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These are the 10 most important clean energy transition projects struggling to get off the ground
“If you’re a Republican with energy expertise, yeah, your stock is fairly high right now.”
California’s Clean Air Act waiver may not be long for this world.
On Cabinet nominations, COP29, and superconductor scandals
Permitting reform could be the big winner, but that’s just one item on the wish list.
Meet Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright.
Donald Trump has selected another stalwart of the fossil fuel industry to lead the Department of Energy. On Saturday, the president-elect put forward Chris Wright, CEO of the oilfield services firm Liberty Energy and a major Republican donor, for the job.
Wright “has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal and Oil and Gas. Most significantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Energy Independence, and transformed the Global Energy Market and Geopolitics,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday. In a post on X, Wright said that he was “honored and grateful” for the opportunity.
Wright had been endorsed by several figures from the fossil fuel industry in the days leading up to Trump’s official announcement,including Oklahoma oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, a major Trump donor and informal advisor.
Trump’s first Secretary of Energy, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, reportedly thought the Department dealt more with, well, energy than it does in reality. While under current Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm it has become a locus of climate change and green energy policy, the sprawling department oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, its national laboratories, and its energy efficiency standards, in addition to a variety of energy programs. The Biden administration has super-sized the Department’s Loan Program Office, which has gone on to offer billions in funding to renewable and non-emitting energy infrastructure projects across the country.
Granholm and the Biden White House put a distinctive stamp on the Department of Energy, letting the charter for a coal advisory group expire expire and renaming the Office of Fossil Energy to the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, reflecting the administration’s major investments in carbon capture technology and infrastructure over the past four years.
Wright, on the other hand, is a deep skeptic of the idea that there’s a climate crisis or energy transition happening at all. To wit: “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition,” Wright said in a video posted to LinkedIn last year. He also wrote that “climate crisis, energy transition, carbon pollution, clean energy, and dirty energy,” were “Five commonly used words around Energy and Climate that are both deceptive and destructive.”
“Carbon dioxide does indeed absorb infrared radiation, contributing to warming,” Wright said. “But calling carbon dioxide ‘pollution’ is like calling out water and oxygen, the other two irreplaceable molecules for life on earth.”
For Republican administrations, the Department of the Interior is considered to be the plum job for energy policy, as the office controls leasing of public lands for energy exploration and extraction. Last week, Trump nominated North Dakota governor Doug Burgum to lead that department, as well as head the new White House Council of National Energy, which “will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American Energy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Wright will also be a member of the Council, Trump said.
“This team will drive U.S. Energy Dominance, which will drive down Inflation, win the A.I. arms race with China (and others), and expand American Diplomatic Power to end Wars all across the World,” Trump wrote.
To the extent an energy policy can be inferred from Trump’s post, it’s likely to be a version of “all of the above,” with barriers lifted for fossil fuel production, along with (perhaps) some support for certain forms of renewable or non-carbon-emitting energy, or at least regulatory relief.
Geothermal, for instance, has long had bipartisan support in Congress, and could be a relative winner among non-carbon-emitting power sources under a Republican trifecta. The industry draws on technology and people from the oil and gas sector, and the location of high-quality geothermal resources in western states controlled by Republicans gives lawmakers reason to support the growing industry. Liberty Energy is also an investor in Fervo Energy, one of the leading enhanced geothermal startups.
“I cannot imagine a nominee with more technical and commercial understanding of EGS and the need to deploy geothermal for clean, firm power. Congrats, @ChrisAWright, looking forward to working with your team,” Ben Serrurier, the head of government affairs and policy at Fervo, wrote on X.
But fossils will no doubt come first. One of Wright’s first priorities will likely be to unblock the federal permitting process for new liquefied natural gas export terminals. The Biden administration formally paused approvals of new LNG export facilities earlier this year to study the effect of such exports on global greenhouse gas emissions. The move set off a cascade of recriminations and opprobrium that culminated in the pause being overturned in court.
Granholm told reporters at the annual United Nations climate conference on Friday that the department’s research on the impacts of LNG exports should be released by the end of the year, which “could set the stage for the fossil fuel-friendly Trump administration’s LNG policy being hamstrung by a Biden-era report,” Bloomberg reported. A group of Republican members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a letter to Granholm on Friday saying that they were “particularly troubled” by this notion.
Wright may also end up tangling with environmental activists over energy efficiency, as did Perry’s successor and Granholm’s predecessor Dan Brouillette. Climate groups sued Brouillette for not updating standards as set out by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. Trump has long mocked such efficiency standards, especially those for water efficiency.
Wright quickly won plaudits from conservative environmental and energy groups, however. “From nuclear to solar to geothermal to oil & gas, Chris Wright has been a pioneer of American energy,” Christopher Barnard, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, wrote on X. “Chris Wright + Doug Burgum is literally the dream team.”
Notably, there’s no specific mention of coal in the Wright announcement, other than a reference to “ALL forms of American Energy.” During his tenure as Secretary of Energy, Perry proposed to help reverse the mass shutdown of coal plants that had begun during the Obama administration and continued throughout the Trump years, but his plan was in turn shut down by the Republican-majority Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Also notably absent from the announcement was any mention of Trump’s least favorite form of renewable energy: wind.
The future of U.S. climate policy may depend on things getting dramatic.
Donald Trump does not care much about climate change. By which I mean not just that he does not believe the warming of the planet is a problem, but also that the entire subject is far from the top of his priority list. Unfortunately, that makes his incoming administration even more dangerous.
The implied chaos of the second Trump term is only beginning. In some cases, the operative question is “Is he really going to do that?” Will he actually deport 15 million people, or put a 20% tariff on all imported goods, or prosecute his political opponents?
But when it comes to climate, Trump has offered no attention-grabbing proposals or bizarre promises. He said he wants to “Drill, drill, drill,” but we’re already drilling more than we ever have before. He has a weird obsession with homicidal windmills (“They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales”) and a contempt for electric cars, it’s true. But the real hazard lies in the agenda of those who will run key departments in his government, doing things Trump barely takes notice of.
This may seem counterintuitive to those who view Trump as a uniquely malign force, pushing the federal government in new and disturbing directions. But Trump only cares about a few things — trade and immigration are his primary policy areas of interest, and much of his days will be spent plotting revenge against his enemies — and climate isn’t one of them.
So far, the Trump appointees with influence over climate policy are not the kind of figures who will grab headlines; Americans are unlikely to develop strong opinions about Lee Zeldin (the pick for EPA Administrator) or Doug Burgum (who will be Secretary of the Interior). Below them will be a cadre of unknown and unnoticed officials determined not just to undo every bit of climate progress that occurred under Joe Biden, but also to go much further, purging scientists, stopping environmental enforcement, opening up federal land to fossil fuel production, eliminating pollution regulations, and shutting down every possible office with “climate” in its name or its mission.
So why would it be better if Trump were paying attention? Because the only likely restraint on this assault will be if Trump decides it reflects poorly on him.
That brings us to a crude but useful unified theory of Trump policy outcomes. Expressed as an equation, it would look like this:
Outcome = ((Trump impulses + party agenda) x attention)/political risk
To put it in simpler terms, the relevant questions are: What does Trump want? What do the people around him want? Is this something Trump cares about? And what are the political risks involved?
As an example, let’s take the idea of repealing the Affordable Care Act, which Trump tried and failed to do in his first term. His impulse was to destroy the ACA because it was signed by Barack Obama, whom he hates. His party would also like to destroy the ACA. But Trump himself is not all that interested in the issue of healthcare; he couldn’t be bothered to come up with a plan to replace the ACA, though he regularly promised “something terrific.” Because it’s such a high-profile issue, it won’t move forward without his attention.
Finally — and most importantly — the political risk of repealing the ACA is incredibly high because it is very popular. Repealing it would be cataclysmic for the healthcare system, leading tens of millions of people to lose their health coverage. Put it all together, and the likelihood that Republicans will achieve their longtime goal of ACA repeal is very, very small.
Now let’s plug climate into the equation. Trump’s impulses are uniformly detrimental, but also vague. He told oil executives they should raise him a billion dollars because he’ll give them whatever they want, but if you asked him what specifically it is they want, he probably couldn’t tell you with any specificity.
The Trump officials who will work on environmental issues know exactly what they want — but most of it won’t attract much attention, from the president or the public. When they start gutting PFAS regulations and methane emissions rules, neither Trump nor the average voter will have any idea.
One exception has already been teed up: It now appears that Republicans will try to kill the electric vehicle tax credit. If he wanted to, Elon Musk could stop this: If he told Trump it’s a bad idea, Trump would instruct Republicans in Congress to keep the credit, and it would be most likely be safe. But Musk is of the opinion that while ending the credit might hurt Tesla sales in the short run, his competitors will suffer even more, perhaps getting out of the EV business altogether.
There could be a fight over EV credits when Congress takes up the issue, and it’s even possible that Trump would step in and tell his party to leave them alone if he decided there would be too much of a backlash that would harm him politically. It’s highly unlikely, but the fact that one could at least imagine how it would happen shows how the preferences/attention/political risk dynamic operates.
But to repeat, EV subsidies are the exception of a climate-related policy that will garner some press coverage (though even that may be limited, since the repeal of the tax credits will be part of a gargantuan reconciliation bill with lots of other contentious ideas in it). Most of what happens at the EPA and the Departments of Interior and Energy, where pro-fossil fuel officials will labor every day to undermine environmental protections, will pass by with little notice.
So climate advocates face a difficult task: If they can raise the salience of the climate issue and make a particular Trump administration climate policy unpopular, it would become possible that Trump will notice, perceive some political danger in what his government and Congress are doing, and act to restrain them, for no reason other than his own self-interest.
It’s not much to pin your hopes on, and the idea that Trump himself could be the force of moderation in an administration hell-bent on reversing progress on climate seems crazy. But this is going to be a crazy four years.
