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Last Updated on: 6th February 2025, 01:30 pm
Want to grow the US economy?
Capitalism is founded on the premise that private actors own and control property in accord with their interests, and demand and supply freely set prices in markets in a way that can serve the best interests of society. If the US is a capitalist society, then the government shouldn’t interfere with private business. But that’s not what is happening right now under the Trump administration.
The US Army Corps of Engineers has temporarily paused permitting on 168 renewable energy projects across the US to comply with President Donald Trump’s fossil fuels mandate, as reported by Bloomberg Law. This is part of Trump’s January 20 “Unleashing American Energy” executive order. Pausing solar and wind projects on private land will slow renewable energy development and represent an escalation of Trump’s pledge to block renewable energy in favor of fossil fuels.
It’s one of many regulatory changes taking place before our eyes. These regulatory changes are amazingly contradictory if the actual goal is to run a more efficient government.
Longtime US political activist Ralph Nader demands that we face the truth. “A lawless madman, with cunning political skills, is at large in our White House.”
According to Yale Environment 360, carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever before, putting hopes of limiting warming in jeopardy. The data comes from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai’i, which has been tracking the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the past 60 years. Last year saw the biggest one-year increase ever recorded with carbon dioxide levels — measured in parts per million — rising by 3.58 ppm.
Individual technical options, or “pathways,” for decarbonizing specific industries are necessary and have been gaining momentum. Aligning investment and innovation cycles helps to reduce a residual emissions burden from existing assets. A heavy reliance on fossil fuels need not continue, as we’re getting closer and closer to tipping points — thresholds are within grasp that will help transition the economy away from fossil fuels.
Jennifer Rubin in the Contrarian notes how former Vice President Al Gore has condemned President Trump’s “phony” energy emergence. “These performative acts show the pervasive influence that the fossil fuel industry will have in the United States over the next four years,” Gore forecasts. “But make no mistake, the global Sustainability Revolution is unstoppable.”
Gore has called out to governors, mayors, business leaders, investors, and activists “to put their heads down and do the work that will advance the climate solutions that our nation and the world so urgently need.” Republicans can go on denying the indisputable science, Gore continues, but they would be well-advised not to deny the jobs and economic benefits that have flowed into their districts from the previous administration’s investment in green energy.
Musk Is Caught With His Hands In The Cookie Jar
Trump’s tyrannical crusade to dismantle the US government has been aided by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. For a decade many of us bowed to Musk as a vocal advocate for climate action. Now Musk has lost interest in a sustainable future; he has shifted his focus from combating global warming to prioritizing AI, robotics, and space exploration. He no longer talks about the urgency of climate change, having seen an opening with conservatives. Just this week he installed his minions under the auspices of fighting government inefficiency.
His conflict of interests as a recipient of multiple federal contracts is striking.
Authoritarian scholar Timothy Snyder describes the loss of democratic principles which organize and bind the country together by a notion of individual freedoms. “The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it.” Resistance to the coup, Synder add, “is the defense of the human against the digital and the democratic against the oligarchic. If Musk controls these digital systems, Republican elected officials will be just as helpless as Democratic ones.”
Not everyone is standing by passively watching. Among the mass protests that took place yesterday, several hundred Connecticut residents gathered outside the state capitol on Wednesday to protest President Donald Trump’s policies as part of the nation-wide 50501 movement. Some protesters zeroed in on Musk, whose staffers have gained access to payment systems across numerous federal agencies. Amy Lake, a retired middle school history teacher, described how “good people need to exercise their moral compass and say ‘no.’”
“It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told MSNBC this week.
“They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment…. Potentially, they know everything about you and your family, and the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly…. If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund, or your mom’s Social Security benefit, in part because we have no window into what’s happening inside the Department of [the] Treasury right now.”
Project 2025 is the backbone of Trump’s plan for the US economy, whether he admits it or not. Repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, rolling back federal standards limiting pollution from power plants and cars, subsidizing fossil fuel production — the Heritage Foundation must be proud that they’re on the brink of halting America’s clean manufacturing renaissance, shedding jobs for a decade, taking a bite out of US GDP, and burdening households with higher energy costs.
Strategist James Carville points out that, although the US economy remains the strongest in the world, with GDP soaring and inflation subsiding, US voters “did not settle for us being better than the rest or take that as good enough.” Instead, a swath of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy. “Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative,” Carville concludes, adding that Democrats must refocus on finding ways to talk to Americans about the economy that are persuasive, repetitive, memorable, and concerned with issues that affect everyday lives.
Writing in the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein stated that the Biden administration ushered in “the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s.” He comments that these investments “could rumble through the economy for years … reviving domestic manufacturing, opening new facilities in depressed communities that have suffered plant closings, and disinvestment since the 1970s.”
Such increased national productivity is a key ingredient of sustained growth of the US economy; promoting renewables would be key to such economic expansion.
Trump Is Not The Cause Of Everything That’s Broken In The US Economy
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D- MA) acknowledges that President Trump “has certainly poured gasoline on the fire” of our economy. She also stops short of blaming the Trumpsters for all of the problems in the US. Instead, she explains that there are systemic issues within the US that have led to his reelection to the executive office. “He is the worst symptom of a corrupt system that rewards the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else,” Warren argues. “It’s a system where Reagan’s trickle-down experiment failed — and is still failing — America’s middle class.”
What are some of these problems that foisted a treasonous, convicted felon to the highest office in the US? According to Warren, it’s a system that:
- has made it harder and harder to start and join a union
- celebrates companies that donate exorbitant amounts of money to a political campaign is a form of “free speech”
- offered government bank bail-outs rather than homeowner assistance after the 2008 financial crisis
- allows a family to go bankrupt because they dared to receive medical care
“The influence of corporate money in the Democratic Party is undermining Democrats’ ability to win elections,” agrees Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement. “It’s time for the Democratic Party to represent everyday Americans and return power to the people.”
Trump won 56% to 43% among voters without college degrees, a proxy for the working class, according to exit polls. Incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), a very strong economic populist, lost his seat in 2024. Brown believes that NAFTA, the free trade bill pushed for and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993, was the reason for his loss. Many experts agree that NAFTA delivered the South to the Republicans by ruining the southern textile industry.
The Democratic party “must, must, must fight back with defiant action instead of just pushing back with great reluctance — while also connecting the dots between today’s crises, yesterday’s systemic causes, and the solutions we’re championing,” Warren outlines. “It’s going to take a lot of work to untangle this system — with political leaders fighting for the bold solutions and a strong grassroots movement calling for a better way forward.”
Final Thoughts
Ralph Nader has sent out an ultimatum to news organizations.
“The reporters and editors at the Times, Post, and the rest of the national and local newspaper, radio, and TV media must rise to higher levels of their own significance and give voice to the aroused resistance against the onrushing Trumpian dictatorial regime imposing fascistic government and more concentrated corporate power.”
We’re doing our best here at CleanTechnica, Mr. Nader. We thank our readers enormously, without whom we might succumb to autocratic pressure beyond our control.
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