President-elect Donald Trump deviates heavily from current President Joe Biden with respect to his views on the environment. He has called the climate crisis a hoax, and said “who the hell cares?” in response to a question about the sea level rising.
And his purported policies are in step with his controversial statements, though some green tech experts don’t think even Trump’s anti-green attitude can outweigh the fact that clean energy is cheaper than the alternatives.
Drill, baby, drill: Trump has promised to increase production of fossil fuels, the greatest accelerator of the climate crisis. He has also said he wants to drill for fossil fuels in the Arctic wilderness, which he says would contribute to the US having the “No. 1 lowest cost energy and electricity on Earth.”
Cameron Dales, the president and CCO of Peak Energy, which deploys large-scale sodium-ion batteries, told Tech Brew that Trump will be able to achieve the lowest-cost energy through renewables, not drilling for fossil fuels.
“An economy that is productive, and a country that wants to be a world power, needs to have access to low cost, reliable energy,” Dales said, “whether that’s for powering AI data centers or manufacturing or just everyday life.”
And low costs are a big priority for Trump. Earlier this week, he announced plans for a government efficiency department that would aim to cut unnecessary federal costs.
Mike Hall, the CEO of Anza Renewables, a solar and energy storage software company, agreed that Trump will likely put cost efficiency over fossil fuels.
“We fully do expect deployments of solar, storage, renewables, broadly, to continue to grow under this administration,” Hall told Tech Brew. “Not necessarily because climate is a top priority for the administration, but because the fundamentals of renewable energy are so strong.”
Steven Cohen, who teaches environmental policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told Tech Brew that Trump’s fossil fuel affinity is “performative and symbolic.”
“The trend toward renewable energy and electric vehicles, it’s going to continue,” Cohen said. “It’s not going to be as accelerated as it would have been had he not been in office, but it’s still going to continue.”
Deflating the Inflation Reduction Act: Trump has also said he wants to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which the current administration hailed as the “most significant action Congress has taken on clean energy and climate change” in US history. Among other things, the law promotes clean energy by allocating funds toward solar and wind power and incentivizing green tech innovation.
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But the law also created over 150,000 jobs, mostly in states that voted for Trump in the 2024 election.
“There’s not a lot of concern that the IRA gets ripped out in entirety,” Hall told Tech Brew. “Because while climate might not be a top priority, the economy is.”
What’s more, Hall said that anything Trump repeals from the IRA would hurt the clean energy industry “more around the edges than at the core.”
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency: In his first term, Trump cut over 100 environmental rules pertaining to clean air and water, which the EPA itself said could have dire consequences.
During his second term, Trump said he again aims to do away with regulations that combat the climate crisis—and he’s hoping to appoint former New York House Representative Lee Zeldin to do so.
“[Zeldin] will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, “while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”
Cohen told us that Trump already made a large impact on the EPA during his first term, when he weakened the scientific capacity of the agency.
“The EPA is a small agency, but it has…a lot of scientific capacity that could be permanently decimated by this,” Cohen said. “And states don’t have the capacity to put together the laboratory capacity that EPA has had.”
Au revoir, Paris Climate Accord: And as he did in his first term, Trump is expected to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, an international treaty signed by 196 countries in 2015. Biden rejoined the venture in 2021 when he took office. The agreement holds participating nations accountable for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to mitigate rising global temperatures and aid developing nations in fighting the climate crisis.
Without the US in the agreement, funding for smaller countries fighting the effects of warming temperatures would decrease, and other global superpowers also might feel less pressure to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
But even though climate may not be the Trump administration’s priority, the usage of clean energy and fuels is now an “economic story,” Dales told Tech Brew.
“These technologies are just fundamentally better and cheaper,” Dales said. “And then it creates this positive spiral.”