A Brief, Reluctant, and Largely Failed Attempt at the Optimistic Post-Election Climate View

Look, it’s not great. We don’t need to rehash it all here, but a second Trump term will make pretty much every angle of climate policy worse. But because there isn’t much to be gained from staring out at the rising sea and sighing, here’s a quick glance at why he won’t be able to burn the planet entirely in these next four years.

The basic reason is momentum. The energy transition is happening, whether Trump or ExxonMobil like it or not; the world added 50 percent more renewable energy capacity in 2023 than in 2022, and the pace is accelerating. China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, is installing mind-boggling amounts — it will be responsible for 60 percent of the world’s new capacity through the end of this decade. India, the world’s most populous country and third-biggest emitter, will set a renewables record this year and then likely break it as it churns to reach 2030 goals. Electric vehicles are slowly but steadily gaining market share in many parts of the world, and they are getting cheaper and cheaper.

Here at home, though there have been grumblings about attempts to repeal or roll back parts of the truly groundbreaking Inflation Reduction Act, that may prove a tough sell: the law has already sent hundreds of billions of dollars to red states and districts, and the House members, Senators, and governors of those places would probably rather they just quietly leave the situation alone. No matter what Trump thinks, coal power is certainly not making any sort of comeback; the interconnection queue, the backlog of power projects waiting for approval to be built and join the grid, is now thousands of gigawatts long, and 95 percent of that is wind, solar, and battery storage. That’s not an ocean liner one turns around easily, or likely at all.

Of course, all this momentum is still not enough; the world will not meet its 2030 renewable energy goals without tens of trillions of dollars in new investment, and from a policy standpoint nations are still far off track. But that would all be true with Trump or Harris in office; his malignant shadow will certainly dim the prospects of global agreements and elevated ambition, but we were more or less failing the assignment already. There’s no point in sugarcoating things, a Trump term is undeniably ugly news for the climate; but he can’t stop what’s happening completely, neither the good nor the bad.