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climate deniers
What a GOP Government Will Really Mean for the Renewable Energy Rollout
If the next Trump administration is serious about pulling the plug on clean energy, that will add up to a lot of jobs and investments to undo in states and districts where the president-elect handily won the election.
Dec 18, 2024
For all that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump trashed renewable energy on the stump, much of his ranting may very well become a murmur when he returns to the Oval Office.
Obscured by his “green new scam” rhetoric is a mad scramble by his supporters in Congress to reap the economic benefits of green industry for their states and districts. The increasing investments, precisely in the places that voted for him, make President-elect Trump’s pledge to “terminate” many green programs political wolf talk. That is because the renewable energy industry is growing jobs more than twice as fast as the overall economy.
This acknowledgement from conservative lawmakers that clean energy and electric vehicles are good business makes it reasonable to bet that the investments they’ve secured for their districts will survive the president-elect’s rhetoric of a “green new scam.”
A lasting irony of the outgoing Biden administration will be how no Republican in Congress voted for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Yet 85% of the announced clean energy projects and 68% of the jobs triggered by the IRA, such as those related to electric vehicles, wind power, solar power, and battery storage, have gone to Republican-held congressional districts, according to E2, a nonpartisan group that monitors the clean energy industry.
The representatives of those districts see no apparent contradiction in touting the attractiveness of their areas for clean energy investments, while publicly supporting the president-elect’s rhetoric and proposals to end clean energy programs.
Love-Hate Relationships Abound
For instance, Texas Congressmember Jodey Arrington, who represents a House district that includes Lubbock and Abilene, called the IRA a “failed liberal spending spree that crippled our economy and left working American families worse off.” The Washington Postreported in October that Arrington’s district is the nation’s fifth-highest recipient of investments for clean energy and manufacturing, receiving nearly $5 billion.
Then there is Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn: a climate skeptic who says infrastructure projects that fight climate change are a “gateway to socialism.” She told the Republican National Convention this summer that the “green new scam” was “destroying small businesses.”
Huh? Relative to the size of the state’s economy (as measured by gross domestic product), Tennessee ranks firstin the nation in clean technology manufacturing investment from the IRA, according to the Clean Investment Monitor, maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Rhodium Group.
Senator Blackburn seems well aware of it. Even before the IRA, when vehicle maker Ford cut the ribbon on a $5.6 billion electric battery plant in her state in 2021, she boasted how Tennessee is “leading the way for innovation” with a “historic project” that would directly create 5,800 jobs and create “countless opportunities in supporting industries.”
The champion of hypocrisy is Representative Richard Hudson, congressman for North Carolina’s Ninth District, nestled in the center of the state. In voting against the IRA, he blasted clean energy programs as “woke climate and social programs that won’t work.”
Hudson was wide awake for the money coming to his district to expand a massive Toyota battery plant for electric vehicles and hybrids. According to E2, Hudson’s district is top in the nation both for clean energy investment and for clean energy job growth triggered by the IRA. The Toyota plant alone promises more than 5,000 jobs. Estimates of investment in his district range from nearly $10 billion to nearly $13 billion.
Selective Cuts Desired
If the next Trump administration is serious about pulling the plug on clean energy, that will add up to a lot of jobs and investments to undo in states and districts where the president-elect handily won the election. North Carolina Representative Hudson hinted he agrees. When CNNasked him in June if he would vote to repeal the IRA if the Republicans won control of the federal government in the election—which they did—he responded, “Rather than try to repeal one big bill with another big bill, we ought to look at the individual policies.”
Another sign that Republicans ultimately won’t scrap all the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act came in an August letter by 18 Republicans to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). The lawmakers asked Johnson to preserve clean energy tax credits in any effort to repeal or reform the IRA. The letter acknowledged that energy tax credits “have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference.”
The letter warned that repealing energy tax credits, especially those for projects that have already broken ground “would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing.”
This acknowledgement from conservative lawmakers that clean energy and electric vehicles are good business makes it reasonable to bet that the investments they’ve secured for their districts will survive the president-elect’s rhetoric of a “green new scam.”
Risks to Offshore Wind Loom
Much less clear is the near-term future for offshore wind.
While campaigning, President-elect Trump promised to sign an executive order on the first day of his return to bring a halt to the offshore wind industry. Never mind that onshore wind is booming in red states in the windy, rural middle of the United States, providing 130,000 jobs. The fastest growing occupation in the nation is wind turbine service technician, paying an average of nearly $62,000 a year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
According to the Energy Information Agency, the top four states for electricity generation from wind in 2023 were the red states of Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
In even more serious doubt is a just transition, where communities that suffer the most from fossil fuel production and pollution can get jobs, lower energy costs, and cleaner air from a move to renewables.
The offshore wind industry, a staple of energy generation in northern Europe, is still in its infancy in the United States. It remains highly vulnerable to price shocks, supply-chain issues, local opposition to siting, and being a political dartboard. The industry is currently centered in more liberal Northeastern states thanks to ideal water depths off the Atlantic coastline and forward-looking governors from Massachusetts to Virginia who have been competing the last two decades for ports and projects.
The U.S. has the technical capacity to harness three times more electricity from offshore wind than it currently uses today, with the Atlantic Ocean off the Northeast coast possessing some of the strongest wind speeds in the country.
Surprisingly, despite its “Drill, Baby, Drill” mantra for oil, the first Trump administration promoted offshore wind when it found out how much money the leases could put into federal coffers. It conducted a then-record auction for waters off Massachusetts to site off-shore wind projects. Ports and manufacturing facilities as far south as Louisiana, home state of House Speaker Mike Johnson, helped launch the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Rhode Island.
But that has not stopped oil and gas companies from continuing to conduct disinformation campaigns to stir up opposition to offshore wind. It is clear they have a lot to lose from a full-blown offshore wind industry in the Northeast. For example, gas accounts for at least half of the electricity generation in New England and New Jersey. New York City generates between 85% and 90% of its electricity from fossil fuels. The Northeast Gas Association boasts that about half the entire region gets its electricity from gas.
On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump elected to play off that disinformation. He attacked offshore wind with gale force lies about its impact on whales and the environment, claims which have zero science behind them as NOAA and others explain.
The unending verbal assault makes it reasonable to worry that under this second administration President-elect Trump may truly try to score political points by directing the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to slow permitting of new projects and telling the Justice Department to side with opponents of incomplete projects. Many experts say that just the slowing of the permitting process risks making construction more expensive and may scare off investors.
Then There’s the Issue of Equity
In even more serious doubt is a just transition, where communities that suffer the most from fossil fuel production and pollution can get jobs, lower energy costs, and cleaner air from a move to renewables.
Almost by definition, the growth of clean energy industries in more sparsely populated, majority white, Republican-held districts may exacerbate the existing structural racism in the energy sector’s workforce, which has been a driver of the Biden administration’s goal of directing 40% of federal climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities.
For instance, Black people are 13% of the nation’s workforce and account for only 8% of the solar and wind workforce, according to the Department of Energy. The Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) says the percentage of Black solar workers has not budged since 2022. Yet, the second-fastest growing job in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are solar panel installers, making on average $48,000 a year.
The percentage of people of color in leadership positions in the renewable energy supply chain is currently infinitesimally small. A 2022 report by the American Council on Renewable Energy found that of 658 manufacturers involved in utility-scale wind, solar, and battery storage, 1.8% were owned by people of color or women. And while there is one bright spot in diversity, with 33% of new clean energy jobs last year being filled by Latinos, 88% of solar industry executives are white and 80% are male, according to the IREC.
Only a quarter of solar firms in the IREC’s annual National Solar Jobs Census reported that they had strategies to hire more people of color or women.
With the return of President-elect Trump, accompanied now by Vice President-elect JD Vance, it will take maverick clean energy companies to improve diversity. Just this past June, Vance co-introduced (along with Senator Blackburn) a bill in the Senate to eliminate all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and funding for any entities that receive federal funding. Representatives Arrington and Hudson co-sponsored the measure in the House. Cynically twisting the purpose of DEI to ensure fair opportunities for people from historically excluded groups, Vice President-elect Vance claims DEI “breeds hatred and racial division.”
President-elect Trump himself has already begun to nominate members of his cabinet with direct ties to Project 2025, the de facto Republican Party platform that also calls for the elimination of DEI throughout government. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the end of DEI in the Energy Department and eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in the Environmental Protection Agency.
The pall placed over the nation is already being felt even before Inauguration Day, as Walmart recently announced it was rolling back DEI policies or dismantling DEI teams, joining companies like Ford, Boeing, Toyota, Lowe’s, Harley Davidson, Molson Coors, John Deere, and Tractor Supply. That follows the scores of universities that are eliminating DEI in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 striking down of affirmative action. It was a ruling virtually assured by President Trump’s packing of the court in his first term.
In a blog last year on this flood of renewable money flowing into Republican districts from a Democratic-inspired law, I wrote that the nation would be so much stronger in the fight against climate change and the effort to clean up communities and boost the economy if conservatives would “drop the two-faced charade of climate denial while diving unabashedly into the pot of federal renewable incentives and tax breaks.” Now that the forces of climate denial have regained the White House and control of both chambers of Congress, they don’t even need two faces. They can just be bald-faced aggrandizers.
The renewable energy industry will indeed have a strong expansion in the U.S. It’s just that it will be heavily driven by a real green scam—an expansion being led by politicians who harness and hoard solar power, wind power, and electric vehicles for their own constituents, but deny it for everyone else.
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We Must Take Power Back From Climate Deniers in High Offices
Political leaders who cast doubt on or minimize the climate crisis are putting their constituents, and everyone else, at great risk for the sake of money.
Aug 17, 2024
The climate crisis is real, as are its solutions. In fact, the many solutions offer a plethora of side benefits, from good jobs and stronger economies to better health and greater equality.
The crisis itself is becoming increasingly costly and is meeting or exceeding predictions scientists and others have warned about for decades: more unpredictable and volatile weather events, flooding, droughts, intense wildfires, sea levels rising, ice sheets and glaciers melting, animals and plants going extinct, temperatures becoming unbearable in parts of the world, diseases spreading, and much more.
Despite the indisputable scientific evidence, as well as easily observable proof, many political representatives are still denying the crisis exists or that it’s serious enough to require action!
This denial from those elected to make difficult decisions about policies and governing delays much-needed change—and we have no time to lose.
A study by the Center for American Progress found that climate science deniers make up almost one- quarter of the United States Congress—100 in the House of Representatives and 23 in the Senate! The somewhat good news is that those numbers are going down, from 150 in the 116th Congress to 139 in the 117th to 123 today.
“The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial,” The Guardian reports. Many are parroting thoroughly debunked information.
The report also found that the fossil fuel industry has given these elected officials more than $52 million in campaign donations.
Noting that 2023 was the hottest year on record, with July hitting “the highest average global temperatures ever recorded” and the U.S. experiencing, “on average, a billion-dollar extreme weather event every three weeks,” the report states, “Americans cannot afford to ignore the realities of global climate change. Climate-fueled extreme weather events continue to cost American lives and billions of dollars year after year, and the intensity and frequency of these events will continue to increase without action to address the causes of climate change.”
The report points to the International Energy Agency’s call for “the need to rapidly transition to a clean energy economy,” and its finding “that achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, even with significant growth in energy demand, does not require any new fossil fuel investment.”
Although the U.S. presents one of the most egregious examples of political leaders putting their constituents, and everyone else, at great risk for the sake of money, it’s not the only country where climate science deniers of various degrees hold positions of power and responsibility.
Some provincial and federal politicians in Canada are campaigning against sound climate policies and enacting regulations and practices that favour gas, oil, and coal over renewable energy. Other countries, especially those that produce fossil fuels, have their share of politicians who deny the reality and/or severity of the climate crisis. The United Nations says the fossil fuel industry is running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” to stall climate policies, even though most people favour them.
This denial from those elected to make difficult decisions about policies and governing delays much-needed change—and we have no time to lose. Even the many policies and programs already in place are inadequate to prevent the crisis from worsening. We’ve pumped so much carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—gases that remain and cause damage for many years—that every delay increases the likelihood of catastrophe.
We still live under a global economic system largely governed by fossil fuel interests. Along with industry efforts to maintain power and profits, there’s a global movement away from democratic systems—to instil cynicism and disillusionment with governance systems and processes that at least attempt to give some power to the people being governed. It’s a reason some elected officials, especially in the U.S., are banning books and attacking teachers, librarians, universities, and programs that encourage critical thinking and greater equality. Education is strength!
We need to stand up and hold onto the power we still have, and take back the power we’ve lost. That means being informed and getting involved in democratic processes, from voting and holding politicians to account to protesting and signing petitions—even running for office. Time is running out.
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'Startling Confirmation': Big Oil Funded Climate Research as Early as 1954
"This pushes back the fossil fuel industry's knowledge of the climate crisis a full two decades," one campaigner wrote.
Jan 31, 2024
The fossil fuel and automotive industries knew that their products could destabilize the climate as early as 1954, new research published by DeSmog on Monday reveals.
The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation, whose contributors included major oil and car companies, helped to fund the early climate research of Charles David Keeling, who went on to create the famous Keeling curve tracking the rise in global concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, DeSmog reported. The foundation was also informed of the potential implications of Keeling's research.
"This pushes back the fossil fuel industry's knowledge of the climate crisis a full two decades," Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media posted on social media in response to the news. "Think of the damage and lives that could have been saved if we started researching and moving to clean energy back then."
"These findings are a startling confirmation that Big Oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years—for twice my lifetime—and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day."
The revelations were based on documents found in the California Institute of Technology Archives, the U.S. National Archives, the Charles David Keeling papers at the University of California, San Diego, and Los Angeles newspapers, which established that the foundation helped finance Keeling's early measurements of carbon dioxide levels in the U.S. West from 1954-56.
The Southern California Air Pollution Foundation was established in 1953 to help address the problem of smog in Los Angeles. Its members included 18 car companies such as American Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors. It also received funds from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Western Oil and Gas Association, now the Western States Petroleum Association. What's more, representatives from the Southern California Gas Company, the Southern California Edison Co., Chrysler, General Motors, and Union Oil—now Chevron—sat on its board of trustees, and beginning in 1955, that board was updated on findings by a "technical advisory committee" staffed with one API member and Richfield Oil Corporation—now BP—and Chrysler scientists.
In a November 1954 research proposal from Keeling's research director Samuel Epstein, the foundation was informed of the potential implications of Keeling's measurements of carbon dioxide levels.
"The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization," Epstein wrote.
DeSmog noted that this makes 1954 the earliest known date at which the fossil fuel industry both funded climate research and was informed of the possible consequences of its products. It comes five years before physicist Edward Teller spoke to API about global heating and around 25 years before ExxonMobil's research into climate change in the 1970s and '80s. In total, the foundation funded Keeling's early work for a total of $13,814, which would be around $158,000 today.
In reporting the news, Rebecca John pointed out that many of the same companies and industry associations that funded Keeling's early research would go on to fund a campaign denying climate science 35 years later, among them API, the Automobile Manufacturers Association, Chevron, and BP.
"It's important to know that the oil industry sponsored climate science research in the 1950s because it reveals a picture of a much more nuanced, closely connected world of science and the frontiers of scientific discovery than the oil industry has admitted to," John wrote.
Geoffrey Supran, who studies the history of climate disinformation at the University of Miami, toldThe Guardian that John's revelations "contain smoking gun proof that by at least 1954, the fossil fuel industry was on notice about the potential for its products to disrupt Earth's climate on a scale significant to human civilization."
"These findings are a startling confirmation that Big Oil has had its finger on the pulse of academic climate science for 70 years—for twice my lifetime—and a reminder that it continues to do so to this day. They make a mockery of the oil industry's denial of basic climate science decades later."
The Center for Climate Integrity put it more succinctly on social media.
"They knew. They lied. They need to pay," the group said.
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