Can Trump Stop the Clean Transition?

Just came back from a meeting with farmers and landowners in Central Michigan, many if not most of them Trump voters. All of them working to expand clean energy development in their area.
Every month they learn more about the importance of the energy transition, most specifically for family farmers, who see clean energy as a means to diversify income and keep operations viable.
We discussed the prospects for the coming 4 years, and agreed that the momentum was favoring faster clean deployment, but also that our roles as local renewable advocates have never been more important.

If you want something to do, other than wring your hands about the path forward, let me know. I’m putting together a team.

Reuters:

A Biden-era law providing a decade of lucrative subsidies for new solar, wind and other clean-energy projects would be near-impossible to repeal, however, thanks to support from Republican states, while other levers available to the next president would only have marginal impact, analysts say.

“I don’t think a Trump president can slow the transition,” said Ed Hirs, energy fellow at the University of Houston. “This is well under way.”
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The production boom started under former President Barack Obama and has continued through the Trump and Biden presidencies. Even so, Trump’s campaign has sought to claim credit, saying his efforts to slash regulatory red tape during his 2017-2021 term paved the way, and arguing he could further expand U.S. fossil-fuel production in a second term by rolling back Biden’s climate initiatives.

Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are the fastest-growing segments on the power grid, according to the Department of Energy, driven by federal tax credits, state renewable-energy mandates, and technology advancements that have lowered their costs.

President Joe Biden in 2022 signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, opens new tab guaranteeing billions of dollars of solar and wind subsidies for another decade as part of his broader effort to decarbonize the power sector by 2035 to fight climate change.

Before the election, Trump slammed the IRA as being too expensive and promised to rescind all unspent funds allocated by the law – a threat that, if accomplished, could pour cold water over the U.S. clean energy boom.

But dismantling the IRA would require lawmakers, including those whose states have benefited from IRA-related investments such as solar-panel factories, wind farms and other projects, to vote to repeal it.
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“Presidents can make a lot of noise about plans for U.S. oil and gas, but ultimately it’s individuals and companies responding to prices of a global commodity that make the decisions on when to drill,” said Jesse Jones, head of North American upstream at Energy Aspects.

Dan Eberhart, Trump donor and CEO of oilfield-services company Canary, LLC, said he supports Trump’s encouragement of increased oil-and-gas drilling, saying it could further lower energy prices for businesses and consumers.

He added he would also welcome a move by Trump to once again withdraw the United States from international climate cooperation, like he did in his first term, arguing other big greenhouse-gas emitters were not doing enough.

“The Paris accord was aspirational and meaningless if China and India don’t participate,” he said, referring to a landmark U.N. deal in 2015 to limit global warming.