{"id":35776,"date":"2026-06-19T13:19:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T17:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=35776"},"modified":"2026-06-19T13:22:54","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T17:22:54","slug":"taking-stock-of-us-green-energy-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=35776","title":{"rendered":"taking stock of US green energy policy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, The New York Times published a piece<\/a> entitled, “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They\u2019re Not So Sure.” (Subtitle: “As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change.”) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, Paul Krugman has a post<\/a> entitled “Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy” that predicts the Iran war will shift the world economy to renewables, concluding: “Thus Donald Trump has in practice become the world\u2019s green energy champion.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the state of play?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Biden Administration, I am not sure to what extent Democrats and environmentalists argued for reducing carbon consumption. There is often a difference between the main themes that politicians express and what voters hear in the media. What jumped out at me was a reluctance to discuss the environment at all. When the president of one of America’s oldest and most famous environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, published his endorsement<\/a> of Kamala Harris, he wrote exclusively about her support for abortion rights, not even mentioning the climate. Thus I am not sure that the Democrats were rhetorically committed to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biden did take modest actions to block new oil and has extraction. However, by far the main strategy of 2020-2024 was to subsidize green energy. In fact, the Democrats’ policies could be attacked from an environmentalist angle because they did not impose new taxes or federal restrictions on carbon. But the Democrats adopted a strategy that I happen to endorse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their basic strategic insight was that interests are upstream from policy. In the USA and many countries today, the most powerful interests support cheap carbon. These interests encompass not only corporations and investors but also many regular people whose livelihoods depend on carbon. Therefore, policies will always revert to promoting carbon. However, by encouraging new industries that are green, the government can support interests that will begin to demand favorable policies and will no longer care about oil and gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This strategy is completely consistent with what Democratic candidates are saying now. According to the Times, Senator Ed Markey “said he isn\u2019t abandoning the Green New Deal and legislation he has sponsored to\u00a0prohibit new federal oil and gas leasing<\/a>. But these days, he said, ‘I talk about the positive vision for what clean energy represents as a solution to the affordability crisis.'” This is a way of describing what he and others actually began to accomplish during the previous administration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Trump was reelected, closely aligned with the oil and gas industries and hostile to green energy for both ideological and idiosyncratic reasons. I think that he and his people fully grasped the logic of the Biden-era policies. Krugman opens his post, “On Wednesday the Interior Department\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that it would pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0to develop three offshore wind farms. … Trump has so far committed $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to killing renewable energy projects.” This seems like an irrational waste (and contrary to Trump’s self-interest in lowering energy costs) unless the administration fears that green economic interests will grow in our country and ultimately take down oil and gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the irony is that Trump has raised the global cost (and the perceived risk) of oil, which is unlikely to return to its previous levels. The Iran crisis hit just as renewable technologies were becoming much cheaper, and Chinese companies were dramatically increasing their production of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Hence Krugman’s point that Trump is a green energy champion at the global level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From an environmental perspective, it doesn’t matter whether a solar panel is manufactured in the US or China. It would be good for the globe if the US consumed less carbon and produced more green technology, but it’s worth keeping our economy in perspective. The US accounts for 13% of global carbon <\/a>emissions and about 16% of global manufacturing capacity. The world can make progress without us. (And we are making slow progress here, with our carbon intensity falling<\/a>–at least through 2024.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a national economic perspective, the US would be much better off with the Biden-era policies. For one thing, US auto manufacturers would have a chance to develop electric vehicles to compete with Chinese cars globally, and American consumers would have cheaper and better alternatives. However, I am far from despondent about the effects of Trump’s policies on the US economy, which is diversified, enormously well capitalized, and dynamic. Maybe China will continue to dominate the world’s markets for batteries and solar panels, but maybe not, and in any case, there are other markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think Democrats and environmentalists should indeed support diversified and cheap energy, leaving ambitious anti-carbon policies for later. There is much more to be gained by supporting green technology now than by struggling to trim carbon consumption against deep and broad opposition. However, no one really controls these trends, and some of them are turning favorable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

See also: the Gulf War and the energy transition<\/a>; the major shift in climate strategy<\/a>; the theory of the Biden environmental policy may be proven right<\/a>; what if climate change isn\u2019t a tragedy of the commons?<\/a>; A Civic Green New Deal<\/a> etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, The New York Times published a piece entitled, “Democrats Once Vowed to Stop Oil and Gas. Now They\u2019re Not So Sure.” (Subtitle: “As the midterm elections approach, many leading Democrats are rethinking their approach to climate change.”) Today, Paul Krugman has a post entitled “Donald Trump, Champion of Renewable Energy” that predicts the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35776"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35780,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35776\/revisions\/35780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}