Trump’s Reactionary Stance on Clean Energy May be Little More than a Small Bump on the Road to Clean Energy Transition, because Fossil Fuels are Very Expensive

Like vast numbers of others around the country of America and around the world, Trump’s vandalism generally, and his anti-renewable pique specifically, causes my heart to beat heavy within my chest. We’re rightly anxious about the battle we must wage to fight climate change, and it sure doesn’t help that it looks likely we’re behind the 1.5C milestone, and we know that any rise beyond that is that much worse.

One slight comfort is to think of Trump’s second term as just a bit of a slowdown in the transition to clean energy and not a devastating blow. There are significant actions toward the clean energy transition among many states, and the U.K and E.U. continue to move forward. China—with all its faults and reasons for suspicion we may believe—continues to explode with clean energy growth. Even the tiniest of general market slowdowns sees China dumping (or, less aggressively put, “selling at discount”) surplus solar components and panels, and, likely, batteries, too, and that’s good news: Pakistan has added significant clean energy power generation in their fight against unstable and very expensive traditional power generation and transmission utilities because of China’s surplus pricing.

So progress continues, but even though solar, wind, and batteries technologies are well-developed, progress is able to progress only so quickly, since even more manufacturing capacity and supply lines solutions need to be in place. While China is way out ahead here, Biden helped re-start the clean energy manufacturing capacity of the U.S. Trump can retard the rate of this growing manufacturing capacity, but it continues. There’s no reason why the rate of manufacturing and supply line growth can’t again quicken post-Trump, or even, god willing, after the 2026 midterms.

Most of what the clean energy transition is experiencing is a mood hit, not an existential crisis. I’m certainly maddened by Trump’s “Drill, Baby, Drill!” absurdity, when what we need is the call to action to “Build, Baby, Build!” clean energy power production, growing installations, and improving our grid systems. I’m certainly angry that the fossil fuel industry is hoping to protect its future profits by building more natural gas power generation and fossil fuel infrastructure now, even before there are compelling benefits to the economy at large, but it makes a sort of perverse sense: once a new buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure is in place, it can run for decades and can reduce the economic urgency for clean energy investment, especially if the Trump quid pro quo continues to artificially advantage the fossil fuel industry.

Power Plants and Infrastructure Projects Take a Long Time

But only so much fossil fuel infrastructure is going to be built in the next 2-to-4 years. These are complex and capital-intensive projects that take time to build. The upgrades in the electrical transmission and distribution grids that will be needed to handle increased power demands are also long processes, and besides, this grid buildout will be needed whatever the source of new electrical generation.

It is true that clean energy manufacturing of solar cells and panels, battery storage products, wind turbines, enhanced geothermal plants, and nuclear plants also needs time to further expand, and, unfortunately, nuclear and geothermal energy generation projects have timetables that resemble those of fossil fuel generation plants. We could, I suppose, outbid the rest of the world for China’s solar products or batteries, but the better aim is to build out more clean energy manufacturing capacity in the U.S., both for national security reasons, but, more importantly, simply to add to the world’s overall capacity of such engines of the clean energy transition. One advantage that solar and wind currently have is time-to-completion, where solar or wind farms can be built far faster than gas-fired generating plants.

But Wait! There’s  a Lot of Solar and Wind Power Ready for Connection

Something that doesn’t get the attention it deserves is that there are plenty of solar, wind, and battery construction already proven in the market, with a whole lot more waiting for connection to our grids. According to a recent report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, nearly 2,600 GW of generation and storage capacity are waiting for interconnection (what makes the energy available for transmission and distribution using our electricity grids), with solar, wind, and battery storage contributing 95% of the active capacity in the interconnection queue. Who considers building new gas-fired electrical power generation plants when there is large power capacity already in place? The people who want to continue to sell natural gas, is my guess. By the way, these future fossil fuel power plants need to line up for the interconnection queue, too, no different than the now-ready solar, wind, and battery installations, except, sigh, that recent history shows a favorable treatment for gas power plants.

As of March 23, 2025, POWER Magazine reports that there are more than 200 gas-fired units in various stages of development across the U.S., with potential to add about 86 GW of electricity output by 2032.  So why, when there’s 30 times more ready-to-go clean energy, are we even thinking about building more gas plants? One reason makes some sense, in that solar and wind are intermittent power sources (the ol’ “sun goes down, winds calm” argument) and while batteries help, there is need for longer duration reliable baseload power generation. “Reliable baseload” is why there are already fossil fuel “peaker” plants that are ready to come online whenever power demand peaks, such as on hot days, when everyone is turning on their air conditioners and frequently opening their fridges for yet another cold Bud. The other reason why gas-fired plants seem advantaged, though, may be that entrenched business interests—fossil fuel corporations and the utility monopolies that buy fossil fuels—like things as they are. Did you know that in many states, the cost of power generation (in this case, natural gas purchase and use in power plants) get passed on to consumers without profit? The utilities make a more or less guaranteed rate of return on power distribution, but utilities also apply for rate increases for capital investment recovery. Capital investments like building gas-fired power plants, wouldn’t you know.

Timetables for Climate Change: Pressing over Decades

So maybe the gas-fired generation plans are supported by Trump and his favors-owed-to-supporters in Big Oil. But this stupidity is going to end within 3-plus years (or sooner), short of a true authoritarian coup on Trump’s part, or continued political support and voting that keeps the Republicans in charge of the House and/or Senate, but that seems ever-increasingly implausible considering Federal chaos and ever-falling approval ratings.

When it comes to climate change, the matter of timelines is a confusing one. On one hand, we’ve been lagging behind in best actions (e.g., building up fast enough clean energy manufacturing), when we could have pushed faster back in the 1990s, or 2010s, or whatever date of your own personal preference. On the other hand, climate change is the result of large earth systems (“planetary boundaries,” if you want to be one of the cool kids) and while it is true that humans have been dumping ever-increasing tons of greenhouse gases from an ever-increasing population that is contributing to actual climate change, the earth systems change over long periods of time. The terror of climate change is that the time frames for climate change have fallen within our lifetimes and that of our children and their children, instead of the multi-millennia timeframes of natural cycles, and this startling compression makes even us semi-sapiens monkeys nervous. The reality of climate change is that the process takes place over years and decades and centuries, so Trump’s oily tantrums for the next couple of years are not the death knell for the species as some panickingly assume. Not helpful, certainly, but a temporary slowdown, certainly.

The fact is that building up clean energy manufacturing, and building out clean energy power sources, and implementing expanded and digitally smarter grids takes time. Today, building clean energy material takes fossil fuels to produce glass and steel and concrete and wires and all the other mining, refining, and making required. Yes, at some point—and better sooner than later–less fossil fuel will be needed, but we’re years away from the glorious moment when only clean energy is used to build clean energy. (And there are some industrial processes that are further away from such a glorious day, and petrochemicals are essential to our society, and are likely to remain so until alternatives are found, and we don’t have much in the way of alternatives at the ready today and may not, in any practical and scaled fashion, for years to come.) Nonetheless, there is so much to do today to move closer to the clean energy transition, and we need to continue—and expand—this work, and one big chunk is solving the interconnect delays and existing grid shortcomings.

We also need to pay attention to the blatant strategy of fossil fuel businesses hoping to keep themselves relevant and profitable for more years than the world actually needs. The main work that is required now is political, more than anything else. Yes, the political wind feels hot on our faces today, but it need not be long before cooling and calming breezes shift our way. The work of today is attending to that shift of prevailing winds.

Fossil Fuels are Expensive

The only thing fossil fuels have going for them is that they are established, mature, and in-place systems. That’s it. There is no positive economic argument applicable to fossil fuels relative to clean energy, because fossil fuels are already far more expensive than clean energy alternatives. The fossil fuel think tanks and industry boosters like to point to the IRA and the Infrastructure bills of the Biden administration, braying that only subsidies are economically advancing clean energy, but behind the hysteria of such finger-pointing  is the real truth, which is, when you consider all the cost in damage from the use of fossil fuels, fossil fuels are much more expensive. There are various direct subsidies also given to fossil fuels—tax advantages, lower lease costs, outright grants—but whether or not these are less than or equal to or more than such subsidies given to clean energy, it is immaterial. There are much, much bigger indirect subsidies given to fossil fuels. These are more accurately called externalities, or costs exacted by air pollution deaths world-wide each year and the growing extreme costs of climate change’s growing extreme weather, and other factors.  These externalities have been recently estimated by Potsdam Institute as dragging $39 trillion dollars out of the world’s annual GDP by 2050! The more conservative International Monetary Fund concludes that there is an additional $6-to-$7 trillion per year that should be included in the cost of producing and using fossil fuels, but these costs are, in effect, hidden from the public. That doesn’t mean these costs don’t get paid, but the price isn’t at the gas pump.

A study by Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, for example, estimates that factoring in social costs like climate change, air and water pollution, health impacts, and environmental degradation could add an extra $3.80 per gallon. Total Societal Impact (TSI), which was coined by the Boston Consulting Group, refers to the comprehensive economic, social, and environmental impact of an organization’s products, services, operations, core capabilities, and activities, and such analyses suggest that the true cost of gasoline, including all benefits and costs over its lifetime, could be as high as $15 per gallon, and that’s before the highway tax. And there are a lot of other forms of fossil fuels besides gasoline, of course.

It may be that the most important political fight for climate change is to bring fossil fuels’ externalities into the light so that the true cost of fossil fuels can be appreciated. There are a growing number of states, including Masschusetts, considering “Make Polluters Pay” laws; Vermont and New York have already passed such laws. There have been carbon-fees-and-dividends proposals in Congress that could bring forward the true costs of carbon-emitting energy systems, or a tax on carbon, or, of course, making fossil fuel companies pay the real cost of their processes and products, although I’m pretty sure that they’d want to pass those costs to us. Of course, we are already paying these costs, aren’t we?

The best prod for political progress is truth, and the truth is that fossil fuels, while having long served in mankind’s progress, are simply too expensive and must be replaced.