Despite these factors, experts told The Hill in November that much of the momentum the renewable energy sector picked up under the Biden administration is likely to continue under Trump.
“In the next few years, there isn’t too much that the president-elect can do to slow down projects,” said David Brown, director of data firm Wood Mackenzie’s energy transition practice.
The shift reflects political and economic realities, experts said. Top among them: Mr. Trump oversaw coal’s decline, not its salvation. Despite the fact that Mr. Trump gutted climate regulations and appointed a coal lobbyist to lead the country’s top environmental agency, 75 coal-fired power plants closed and the industry shed about 13,000 jobs during his presidency.
“Not a single coal miner went back to work or power plant saved,” said Erin E. Bates, a spokeswoman for the United Mine Workers of America, the labor organization representing coal miners.
A new method based on global climate model pressure gradients was developed for identifying coastal high-wind fire weather conditions, such as the Santa Ana Occurrence (SAO)….. This initial analysis shows consistent shifts in SAO events from earlier (September–October) to later (November–December) in the season, suggesting that SAOs may significantly increase the extent of California coastal areas burned by wildfires, loss of life, and property.
Hurricanes, storms, floods and other natural disasters caused an estimated $140 billion in insured losses in 2024, up from 2023 and one of the costliest years on record, Munich Re said on Thursday.
The year’s tally of losses from natural catastrophes covered by insurance compares with $106 billion recorded in 2023 and is well above long-term averages. It is also higher than a similar forecast by Swiss Re, published in December.
Munich Re, the world’s largest insurer, said the development shows that “climate change is showing its claws” as global temperatures continue to rise, contributing to more frequent and extreme weather events.
Climate scientist Daniel Swain said on CNN that the Pacific Palisades fire alone may end up as the most expensive wildfire in history, and that he expected that collectively, the fires ravaging the region will be the costliest wildfire event in history. According to NOAA, the most expensive wildfire season on record (in 2024 USD, to account for inflation) was the $30 billion 2018 season, mostly because of severe fires in California. This included the most destructive wildfire on record – the November Camp Fire, which devastated Paradise, California, killing 85 and destroying over 18,800 buildings. That fire cost about $12.5 billion, making it the most expensive single fire in world history.
In a bonkers press conference where the President elect wouldn’t rule out invading Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Greenland, he also said he would put a stop to “windmills” in the US. Presumably this will be right after he brings down the price of eggs, invades Canada, ends the war in Ukraine, and annexes Greenland.
President-elect Trump signaled Tuesday that he would oppose all new wind energy production in his second term in remarks to reporters.
“We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump said, adding “they don’t work without subsidy. … You don’t want energy that needs subsidy.” Data from the International Energy Agency indicates fossil fuel subsidies reached an all-time high in 2022, with oil subsidies increasing 85 percent.
The president-elect has long disparaged renewable energy and vowed to pursue policies favorable to the fossil fuel industry in his second term. He has named fracking CEO Chris Wright as Energy secretary.
However, Trump has long been a vocal detractor of wind power in particular, vowing in May to end offshore wind production by executive order “on day one.” Before his first presidential run he frequently spoke out against turbines within view of his golf course in Scotland as unsightly. He has also blamed offshore turbines for whale deaths, although the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said “[t]here are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”
German energy firm RWE has already suggested its timeline for a planned wind farm in the Gulf of Mexico will likely be delayed but not be canceled outright.
“The change of administration in the U.S. entails risks for the timely implementation of offshore wind projects,” RWE Chief Financial Officer Michael Müller said at a press conference in November.
Despite these factors, experts told The Hill in November that much of the momentum the renewable energy sector picked up under the Biden administration is likely to continue under Trump.
As devastating wildfires sweep over parts of southern California, it is vital that media, the public, and our policymakers understand what’s happening and how to best respond. The first and most important need is to ensure that local communities have accurate, real-time information about the risks they face, and that emergency responders have the resources they need. In the coming months and years, however, it will be critical to improve our understanding of these risks and how they are changing with accelerating climate change and with changing population and development patterns, and to improve our ability to manage worsening disasters.
What’s not helpful are inaccurate statements from politicians. But that’s what Donald Trump offered up when he posted a statement on TruthSocial falsely laying the blame for the fires and for firefighting problems on democratic governor Gavin Newsom and state water policies.
The first thing to understand is that reported problems with water supply for firefighters are the direct result of the massive demands for fire-fighting water, the destruction of pipes and pumps by the fires, and homeowners leaving hoses and sprinklers running to try to protect their property. All of these demands overwhelmed the water-supply infrastructure, causing some water tanks and hydrants to lose pressure or dry up. They have nothing to do with the overall availability of water to southern California and nothing to do with the state’s efforts to protect endangered and threatened fish and ecosystems.
As Climate impacts get worse, expect more desperate distractions. Climate stoked wildfires in California, you’ll remember were blamed on “Jewish Space Lasers” just another occasion to stoke anti-gay bigotry.
As wildfires raged out of control across the Los Angeles area on Wednesday, consuming over 28,000 acres of land, destroying thousands of homes and buildings, including entire neighborhoods, and causing the deaths of at least five people, president-elect Donald Trump, his MAGA acolytes, right-wing commentators, conservative news outlets, and far-right conspiracists all laid the blame not on climate change or on eight months without rain, but on wokeism.
Trump—who supports vastly expanding the extraction and use of fossil fuels, which scientific consensus directly connects to the increasing prevalence of extreme weather events—used the unfolding tragedy to attack his long-time nemesis, California governor Gavin Newsom. He claimed that the Democrat’s embrace of environmental issues was to blame for the inability of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) to contain what is already the worst fire in California’s history.
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California.”
Rising utility bills are a huge concern for U.S. families – ⅓ of households had to forego basic necessities to pay energy bills last year. But new Energy Innovation research finds the biggest culprits behind rising prices include fossil fuels and the climate change impacts they cause, not clean energy. In fact, states with high levels of wind and solar generation like New Mexico, Iowa, and Oklahoma have experienced the lowest rate increases. The data is clear– clean energy is not causing electric bills to rise. Rather, the biggest factors causing bills to go up include:
Wildfire costs and risk driving up prices
Natural gas price volatility in regions heavily dependent on the fuel
Utility investments in aging, uneconomic coal plants
Transmission and distribution costs rising faster than inflation
And utility business models favoring big capital expenditures
Only looking at national average electricity prices obscures real trends as well. Between 2021 and 2023, electricity prices increased faster than inflation in only 15 states, and those were states particularly vulnerable to wildfires (i.e., California), natural gas volatility (i.e., Massachusetts), or heavily dependent on coal (i.e., West Virginia).
Prices for residential Electricity in a Renewable heavy state, vs state with predominantly coal, gas, nuclear
Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering.
It’s a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world. Such cold air blasts have become known as the polar vortex. It’s a long-established weather term that’s become mainstream as its technical meaning changed a bit on the way.
What it really means to average Americans in areas where the cold air comes: brrrrr.
What’s happening is the jet stream — that usually west-to-east river of air way above ground that moves weather systems along — has made a roller-coaster like dip from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast and is stuck on that wavy track. To the west of that plunge, in California, it’s hot and dry. But to the east and just above the dip, it’s a taste of the North Pole.
..the biggest ongoing risk remains homes with inefficient heating systems and poor insulation. These systems put immense strain on the grid during winter storms, leading to potential rolling outages. However, temperatures in this storm are expected to be 20-25 degrees warmer than during Winter Storm Uri so I do not expect any rolling outages this time, as I discussed with KHOU.
In my discussion with KHOU, we focused on how different this storm is compared to previous ones and how far Texas has come since Winter Storm Uri.
“A statewide average of right around 6 degrees led to extremely high demand during Uri,” I explained.
This one will likely be around 30 degrees, far less severe than six previous winter storms over the last 13 years.
