It’s unclear exactly what climate-related policies the new administration will put forth next year. As in the case of so much of what he says, Unpresidented-Elect Trump has been all over the place in his statements on the subject. He has called climate change a hoax, hinted he will yank the U.S. out of the Paris climate pact, and promised to put coal miners back to work by exploiting the nation’s “thousand years” of coal reserves. On the other hand, he has claimed he has an open mind on the subject. Go back several years and you’ll even find him voicing acceptance of the findings of climate science.
But Trump’s cabinet appointments brimful of aggressive climate science deniers give us a pretty good indication of how things will go. At worst, the new administration will do what it can to wreck the important but modest policy advances put in place by President Obama. At best, it won’t add to policies we so desperately need as part of civilization’s efforts to keep us below a 3.6° Fahrenheit increase in average world temperatures.
But while Trump, the Republican Congress and a Republican-dominated federal judiciary obviously cannot be counted on to take climate change seriously—and that together they will do what they can to roll back the climate policies already in place—there will be strong resistance to their greedy myopia.
California can be expected to take the lead in this resistance, just as it has done for the past half century on a range of environmental matters. Adam Nagourney and Henry Fountain report:
In a show of defiance, Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and legislative leaders said they would work directly with other nations and states to defend and strengthen what were already far and away the most aggressive policies to fight climate change in the nation. That includes a legislatively mandated target of reducing carbon emissions in California to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
“California can make a significant contribution to advancing the cause of dealing with climate change, irrespective of what goes on in Washington,” Mr. Brown said in an interview. “I wouldn’t underestimate California’s resolve if everything moves in this extreme climate denial direction. Yes, we will take action.”
Only one state, Hawai’i, has a more aggressive stance than California on mandating renewables—100 percent by 2045. In 2015, Gov. Brown signed an executive order mandating the 2030 carbon emissions cut as well as legislation requiring that 50 percent of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources by the same year. The law also requires that new buildings be 50 percent more efficient than they are now.
Although it’s by far the largest, richest U.S. jurisdiction with such a goal—39 million people, a gross domestic product that arguably makes it the world’s sixth largest economy—many other places are also in a position to resist Trumpkochian climate and energy policies.
Among the cities already providing electricity to 100 percent of their government infrastructure from renewable sources—buildings, street lights, parks—are Burlington, Vermont; Aspen, Colorado; and Las Vegas, Nevada. Others are at or nearly at 100 percent renewables for both their public and private sectors: Columbia, Maryland; East Hampton, New York; Georgetown, Texas; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Greensburg, Kansas; Nassau, New York; Palo Alto, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, San Monica, California; and Rochester, Minnesota.
The good news is that at the state and local level, there are many Republicans as well as Democrats who support expanding the percentage of electricity acquired from renewables no matter what the Trump administration has in mind.
Republican-dominated Texas and Iowa, for instance, have tremendous wind energy operations in place, and officials there hope to see even more of this. Key reasons for their support? Switching to renewables generates more than clean energy. It creates new businesses, new jobs, new investment opportunities. That was a point of view that was widely laughed at by Republicans and a big hunk of Democrats a decade ago. The ridicule has since plunged as realists see what’s happening in the renewables market.
This change of mind doesn’t mean these same Republicans will go so far as to back municipally or cooperatively owned utilities, which constitute a good means of transforming the economy and the energy system so that the advantages of going renewable benefits lower-income Americans as well as the affluent. Even for pro-renewables Republicans, such moves would inject a bit too much socialist “red” in with the environmentalist “green” that such measures would entail. And, frankly, few Democrats are suggesting such approaches either.
If it were just a matter of pushing for developing non-carbonized energy sources, a few Republicans in some places might even be tempted to join the progressive resistance against whatever monkey wrenches Trump and his crew use to try to jam up a transition to renewables. But when it comes to the other part of the equation—mandating lower carbon emissions—most Republicans will surely link arms with the new administration.
As Nagourney and Fountain note, there are things Washington could do to undermine California’s aggressive approach. Such as reduce or cut off funding to the state’s national labs that have contributed a great deal to climate science and energy innovations. In addition:
“They could basically stop enforcement of the Clean Air Act and CO2 emissions,” said Hal Harvey, president of Energy Innovation, a policy research group in San Francisco. “That would affect California because it would constrain markets. It would make them fight political and legal battles rather than scientific and technological ones.”
And some business leaders warned that California’s embrace of environmental regulations — from emission reductions to new regulations imposing mandatory energy efficiency standards on computers and monitors — could put it at a disadvantage, all the more so as conservatives elsewhere move to roll back environmental regulations.
Taking that approach guarantees resistance. As Gov. Brown said In October 2015 when he signed the 50 percent-by-2030 legislation: “Climate skeptics don’t quite get it. They are in political Pluto, and we have to bring them back to Earth, where the rest of us live.” Resisting the backward thinking of these numbskulls is essential if the Earth is going to be a place where our children and grandchildren can comfortably live.