and unsubstantiated assertions of fraud are insufficient.”
On these grounds, the judge blocked the agency from terminating $14 billion dollars in green grants earmarked for three climate groups who had sued the EPA and Zeldin.
Tax dollars to pay massive climate damages
When Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement earlier this year, he sparked fears that the country’s failure to reduce emissions could severely hinder efforts to limit global heating.
This would also result in major costs for citizens in the US and beyond. A report by business advisors, the Boston Consulting Group predicts that if temperatures increase by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100 — double the 1.5-degree target set in Paris — such warming would “reduce cumulative economic output by 15% to 34%” by the end of the century.
In the last decade alone, climate-related extreme weather events have cost the global economy more than $2 trillion, according to a recent report by the International Chamber of Commerce.
The January Los Angeles wildfires that caused widespread destruction and have been linked to human-made climate change alone caused property and capital damages of up to $164 billion.
Boston Consulting note that the net cost of inaction could be as high as 27% of cumulative GDP globally, which is enough to otherwise eradicate extreme poverty around the world.
Climate rollbacks to spark job losses and economic decline
Corey Bradshaw, a professor of global ecology at Flinders University in South Australia, says the Trump administration claims that its climate cuts will improve economic prosperity are false. Disincentivizing the green manufacturing boom will only result in job losses and economic decline for American consumers, he said.
“Their cost of living will grow and their income opportunities will decline,” he told DW.
Two years after the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) triggered the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy technologies, the sector has accounted for more than half of the total US private investment growth, according to a 2024 report by the Clean Investment Monitor (CIM) — which tracks public and private funding of climate technologies in the US.
The fastest growth was in manufacturing clean energy and transportation technology, which totalled $89 billion in the two years after the IRA was legislated — more than four times the $22 billion invested in the two years prior to the Biden administration’s flagship 2022 law to address climate change.
Republican states have been significant beneficiaries of this clean energy largesse. Nearly 60% of the projects announced since 2022 are in the party’s congressional districts.
Georgia alone gained over 43,000 green jobs and more than $30 billion in renewables investment since the passage of the IRA. More than 400,000 new clean energy jobs were created nationally.
By 2024, the US power grid had added more capacity from solar energy than from any other source in more than two decades.
Sylvia Levya Martinez, a solar analyst for US energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, which co-authored a report announcing the record solar uptake, warned that the boom could be quickly reversed, however.
“Last year’s record-level of installations was aided by several solar policies and credits within the Inflation Reduction Act that helped drive interest in the solar market,” she said in a statement. “If any of these policies were eliminated or significantly altered, it would be very detrimental to the industry’s continued growth.”
Trump’s climate revolt to be held up in the courts?
Meanwhile, David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, a pro-climate non-profit, believes that efforts to dismantle climate and environmental protection will be held up in the courts.
“The EPA cannot roll those regulations back without a lengthy process,” he said, noting that during the first Trump administration, the EPA lost most of its anti-climate court cases due to failure to follow procedural rules.
Corey Bradshaw cautions, however, that while Trump‘s attempted climate rollbacks are “illogical” and amount to support for “a dying fossil fuel industry,” any delay to urgent emission cuts will quickly “retard any climate gains.”
