For Power & Profit: The Retreat From Renewables Has A Dark & Dangerous Underside – CleanTechnica

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The existential climate crisis that confronts us requires political and policy solutions that disempower the fossil fuel industry and their state allies. Unfortunately, the current US presidential election season is filled with hyperbole, controversy, and disinformation. Such discourse threatens to spawn a retreat from renewables in favor of continued burning of fossil fuels, which are having far-reaching, devastating effects on our climate and ecosystems.

It is time to hold fossil fuel businesses accountable for their part in the deterioration of the environment. Nonetheless, addressing the harmful effects of fossil fuel energy decisions across various governance levels is a complex task for policymakers.

On the positive side, local energy balancing in a new energy system that does not use fossil fuels would infuse energy self-sufficiency through smart grids based on innovative market mechanisms. Such a shift, however, would require initial regulatory steps in which sustainability disclosure standard setting and sustainability benchmarking practices would become the norm.

Safeguarding the environment and human rights, consumer interests, and investor interests requires a threshold of duty of care standard that is at jeopardy in the US due to the pressure of Big Oil to retain its power and profitability.

As the authors in a 2023 Energy Research and Social Change article explain, public health harms and disproportionate impacts exist across the coal, oil, and gas life cycles within the US.

“Each stage of the fossil fuel life cycle — extraction, processing, transport, and combustion — generates toxic air and water pollution, as well as greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions that drive the global climate crisis.”

Big Oil is keenly aware that federal incentives for renewables “eat into their profits and threaten their stranglehold over energy consumption,” as the LA Times Editorial Board argued earlier this summer. Former President Donald Trump and other Republican politicians want to exploit consumer anxieties by the “peddling of disinformation” that is in “the service of a pro-fossil fuel agenda” — which they add is “not surprising coming from the oil industry or from Trump.”

Since the 1990 election cycle, more than two-thirds of the oil and gas sector’s contributions to candidates and party committees has gone to Republicans, according to Open Secrets. The electric utilities industry is another big donor. Less generous, but even more partisan, is the mining industry. Trump has received more cash donations than any other federal candidate during this election cycle, fueling “easy-to-disprove mischaracterization intended to stoke anger and confusion among voters,” the LA Times Editorial Board says. Such efforts by some of the most powerful companies in the world serve to “sow confusion and prey on our anxieties in the pursuit of power and profit.”

Trump’s allegiance is to Big Oil, as a springtime meeting with industry bigwigs produced a promise that a $1 billion campaign donation would usher in an all-systems-go approach to oil and gas production. “Drill, baby, drill” is the Trump-pumping mantra.

Historic levels of investment in domestic vehicle and battery manufacturing under the Biden–Harris Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are left unspoken by Republicans. Their only narrative is to turn back to a Golden Era in which the fossil fuel industry reigns supreme. In doing so, as the Center for American Progress states, they focus on “spreading misinformation and obstructing elected governments’ climate efforts, promoting anti-democratic movements and candidates, and even undermining democratic rights.”

In a 2024 book titled Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, journalist Anne Applebaum examines how today’s autocrats work together to undermine democracy. She says that “the language of the democratic world, meaning rights, laws, rule of law, justice, accountability, [and] transparency…[is] harmful to them,” especially as language about equity and fairness to all questions an autocratic worldview. And so they need to undermine the people who use such oppositional language, “and, if they can, discredit it.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, as we listen to Trump’s diatribes?

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Be Careful What You Wish For: Trump’s Retreat from Renewables

It’s been made clear over the past several months that Trump is no fan of renewable energy. If re-elected, he has promised that he’ll gut the Inflation Reduction Act so that “all new spending grants and giveaways” will pave the way for federal savings — or so he says. While Trump also favors tariffs on Chinese goods, his pledges to weaken the Inflation Reduction Act could set back US efforts to catch up with China on solar panel and EV manufacturing.

Climate change? A hoax. Trump says that climate change is not influencing extreme weather. Five months into his administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not have leaders. And while Trump offered federal support for relief efforts after a number of severe storms, he was slow to respond to many weather disasters, most notably Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

The Paris Climate agreement? He withdrew from it once, and he’s pledged to do so again. There’s no way he’d condone voluntary GHG targets, especially when they’re individualized for each country’s build-out, capacity, and climate pollution record.

Trump originally said EVs were too expensive and had too little range. Say goodbye, Trump has threatened, to EVs — that is, unless a billionaire donates to his campaign, and then Trump will soften his position momentarily. Since Tesla CEO Elon Musk endorsed him, Trump has said he likes all kinds of vehicles, including EVs. It’s unnerving to think that Musk could become a key player after November’s election.

Still, Trump wants to eliminate tax credits in the EV tax credits that are part of the Inflation Reduction Act. This could mean rolling back the law’s EV subsidies and incentives that encourage small businesses to install charging stations. Many of the investments benefiting from the IRA are in Republican states, however, and targeting those projects may be politically unpopular with Trump’s base.

The Trump administration cancelled over 100 environmental protection regulations, and all indications are that he will continue that process if re-elected. An analysis in 2020 projected 1.8 billion more metric tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2035 than there would have been without his dismantling of regulations. A report in 2022 from researchers at Yale and Columbia found that the US environmental performance had plummeted as a result of the Trump administration’s actions.

Lest we forget, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), which had seemed destined for greenwashing, accepted an 11,000 page document that was considered the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. The global pact calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner” — it includes explicit language looking to the end of Big Oil. The victory gave activists a baseline of language to use as leverage in order to try and win all the fights that lie ahead to defuse fossil fuel dominance.

Trump would likely use his dictator-on-day-one promise to reject such progress.