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November 5, 2024 - American voters, intending to or not on Tuesday, will choose a future for the nation’s energy infrastructure at a time of dire climate threats and seismic technology disruptions.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, their parties’ standard-bearers, are poles apart on energy policy and climate change. Whoever enters the White House in January faces energy challenges and opportunities that far exceed those in 2017, when Trump took office — and even four years ago at the start of President Joe Biden’s term in office.
The shift to cleaner energy today is a force in the U.S. economy. It is marked by the closure of coal plants, which are the biggest sources of pollution in the electricity sector, and additions of vast amounts of wind and solar power every year. Meanwhile, American technology companies with trillion-dollar valuations and political power are driving projections of rapidly growing electricity demand.
Since 2021, Washington and Fortune 500 companies have made multibillion-dollar investments in electric vehicles and battery technology. And that’s putting clean cars on the roads by the millions and rebuilding domestic manufacturing.
Still, as Harris and Trump crisscrossed the country over the past two months, they rarely articulated this story to the American people.
Trump, who denies that climate change is a problem, has never acknowledged the effect of record heat and sea-level rise and the toll that violent, climate-fueled storms is taking on American towns and the federal budget. The Republican has sought the financial backing of oil moguls and bad-mouthed zero-carbon technology that has created new jobs, stimulated economic growth and set the United States on a more sustainable path.
Democrats and Republicans say Trump can’t wish away the momentum behind investments in solar and battery factories — much of it in red states — and the need for significant power grid upgrades and expansions to absorb more demand, move high-voltage power longer distances and protect against extreme weather. The stimulus of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and climate spending in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is magnified by green agendas across industry and society.
“We are headed toward a lower-carbon economy,” said former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. “The pace and scale could be accelerated, and I wish they were, but that’s clearly where we are going.”
Washington insiders who shaped Trump energy policies the first go-around contend that climate denialism wouldn’t be the central theme of a Trump 2.0 energy agenda. “The landscape is different,” said a former White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The former Trump official pointed to House Republicans who defend the IRA as evidence that there’s also bipartisan support for keeping up investment in the grid.
“In a Trump 2.0, if that occurs,” said Moniz, “there will be a stabilizing element because the private sector is not going to want to lurch from one [policy] strategy to another in what is, for them, a relatively short time frame of a few years.”
Moniz, who served under the Obama administration, agrees with leading Democrats and some climate activists that, even if the Harris campaign has been short on specifics, Harris plans to maintain policies and incentives meant to spur clean energy growth.
Energy analysts at Rhodium Group estimate that while the U.S. is falling well short of Biden’s goal of a zero-carbon grid by 2035, greenhouse gas emissions across the economy could decline by as much as 56 percent below 2005 levels in that year. That would represent at least a doubling and as much as a quadrupling of annual reductions over three decades.
But federal and state polices underlying that analysis have to work. Political experts say a larger majority of Americans who go to the polls need to elect officials willing to invest now to reduce future climate risks. Today, some of those initiatives are caught up in the extremes of American politics or slowed down by the uneven post-pandemic economic recovery or the grind of an arcane regulatory apparatus governing utilities responsible for securing the electric grid.
Then there is the cost of federal leadership. The $2 trillion federal deficit is projected to grow significantly in the coming decades, according to the Deficit Tracker at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The growing costs of addressing climate pollution and catastrophic storms and wildfires will ramp up pressure on consumers’ electricity bills, whoever sits in the Oval Office.
What Trump and Harris didn’t tell us
Harris and Trump would both inherit a U.S. power grid that is face-to-face with increasing risks of power shortages.
The recent warning from leaders of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the interstate grid monitor, pulled no punches: “The supply of electricity is not growing fast enough to meet the growing demand for electricity,” NERC CEO Jim Robb and chief engineer Mark Lauby told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last month.
Coal and fossil plants are retiring faster than they can be replaced by wind, solar and energy storage resources, NERC reports. Flooding, hurricanes, heat waves and Arctic blizzards linked to climate change are coming more rapidly. It took 50,000 utility line crew workers from 35 states to restore power in the Carolinas and Georgia after Hurricane Helene.
On top of that, a stressed supply-demand imbalance threatens to veer further out of control because of the surging power demands of data centers processing artificial intelligence programs.
“The frequency of actual and near-miss reliability events is warning sign,” Robb and Lauby said in their statement to FERC. “Unless reliability is appropriately prioritized during the energy transition, North America is at risk of more frequent and more serious long-duration reliability disruptions, including the possibility of national consequence events.”
A hodgepodge of uncoordinated federal and state policy authorities over the grid leaves no one in charge or responsible, grid officials acknowledge.
What would Harris or Trump do? The answers are yet to come.
Both candidates have at times trumpeted U.S. oil and gas production — the highest in the world. Trump says the industry’s success started under his administration, and expanding it even more is a top priority. Harris notes that record-setting oil and gas numbers are evidence that the Biden-Harris administration isn’t on a crusade to destroy an American strategic asset and one that is central to the economies of Texas and Pennsylvania.
Nonetheless, Harris is considered certain to maintain the directions charted by Biden and congressional Democrats. Harris was the Senate’s tie-breaking vote for the IRA. She could deploy the remaining parts of the estimated $1.6 trillion in grants and tax breaks passed by Congress meant to catalyze development of non-fossil clean energy projects and infrastructure.
In a preelection analysis, ClearView Energy Partners observed, “At a high level: we would expect Harris to deliver a faster, greener transition by defending and expanding Biden-era regulatory frameworks and tax incentives.”
But Harris will chart her own course, the ClearView analysts noted, quoting Harris: “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Harris has promised.
At the Ellipse in Washington on Tuesday, Harris offered a process, not a prescription. “I pledge to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make — and to people who disagree with me,” Harris said.
Trump’s course, by contrast, rejects and mocks the experts on climate, disregarding their consensus that land and ocean warming caused by accumulating atmospheric greenhouse gases is feeding a growing ferocity of extreme weather in the U.S. and worldwide.
With “drill, baby, drill” as a campaign banner, Trump has gone back to his first-term strategy of promoting red state coal, oil and gas production.
“As president, I will set a national goal of ensuring that America has the No. 1 lowest cost of energy of any industrial country anywhere on Earth,” he said in a video statement. “We will develop the liquid gold that is right under our feet, including American oil and natural gas, and we will also embrace nuclear, clean coal, hydropower.”
Trump implied, with no details, that he would use executive authority enacted under the New Deal to build more natural gas (and perhaps new coal) generation, regardless of its climate impacts.
“We will build new power plants,” he said during a September stop in Savannah, Georgia. “China is already building plants, electric plants, and we have a problem because we have things called environmental impact statements and various things that you have to go through. I will get them approved so fast.”
Biden’s Energy Department under Secretary Jennifer Granholm has sought to make new high-voltage power lines a nonpartisan energy priority, citing the need for a stronger grid to defend against climate shocks and lower electricity costs by building a larger, less constrained electricity system.
It’s possible a Trump energy team could see grid expansion as a necessary tool for his agenda, some policy strategist surmise.
A revealing policy test for Harris is coming if she wins and Democrats take back the House. If an active lame duck session follows the election, and a bipartisan compromise moves forward to speed the permitting of both clean energy transmission and natural gas pipelines, will she take on progressives in her party and support a compromise?
‘She has championed these causes’
Both Harris and Trump say they would continue Biden’s strategy of using tax breaks for an “industrial development” policy, incentivizing U.S. and foreign suppliers to open manufacturing plants to produce grid equipment, their campaign materials promise.
The ClearView analysis noted, “Harris has proposed tax credits to support strategic sectors, including green steel, critical minerals and clean energy while Trump has put his weight behind another tool: an across-the-board 10-20 percent tariff on imports and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods.”
Trump’s vision is anchored in the past and present reality that fossil fuels power most of the U.S. economy, despite dramatic gains by renewable generation and the steady improvement of electric cars.
Biden sought to change that reality. His agenda was set before his nomination in 2020, when he won the support of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and progressives by embracing the goal of a carbon-free grid in 2035.
Despite remarkable advances in clean energy technology and deployment, the U.S. and other governments are failing to hit clean energy targets, a new United Nations report warned.
Trump says he will quit the struggle. Harris will not, she says. “Voters who care about climate change understand that she is someone that not only movements can work with, but she has championed these causes, and that we know who she is,” Camila Thorndike, Harris’ climate engagement director, told POLITICO. |
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