Green Retreat: The Trump Effect

It never should have happened. Politics, magical thinking, and corporate rent-seeking tried to reverse the physics of energy density to transition away from consumer-chosen, taxpayer-neutral hydrocarbons.

After decades of waste, the politics have changed. So much for not-so-green energy.

Renewable advocate George Lawrence reported on LinkedIn, quoting Canary Media:

Trump is killing the country’s clean-energy manufacturing momentum.” This is all about momentum indeed, + the few yrs we have to turn things around.

“In the first three months of this year, firms have already abandoned plans to build nearly $8 billion worth of clean energy projects—mostly factories that would have produced everything from grid batteries to electric vehicles, per new data from E2 [consulting engineers].”

This draconian reversal contrasts with the Biden era, where from 2022 to 2024 only a cumulative $2.1 billion in investments was canceled. Under the last president, ‘well over $100 billion worth of EV assembly facilities, solar-panel factories, battery recycling plants, and more [had] been announced since the passage of the law, which created tax incentives as well as grant and loan programs for domestic clean-energy manufacturing.’

Currently, the US has some 12.8 million workers in the manufacturing sector, + the projection was that an additional 109,000 permanent jobs nationwide would have been created. Under the current president, this is crumbling. “Prysmian Group, for example, which earlier this year scrapped its plan to build a $300 million offshore wind cable manufacturing facility at the site of a retired coal plant in Somerset, Massachusetts.”

Counterintuitively, there are still some new investments occurring. In March alone, $1.7 billion including a $200 million Tesla grid-battery factory in Texas [of course]. “Plus, the vast majority of announced projects have yet to be canceled, paused, or downsized.” If ‘congressional Republicans decide to rescind the Inflation Reduction Act’s manufacturing incentives, a move that’s on the table, the situation could grow even more dire.’ In the infamous words of the president who has no clothes [as even a proverbial child did note], we must all ‘fight, fight, fight’ for what is right.

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More than 150 comments followed. One said much: “Well if government can kill it – then it was never a real industry to start.”

I commented:

Green energy is not affordable or green, so less government kills it. Shame that the futile climate crusade has misdirected so many people and talent that now needs a major mid-course correction. Political bubbles burst ….

Bob Armstrong shared a John Christy quotation:  “If it’s not economically sustainable, it’s not sustainable.”

The last word goes to a Kevin K, principal software engineer at Honeywell Aerospace:

Yeah, it was a dream and just a dream to get rid of fossil fuels, can’t do it in today’s high energy demanding world. The majority are not complaining about fossil fuels and climate crap but the majority will be complaining when their utility bills, food bills go sky high as a result of expensive “green” energy replaces fossil fuel based energy along with lack of predictable energy. Take a look at Europe today, they are having energy problems and actually changing and going back to fossil fuel based energy. Folks who are complaining the most about climate are the grifters, those making a fortune on the fools who push “green” crap and the low information.

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