Donald Trump calls climate change a “hoax,” a “scam,” and a “con job.” He has (twice) withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, and he has pulled the plug, or tried to, on “the Green New Scam,” which is what he calls President Joe Biden’s extensive subsidies to alternative energy in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. (The Green New Deal, as Trump well knows, is a separate and never-enacted set of decarbonization policies advocated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey.) Trump’s energy motto is “Drill, Baby, Drill”; he’s showered the petroleum industry with $80 billion in subsidies, and his Iran War is delivering sky-high windfall profits to the oil industry.
Nevertheless, through a combination of stubbornness, incompetence, and senility, Trump is inadvertently boosting the fortunes of alternative energy to a degree not seen since Biden was president. If he keeps this up, the Natural Resources Defense Council may have to erect a statue in his honor.
As I write, the international benchmark price of Brent crude is trading around $108.50 per barrel, and gasoline is priced, nationally, at an average $4.56 per gallon. In Washington, D.C., where I live, and where members of Congress in vulnerable districts have been known to gas up, the price is an even higher $4.67 per gallon. By attacking Iran, Trump prompted that nation’s ruling regime (very predictably) to close the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump has made it unaffordable for Americans to fill their gas tanks. That’s bad. But the silver lining is that sky-high gas prices are a blessing to the environment. “Renewable Energy Is Booming Again,” says Barron’s. “Trump May Not Be a Fan of Clean Energy, But Iran War Is Accelerating Global Shift From Oil and Gas,” says The Guardian. “The Iran War Is Driving a Clean Energy Wake-Up Call,” says the climate-focused Canary Media. You can call it “The Only Good News From Iran” (David Wallace-Wells, New York Times), or you can call it “Donald Trump’s Green New Deal” (Tej Parikh, Financial Times). Parikh’s headline irritated me because that’s the one I pitched to my editor. It was already taken because the characterization is true.
Regrettably, this clean-energy boom is happening mostly outside the United States, and especially in China, which was already cleaning our clock on renewable energy. Still, Planet Earth doesn’t care where carbon reductions originate, so long as they originate from someplace.
In Barron’s, Avi Salzman reported that China doubled its exports of solar energy equipment in March. Its solar exports dipped a little in April, but still were 60 percent higher than a year earlier. Also in April, China’s exports of alternative-fuel vehicles more than doubled over the previous year, reaching a record high. Domestically, Nicholas Kusnetz and Georgina Gustin reported in Inside Climate News, China’s investment in green technologies is softening the blow of higher oil prices. For example, more than half of all new cars sold last year in China were electric.
Outside China, solar generation was up 15 percent over the previous year during the war’s first month. Wind power was up 8 percent, and hydropower was up 2 percent. Jigar Shah, who was an Energy Department official in the Biden administration, predicted to Matthew Zeitlin of Heatmap News that clean energy spending will double globally to $400 billion per month by the end of this year, all thanks to Trump’s Iran War. In Europe, electric-car sales rose 51 percent over the previous year in March and 34 percent over the previous year in April. Alternative-fuel vehicle sales more than doubled in March in Japan, Korea, and New Zealand over the previous year, and rose more than 50 percent in India and Australia.
In spite of Trump’s efforts to kill it, some of this alternative-energy boom is tiptoeing into the United States. The energy storage industry, which includes solar, hydropower, and batteries, reported record growth in January, February, and March. The proliferation of data centers was the primary driver, but “disruptions to global gas and gas turbine supplies” also helped, Reuters reported. This expansion occurred even as Trump cancelled $7 billion in solar subsidies. During that same period, investment in electric vehicles increased by $1.1 billion (even as employment fell nearly by six thousand jobs due to Trump’s policies discouraging EV production).
“The US renewables rollout has been more resilient to Trump’s anti-green policies than many first thought,” concluded Parikh in Financial Times, noting that in March the United States, for the first time in history, generated more electricity from renewable energy than from gas. That would have happened anyway, but it happened sooner because of Trump’s Iran War. Parikh further noted that clean-energy stocks continue through the Iraq War to outperform fossil-fuel stocks, with the gap widening since the war began.
It isn’t just the war that’s greening United States energy production. As noted above, an irony of Trump’s refusal to regulate Artificial Intelligence is that all those data centers multiplying like rabbits, since they rely heavily on solar, expand business for green energy companies. When our AI overlords take over the planet they will thank us for the head start we gave them on reducing climate change.
But much of their gratitude will have to go to Trump for boosting gas prices higher than few environmentalists dared wish through his Iran blunder. With Trump’s own Energy Department forecasting that oil prices won’t come down to their pre-war level until “later this year” (read: December), a Democratic House is starting to look inevitable and a Democratic Senate is entering the realm of the possible. Democrats mostly support green energy, so in that sense, too, Trump is an accidental Green New Dealer. For the moment, though, most of the economic benefit is going to China. Maybe Trump’s an accidental Sinophile as well.
