On June 1, 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, the governors of New York, Washington, and California announced that they were forming the US Climate Alliance and committed to reducing their states’ greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28%. During Trump’s first term, the alliance made good on its promise to reduce state emissions, widened access to clean energy, and created clean energy jobs.
The group’s work didn’t stop while President Joe Biden was in office, but now that Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Agreement again, the alliance is ready to leverage its collective power against climate rollbacks. Tech Brew talked with Casey Katims, USCA’s executive director, about Trump’s second term, climate-focused executive orders, and what’s next for the group.
What are the US Climate Alliance’s plans for the second Trump administration? How is this going to be different from his first term?
Governors understand that the climate crisis demands action, and that the crisis doesn’t pause just because there’s a change in federal administration. So, governors across the US Climate Alliance are committed to advancing climate solutions and continuing to press forward toward our climate goals and climate targets because it is a scientific imperative, regardless of what happens at the federal level.
Our coalition got its start seven and a half years ago when President Trump yanked the US out of the Paris agreement the last time. So we were quite literally built for this moment. And the good news is that states continue to have broad authority under the US Constitution to advance solutions to the climate crisis…The commitment and resolve that the alliance has for tackling this crisis isn’t going to change. It [now] means that we don’t necessarily have a partner in the federal government in our work.
That’s not a new challenge to our governors. During the first Trump administration, US Climate Alliance governors learned really effective strategies for how to tap their authority and their experience at the state level, and how to leverage their collective market share. The alliance represents, collectively, 60% of the US economy, 55% of the US population. There’s a capability for [us] acting together to transform markets and to adopt substantially similar solutions that make a meaningful impact, that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that increase resilience to the climate crisis, and put us on a path to a safer, cleaner future.
Any reactions to Trump’s climate-focused executive orders? And what sort of strategies will the alliance be using to get around those?
There’s a lot of things that the executive orders don’t change. The executive orders don’t change the fact that the climate crisis is here…And they don’t change the economic benefits that are delivered to consumers, households, and businesses from taking action on climate. These technologies of the future are, in many cases, lower-cost, more efficient, more effective, and better technology. The executive order can’t stop the deployment of cleaner technologies like heat pumps. It’s not going to stop the EV transition. In many cases, the Trump administration may act more like a speed bump than a roadblock on our way to the net-zero future, and some of those technological and scientific shifts that our society is going through are not impacted by the executive order as much as the president may wish that they were.
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When you get down to the brass tacks of it, there are two main things. One of which is that the executive order has initiated an unlawful pause on the disbursement of many federal funds. Our states have been very clear…There are billions of dollars for really impactful projects across the country that are lowering household energy bills, putting Americans to work, increasing energy production, modernizing the grid, cleaning up our air and our water, and tackling climate pollution. And those funds are owed for those projects. The federal government cannot lawfully withhold funding for those.
Our states will always welcome an opportunity to work collaboratively with this administration where they can, but when this administration steps outside the bounds of what is legal, they will not hesitate to defend their interests and to protect Americans from the harmful impacts that those decisions would cause.
The second thing is, when it comes to the deployment of electric vehicles, when it comes to the deployment of new energy generation like offshore wind, it will always come down to, where does the federal government have authority, and where do states have authority? It is unfortunate that this administration has the ability to create significant challenges for a booming industry like offshore wind—which stands to increase energy production at a time when this administration says we need to be increasing energy production.
[Trump] has the ability to create challenges for that industry, but there are a lot of ways where he does not have the authority to block states from advancing progress. States are going to continue to drive toward a cleaner, safer vehicle future where Americans can choose to buy an EV if they want to, where Americans can choose to install a zero-emission heat pump to cool and heat their home, where Americans can choose to have more efficient appliances in their homes because they are better technologies and they are lower cost. And states are able to adopt more protective standards than the federal government to drive down climate pollution and create the markets for these incredible technologies that Americans clearly want.
Do you think there’s any chance that any more states will join the alliance?
Our doors are always open.
What we’re doing is working, and any state should want to be part of this incredible body of work that is both about protecting future generations, protecting generations today from the worst of the impacts of climate change, and also delivering cleaner air, cleaner water, more jobs, more energy savings, and more abundant energy.