For Power & Profit: The Retreat From Renewables Has A Dark & Dangerous Underside

Join daily news updates from CleanTechnica on electronic mail. Or follow us on Google News!

The existential local weather disaster that confronts us requires political and coverage options that disempower the fossil gas trade and their state allies. Sadly, the present US presidential election season is full of hyperbole, controversy, and disinformation. Such discourse threatens to spawn a retreat from renewables in favor of continued burning of fossil fuels, that are having far-reaching, devastating results on our local weather and ecosystems.

It’s time to hold fossil fuel businesses accountable for his or her half within the deterioration of the atmosphere. Nonetheless, addressing the dangerous results of fossil gas power selections throughout varied governance ranges is a posh activity for policymakers.

On the optimistic aspect, local energy balancing in a brand new power system that doesn’t use fossil fuels would infuse power self-sufficiency by way of sensible grids primarily based on progressive market mechanisms. Such a shift, nonetheless, would require preliminary regulatory steps through which sustainability disclosure normal setting and sustainability benchmarking practices would turn into the norm.

Safeguarding the atmosphere and human rights, shopper pursuits, and investor pursuits requires a threshold of duty of care standard that’s at jeopardy within the US as a result of pressure of Big Oil to retain its energy and profitability.

Because the authors in a 2023 Power Analysis and Social Change article explainpublic well being harms and disproportionate impacts exist throughout the coal, oil, and fuel life cycles inside the US.

“Each stage of the fossil fuel life cycle — extraction, processing, transport, and combustion — generates toxic air and water pollution, as well as greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions that drive the global climate crisis.”

Huge Oil is keenly conscious that federal incentives for renewables “eat into their profits and threaten their stranglehold over energy consumption,” because the LA Occasions Editorial Board argued earlier this summer season. Former President Donald Trump and different Republican politicians wish to exploit shopper anxieties by the “peddling of disinformation” that’s in “the service of a pro-fossil fuel agenda” — which they add is “not surprising coming from the oil industry or from Trump.”

Because the 1990 election cycle, greater than two-thirds of the oil and gas sector’s contributions to candidates and get together committees has gone to Republicans, in accordance with Open Secrets and techniques. The electrical utilities trade is one other huge donor. Much less beneficiant, however much more partisan, is the mining trade. Trump has acquired more money donations than every other federal candidate throughout this election cycle, fueling “easy-to-disprove mischaracterization intended to stoke anger and confusion among voters,” the LA Occasions Editorial Board says. Such efforts by among the strongest firms on this planet serve to “sow confusion and prey on our anxieties in the pursuit of power and profit.”

Trump’s allegiance is to Huge Oil, as a springtime assembly with trade bigwigs produced a promise {that a} $1 billion campaign donation would usher in an all-systems-go method to grease and fuel manufacturing. “Drill, baby, drill” is the Trump-pumping mantra.

Historic ranges of funding in home car and battery manufacturing below the Biden–Harris Inflation Discount Act (IRA) are left unstated by Republicans. Their solely narrative is to show again to a Golden Period through which the fossil gas trade reigns supreme. In doing so, because the Middle for American Progress statesthey concentrate on “spreading misinformation and obstructing elected governments’ climate efforts, promoting anti-democratic movements and candidates, and even undermining democratic rights.”

In a 2024 guide titled Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the Worldjournalist Anne Applebaum examines how as we speak’s autocrats work collectively to undermine democracy. She says that “the language of the democratic world, meaning rights, laws, rule of law, justice, accountability, (and) transparency…(is) harmful to them,” particularly as language about fairness and equity to all questions an autocratic worldview. And so they should undermine the individuals who use such oppositional language, “and, if they can, discredit it.”

Sounds acquainted, doesn’t it, as we hearken to Trump’s diatribes?

Chip in just a few {dollars} a month to help support independent cleantech coverage that helps to speed up the cleantech revolution!

Be Cautious What You Want For: Trump’s Retreat from Renewables

It’s been made clear over the previous a number of months that Trump isn’t any fan of renewable power. If re-elected, he has promised that he’ll intestine the Inflation Discount Act in order that “all new spending grants and giveaways” will pave the best way for federal financial savings — or so he says. Whereas Trump additionally favors tariffs on Chinese language items, his pledges to weaken the Inflation Discount Act may set again US efforts to meet up with China on photo voltaic panel and EV manufacturing.

Local weather change? A hoax. Trump says that local weather change shouldn’t be influencing excessive climate. 5 months into his administration, the Federal Emergency Administration Company and the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration didn’t have leaders. And whereas Trump provided federal help for aid efforts after quite a few extreme storms, he was gradual to reply to many climate disasters, most notably Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

The Paris Local weather settlement? He withdrew from it as soon as, and he’s pledged to take action once more. There’s no method he’d condone voluntary GHG targets, particularly once they’re individualized for every nation’s build-out, capability, and local weather air pollution document.

Trump initially stated EVs had been too costly and had too little vary. Say goodbye, Trump has threatened, to EVs — that’s, except a billionaire donates to his marketing campaign, after which Trump will soften his place momentarily. Since Tesla CEO Elon Musk endorsed him, Trump has stated he likes every kind of automobiles, together with EVs. It’s unnerving to suppose that Musk may turn into a key player after November’s election.

Nonetheless, Trump desires to eradicate tax credit within the EV tax credit which can be a part of the Inflation Discount Act. This might imply rolling again the regulation’s EV subsidies and incentives that encourage small companies to put in charging stations. Most of the investments benefiting from the IRA are in Republican states, nonetheless, and concentrating on these tasks could also be politically unpopular with Trump’s base.

The Trump administration cancelled over 100 environmental safety laws, and all indications are that he’ll proceed that course of if re-elected. An evaluation in 2020 projected 1.8 billion extra metric tons of greenhouse gases within the environment by 2035 than there would have been with out his dismantling of laws. A report in 2022 from researchers at Yale and Columbia discovered that the US environmental efficiency had plummeted on account of the Trump administration’s actions.

Lest we overlook, the United Nations Local weather Change Convention (COP28), which had appeared destined for greenwashing, accepted an 11,000 web page doc that was thought of the “beginning of the end” of the fossil gas period. The worldwide pact requires “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner” — it contains express language seeking to the top of Huge Oil. The victory gave activists a baseline of language to make use of as leverage with the intention to try to win all of the fights that lie forward to defuse fossil gas dominance.

Trump would seemingly use his dictator-on-day-one promise to reject such progress.