During his first term as president, Donald Trump rolled back a raft of environmental rules, withdrew from the Paris Agreement and boosted the fossil fuel industry. In his second term, the president-elect is expected to be downright hostile to clean energy and climate action, pledging to eliminate remaining funding from Joe Biden's landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) . The $891 billion law gives any household thousands of dollars to switch to appliances like heat pumps, install solar panels and buy electric vehicles.
Looking beyond the IRA, Trump vowed to increase fossil fuel production and withdraw from the Paris Agreement again. The man who calls climate change a “hoax” is also expected to wreak havoc on federal agencies critical to understanding and combating climate change. But substantial climate action will be difficult to tackle in a second Trump administration, and the 47th president will be unable to prevent the inevitable shift of the entire economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.
“It’s bad for the climate, full stop,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “That is, it will be another wall that will never be built. Basic market forces are at work.
One of the central ironies of climate change is that the markets that have spurred the massive burning of fossil fuels, creating the chaos into which humanity has descended since the Industrial Revolution, are now driving a renewable energy revolution that will help solve the problem. Coal, oil and natural gas are commodities with volatile prices. As natural resources that humans extract from the ground, they are virtually unimproved—engineers cannot design new versions of coal.
By comparison, appliances like solar panels, wind turbines, and induction cooktops will only get better, more efficient, and cheaper over time. Energy experts believe the price of solar power dropped 90% between 2010 and 2020 and will continue to surge across the field. (Last year, the U.S. added three times more solar power than natural gas.) Heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces in the U.S., in part because of government incentives. Last year, Maine announced it would hit its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule, thanks in part to state rebates. So if the Trump administration cuts off funding for heat pumps from the IRA, states can pick up the slack.
Local utilities are also looking for new ways to use heat pumps. In Massachusetts, for example, utility company Eversource Energy is experimenting with “connected geothermal,” in which homes in specific communities use water pumped from the ground. Heat pumps use water to heat or cool a space, which is much more efficient than burning natural gas. Eversource and two other utilities, representing about half of the nation’s natural gas customers, have formed a coalition to deploy more grid-connected geothermal systems.
In addition to being more efficient, green technologies are also cheaper to adopt. Take Texas, for example, which long ago separated its power grid from the national grid so it could circumvent federal regulations. The Lone Star State is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the United States, but 40% of its energy comes from carbon-free sources. “Texas has the most solar and wind energy, not because Texas Republicans like renewable energy, but because it’s the cheapest form of electricity out there,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate research nonprofit Berkeley Earth. . The top three states for wind power production—Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas—are also red.
State regulators are also pressuring utilities to cut emissions, further boosting the adoption of wind and solar energy. As part of California's goal to decarbonize electricity by 2045, the state increased battery storage by 757% between 2019 and 2023. This allows utilities to load up on abundant solar energy during the day and then drain those batteries at night — critical to moving away from fossil fuel power plants. Trump may impose tariffs on imported solar panels, raising their prices, but that could boost domestic manufacturing of those panels, helping fledgling photovoltaic manufacturing in red states like Georgia and Texas.
The irony of the climate bill Biden signed is that states that overwhelmingly supported Trump are among the largest recipients of funds provided by the bill. This means that even if Republicans control the Senate, if not Congress, tampering with the IRA could put the Trump administration in political danger. In addition to providing incentives for households (3.4 million U.S. households applied for more than $8 billion in home energy improvement tax credits last year alone), the legislation has so far generated $150 billion in the green economy since its passage of new investment until 2022 to boost manufacturing of technologies such as batteries and solar panels. According to research group Atlas Public Policy, 160,000 jobs could ultimately be created. “About 66 percent of IRA spending went to red states,” Hausfather said. “There’s certainly a contingency now for Republicans to support retaining some of the subsidies.”
More progress is being made at the state and local levels ahead of passage of Biden's signature climate legislation. For example, New York has set goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels. has signed an agreement with California pledging to meet the state's zero-emission vehicle mandate even if judicial or federal action overturns the agreement. It then sells those same cars in other states.
“State governments will be Donald Trump’s most visible check on the direction of the country on environmental policy,” said Thad Kusel, co-director of the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at the University of California, San Diego. “If As the Trump administration lowers national standards, California and its allies will work to comply with stricter standards.”
Last week, 62 percent of Washington state voters resoundingly rejected a ballot initiative to repeal a landmark law that would have raised money to combat climate change. “Donald Trump will learn what our opponents learned in our battle for the initiative: Once people benefit, you can't It's taken away. “His efforts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act are going to fail because governors, mayors of both parties are going to say, 'This is mine and you're not going to touch it with your dirty hands.' '” “
Even without federal funding, states regularly launch their own large programs to adapt to climate change. California voters, for example, just overwhelmingly approved a $10 billion bond to fund water, climate and wildfire prevention programs. “This would be an example,” said Saharnaz Mirzazad, executive director of ICLEI-Local Government Sustainability USA. “You can use it at the state level or the local level [more of] these types of bonds. You can help build some more resilient infrastructure.
Urban areas are also key drivers of climate action: In 2021, 130 U.S. cities signed the UN-backed pledge to accelerate decarbonization. “Lack of federal support is unhelpful, to say the least,” said David Miller, managing director of the Center for Urban Climate Policy and Economics at C40, a global network of mayors fighting climate change. “This doesn’t mean climate action will stop. That’s not the case. Republican administrations have withdrawn from international agreements twice in recent U.S. history. Cities stand out.
And not in isolation, as mayors are talking: Cities share information on how to enact legislation, such as laws to reduce carbon emissions from buildings and ensure new developments are connected to public transport. They transform food systems to grow more crops locally, provide jobs and reduce emissions associated with transporting produce over long distances. “If anything, there has to be a push for government, as we imagine, to redouble our efforts at the local level,” Miller said.
Federal funding may dry up for many local programs, such as the $1.5 billion the U.S. Forest Service allocated with help from the IRA to plant trees in urban areas, but city governments, community groups and charities will still be there. “You imagine a web, and we would take something like a pair of scissors or a machete and chop off part of the web,” said Elizabeth Sawin, director of the Multisolving Institute, which The Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing climate solutions. “Having so many layers of partners creates such resiliency.”
All in all, climate change has been making progress on many fronts for years — often without adequate support from the federal government — and that progress will continue no matter who is in the White House. “This too shall pass, and hopefully four years from now we will be in a more favorable policy environment,” Hausfather said. “At the same time, we have to keep working to make clean energy affordable and hope it wins on its merits.”
This article was originally published by Grist as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism partnership to enhance coverage of climate stories.
Only 28% of U.S. residents regularly hear about climate change in the media, but 77% want to know more. Help us bring climate news to more people.
Republish our articles for free online or in print under a Creative Commons license.
