Anticipating juicy growth in corporate earnings under the new administration, the U.S. stock market closed Friday up almost 5%, the biggest weekly percentage gain in a year. But clean energy stocks sank, as investors feared that Joe Biden’s pro-renewable program will give way to “drill, baby, drill” policies under Trump.

The decline in clean energy stocks despite an otherwise buoyant market confirms the uncertain reality facing sustainable finance. For the last two years, Republicans have waged a battle against environmental, social and governance investing, prompting many states to boycott ESG managers.

Before the vote, the very thought of a second Trump presidency inspired dread for many in the ESG community. But now a week after voting day, two schools of thought have emerged on how the Trump effect will play out.

While some industry leaders believe the sustainable finance community should lawyer up for a legal fight of mammoth proportions, others take a softer view. The latter group argues that the price advantage of clean energy, the resilience of ESG investments and pro-climate political considerations will prove stronger than the new administration’s policy attacks.

The pessimists: One billion tonnes more CO2

“The U.S. election is going to be a headwind for climate,” said Rebecca Mikula-Wright, CEO of the Investor Group on Climate Change, at the group’s annual summit in Melbourne, Australia, on November 7. Some other attendees agreed with the downbeat assessment.

“Donald Trump likes emissions,” said Greg Sharenow, managing director and portfolio manager at U.S-based asset manager PIMCO. “His positions are going to be distinctly supportive of additional emissions.”

If Trump makes good on all his climate and energy promises, it could delay the energy transition in the United States by 10 years or more, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

“A Trump administration means radical changes for tariffs on imports, climate policy and international affairs,” writes Simon Flowers, Wood Mackenzie’s chair and chief analyst. He says that Trump’s election along with probable Republican control of Congress makes it more likely there will be a delayed climate transition. “The U.S. will backtrack on net-zero.”

Trump will follow through on his promise to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, Flowers says in a post-election blog. The result will be felt as early as this week when the U.S. voice “will carry much less weight” at the United Nations COP29 climate summit.

In a report in May, Wood Mackenzie predicted that Trump policy changes would result in reducing low-carbon investments by US$1 trillion, resulting in one billion additional tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. The Trump changes would hit the industry with a double whammy by removing tax credits and subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act while raising costs through a general tariff on steel and equipment.

Trump is also likely to allow more permits for liquefied natural gas projects, new regulations favouring fossil fuels over renewables (blue rather than green hydrogen, for example) and rollbacks on methane caps and power-plant and vehicle-emission standards.

Natural gas demand will be 6% higher by 2030, the stock of electric vehicles will be 50% lower, and shutdowns of coal-fired power plants will be delayed under these changes, Wood Mackenzie says.

The optimists: Data centre demand, political pressure may dampen Trump effect

Some fund managers, asset owners and clean energy executives are taking a somewhat more positive view, saying that Trump’s policy actions will be blunted by political considerations and the sheer market demand for renewables.

“Policy is not the only driver of the energy transition, and the U.S. is not the only market for companies across the space,” writes Alex Monk, portfolio manager of global resource equities at Schroders. “While the shifting U.S. policy landscape is undoubtedly unhelpful, it should not distract from the strength of other forces encouraging investment in the space.”

The recent World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency forecasts that renewable power capacity will rise from 4,250 gigawatts today to nearly 10,000 gigawatts in 2030, which together with nuclear power will generate more than half of the world’s electricity and create peak demand for fossil fuels by 2030. The report states that power demand is soaring for industrial consumption, electric mobility, cooling, and data centres and artificial intelligence.

Renewable power is well positioned to meet this demand because it has a huge cost advantage, says Connor Teskey, CEO of Brookfield Renewable Partners, one of the world’s largest clean energy companies.

Even if Trump cancels investment tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, Teskey says that power producers like Brookfield will be able to offset those credits with rate increases to utilities or corporate customers. “The key point there is because onshore wind and solar are so much cheaper than the alternatives, there is room to do that and still be the cheapest form of bulk electricity production,” he said in an investor call on November 8.

Political pressure from Republican members of the House will also likely reduce Trump’s ability to cut all tax credits and subsidies under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Eighteen House Republicans have signed a letter asking for the tax credits to continue to protect wind, solar and battery projects already underway in their districts.

“President Trump will face a bipartisan wall of opposition if he attempts to rip away clean energy incentives now,” says Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute.

Sustainable investment will be under attack. Can it survive?

Biden-administration regulations encouraging ESG investment and engagement are also in Trump’s crosshairs.

A Bloomberg Intelligence report issued after the election suggests that Trump will seek to limit the ability of shareholders to file proposals to companies on ESG matters. Recent more lenient rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have increased the number of ESG proposals by 47% since 2021.

It’s expected that Republican members of the House will reintroduce legislation allowing corporations to exclude ESG shareholder proposals from a vote at their annual meetings.

Before the election, Bryan McGannon, managing director and head of policy for the US Sustainable Investment Forum (US SIF), said that he is quite concerned about this potential legislation, because it would be more difficult to contest than regulation and would require Democratic majorities to repeal. “Shareholder rights is the thing [Republicans] will go after, and they have been trying to for ages,” he said.

The Bloomberg Intelligence report also says that Trump will revoke a Biden-administration rule permitting pension fund trustees to explicitly consider ESG issues in their investment decisions. A recent SEC rule requiring public companies to disclose their Scope 1 (facility) and 2 (energy) emissions will also be on the chopping block, the report says. “The bottom line is the Trump administration is anxious to undermine these ESG-related initiatives,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Rob Du Boff says.

However, the real impact of these two rollbacks may not be as bad as many fear.

A Trump regulation banning ESG consideration would most certainly be tested in the courts, McGannon said, and he believes it would not be upheld given the financial industry practice of using ESG for pecuniary issues of risk and return.

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And on carbon dioxide reporting, corporations are facing a growing trend worldwide to disclose CO2 emissions and risks, including in California, where CO2 reporting rules went into effect last year. U.S. companies operating in Europe will be subject to similar rules under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. McGannon said that large segments of corporate America will be subject to climate reporting regardless of what happens at the SEC.

Memo to ESG investors: Get a lawyer on speed dial

In a note to clients the day after the election, investment manager Jefferies Financial Group said there could be federal litigation based on the untested claim that financial institutions and climate activists have colluded to exert ESG pressure on businesses. “We’d encourage all ESG fund managers to have a lawyer on the team, or on speed dial,” the note said. “General counsels are in the ear of CEOs, frightened about legal retaliation to ESG initiatives.”

These attacks will have a chilling effect on ESG managers, said Jeff Gitterman, CEO of Gitterman Wealth Management, in an interview with Institutional Investor. “You are going to see ESG managers backing off more on how they market and publicly speak about what they are doing,” he said, adding that they will continue to incorporate ESG into investment decision-making, even if they don’t talk about it publicly.

US SIF CEO Maria Lettini is taking a guarded approach to the new administration and Congress. “Sustainable investing identifies unmanaged risks and unlocks investment opportunities in order to safeguard and increase long-term portfolio value,” she said in a post-election statement. “Investors require transparency through clear reporting requirements, the ability to engage the companies they own on financially material issues, and certainty that policymakers will support robust climate action. That remains true regardless of the political landscape. We commit to working with the next administration and other newly elected officials across the United States to advance a more just and sustainable American economy.”

The sustainable investment community looks to be taking a slow, cautious approach in dealing with the new administration. But it will also need to stand ready with lawyers and lobbyists when the policy battles begin.

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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“As clean energy begins to challenge the dominance of oil and gas, what some industry barons and their allies fear most is being perceived – by investors, policy-makers, and the public – as entering a state of terminal decline,” independent journalist Jonathan Mingle writes in a guest essay for The New York Times. “If Kamala Harris wins the presidency, she could hasten the arrival of that moment by pursuing policies and regulations that would lead to lower consumption of oil and gas.”

But if Donald Trump prevails in the November 5 vote, “the industry is betting he will slam the brakes on the clean energy transition, prolong demand for oil and gas, and help maintain the primacy of fossil fuels for decades to come.”

If a Trump victory provides the opportunity, the industry will be ready, The Washington Post reports, citing internal documents produced by the 30-member American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) and obtained by climate researchers at Fieldnotes.

“The lobbying blueprint takes particular aim at a new tax on emissions of methane, a gas that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is responsible for nearly a third of human-caused global warming,” write journalists Evan Halper and Josh Dawsey for The Washington Post. “The policy plans, contained in documents distributed to a wide group of company executives at AXPC board meetings in April and August, also call for a repeal of more than a half-dozen executive orders that lie at the center of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change.”

All in all, “the group’s goals amount to a monumental rollback of some of the most aggressive federal tools for cutting emissions,” along with measures “to unleash production and export of liquefied natural gas (LNG),” The Washington Post reports.

A ‘breathtakingly corrupt proposal’

AXPC says it will pursue the same policy agenda regardless of who wins the election. But “almost all the policies it targets for elimination and rewrite were enacted by the Biden administration,” Halper and Dawsey write. Trump, by contrast, “has called climate change a hoax and signaled a willingness to embrace the industry’s agenda by pledging favorable policies as he urged fossil fuel companies to donate heavily to his campaign.”

In The New York Times, Mingle has a rather more direct take on that extraordinary moment. “When Donald Trump invited about 20 prominent oil and gas executives to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago in April, he made a breathtakingly corrupt proposal: If they raised a billion dollars to help him retake the White House, he would roll back any policy they didn’t like when he took office,” Mingle recalls. “Several fossil fuel companies and their executives have since answered his call with brio, becoming among the top donors to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned super PACs.”

At first glance, Mingle says, it isn’t clear why fossil companies would be so leery of a sitting government that allowed record domestic oil production over the last four years. “But if you take the long view, as these companies do, other policies of the Biden administration – which would probably be continued by a Harris administration – could pose a significant threat to their interests,” beginning with Biden’s late January pause on new LNG projects as an example. “The industry is wary of an administration that may make climate imperatives a permanent fixture in the public interest equation. That’s why reversing the pause was reportedly one of executives’ top requests of Mr. Trump at their Mar-a-Lago meeting. An attendee told the Washington Post that he promised to give it to them on his first day in office.”

Oil and gas interests are also pushing back on the International Energy Agency’s forecasts over the last year that global demand for all three fossil fuels will peak before the end of this decade, giving way to a new Age of Electricity. “Why such a fuss? Because when the energy data agency says the world’s appetite for oil and gas could soon enter a period of permanent decline, investors pay close attention. When the Dutch bank giant ING recently announced it would cease financing upstream development of new oil and gas fields immediately and liquefied natural gas export terminals after 2025, it pointed to IEA’s forecasts as justification.”

The ascent of renewables

While fossil companies join tech titan Elon Musk in trying to buy the election outcome they want, a new online dashboard published last week by the Environment America Research & Policy Center and California-based Frontier Group shows U.S. production of renewable electricity from solar, wind and geothermal tripling over the last decade.

“The growth of renewable energy in America has exceeded even the sunniest expectations,” Johanna Neumann, senior director the Policy Center’s Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, said in a release. “When we replace fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels, and curb wasteful uses of energy, we build a world where the planet and people can thrive.”

The two organizations report:

• 15 U.S. states producing 30% or more of their electricity from renewables, up from only two in 2014, with Texas, California, Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas (four Republican-voting states out of five) in the lead
• battery storage up 97-fold since 2014 and 72% since the end of 2022, at 15.5 gigawatts
• a 33-fold increase in solar in the southeastern U.S. over the last decade, delivering enough electricity to power 4.6 million average U.S. homes

“In 2024, with states like Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa leading the way, repowering America with clean energy is a fully nationwide project,” said Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst at Frontier Group. “Solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and battery storage are benefitting people in all 50 states, providing the building blocks of a clean energy system free from dirty fossil fuels.”

As demand falls, so do gas prices

The post The oil and gas lobby is spending big to help Trump’s campaign appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed to each other on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on the matter of climate change: one thinks rising temperatures pose an existential threat, the other thinks climate science is nonsense.

That gulf in views was put on full display in the last minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC News Live Prime host and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis asked the pair what they would do to fight climate change. Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has implied on many an occasion that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we know is that it is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who is living in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who is now being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up.” In the past couple of years, private insurance companies have begun dropping policies in fire- and flood-prone states like California and Florida.

While Harris pointed out the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them, choosing instead to cite investments in climate change made by the current president. “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” She got that $1 trillion sum by adding up all of the administration’s major investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely connected to climate change.

Trump didn’t answer the question at all, instead making a convoluted point about domestic vehicle manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden is getting millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They’re selling our country down the tubes,” he said.

Trump slashed scores of environmental rules and climate regulations during his four years in office and appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who have since made it harder for the federal government to clamp down on pollution. He also withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact to slow planetary warming, though President Biden later reentered it.

Before Tuesday’s debate, it seemed likely that Harris would cite her record as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she formed the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at penalizing companies for polluting. Or her tenure as California attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the company’s attempts to cheat smog emissions standards. But she didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.

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Instead, Harris doubled down on her recent efforts to make swing-state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania forget about the anti-fracking position she took during her 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “in favour of banning fracking,” but she recently walked that back. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said early in the debate. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases on fracking.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the single-largest investment in fighting climate change in American history, something Harris chose not to point out.

Rather, she advocated for an energy strategy that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something resembling an “all of the above” approach in order to boost American energy independence. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”

Harris wasn’t the only one eager to talk oil and gas at the debate. Onstage, Trump frequently returned to a familiar set of energy-related talking points. He skewered President Biden, and Harris by association, for high gas prices, which spiked again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said that they aim to eliminate the country’s vast reliance on fossil fuels in the near future.

Trump also went after sources of renewable energy, saying that, while he is a “big fan of solar,” Democrats have commandeered “a whole desert to get some energy out of it.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has approved 33,500 acres of land, some of it desert, for solar installations since 2021.

As the debate wrapped up, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had succeeded in her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she’s not the anti-fossil-fuel crusader Trump has been working to pin her as. But she did leave Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift.

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”

Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.

This article originally appeared in Grist; it has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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The answer might surprise you, given the way each has talked publicly about fossil fuels: former president Donald Trump embracing them, and President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris focusing on reducing fossil fuel use to fight climate change.

Under each of the three most recent presidencies, Republican and Democratic alike, U.S. oil and gas production was higher at the end of the administration’s term than at the beginning.

That production has both pros and cons. Together, oil and gas account for nearly three-quarters of U.S. energy consumption. Producing oil and gas in the U.S. provides energy security, and high production generally keeps prices down. Burning oil and gas, however, releases carbon dioxide into the air, contributing to climate change. And natural gas is mostly methane – another potent greenhouse gas.

Global events can also have large effects on production.

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Eco-right organizations such as the Conservative Climate Foundation and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions were set to hold a reception on Tuesday at a horticultural conservancy where members of the Conservative Climate Caucus will speak. But their concerns about a warming planet will likely go largely unnoticed by the most powerful elements of today’s Republican Party. And anything they say is bound to be drowned out by former president Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he was picking Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Vance, for his part, seems to be an embodiment of two important threads that have been pervasive in today’s GOP: limitless loyalty to Trump and an unwillingness to support policies to wean the United States off fossil fuels.

The Ohio senator’s name is more commonly associated with the former than the latter of these two concepts, but his connections to the fossil fuel industry run deep. Vance has been a supporter of expanding hydraulic fracking for gas in his state, which is the sixth largest in gas production. In the 2022 election, Vance’s campaign was among the top 20 recipients in the country of fossil fuel donations, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. And Vance’s personal investments are also heavily tied up in oil and gas. Financial disclosure forms he filed in 2022 show he owned between US$100,001 and $250,000 in a crude-oil-futures exchange-traded fund called K-1 Free Crude Oil Strategy ETF.

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Vance’s political rhetoric and actions have matched the state of his personal and campaign finances. In 2022, he said he was “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man” and said the climate has been “changing for millennia.” He once said the climate crisis was “created” to “justify Democratic donors” and has criticized environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing as a “massive racket to enrich Wall Street.” Like his fellow Republicans, he has also opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, a law that has pumped more than US$12 billion into Ohio’s clean economy. And last year, he introduced a bill that, if passed, would repeal federal tax credits for electric vehicles and replace them with credits for gas-powered cars.

“Time and again, JD Vance has gone out of his way to minimize the very real climate crisis we face and cast doubts on the human behavior driving it,” Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement. “Now, Vance joins a ticket that has sought to sell out Appalachian communities by pushing for the expansion of dangerous fracking . . . as well as by seeking to defund vital Inflation Reduction Act investments that are targeted to support jobs in energy communities like the ones he claims to represent.”

J.D. Chameleon

Vance rose to prominence after Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir about his childhood in Ohio and his family’s Appalachian roots, became a popular bestseller and later a movie. In the book, he draws from his own experience to try to explain why some working-class parts of America are turning away from Democrats.

Once a vocal critic of Trump (having reportedly called him “America’s Hitler” in 2016), he ultimately apologized and fell in line when he started running for Senate in 2021 and needed the former president’s endorsement. Vance has undergone a similar evolution on climate policy. In 2020, he acknowledged the harms of climate change and said natural gas was not “the sort of thing that’s going to take us to a clean energy future.”

There was a time when Vance was considered a moderate voice, but the one-term senator has taken up the ultra-conservative mantra of Trump’s supporters, opposing measures that would enable access to abortion and provide greater rights to 2SLGBTQIA+ people.

Vance beat out two other fossil-fuel-friendly lawmakers on the shortlist: Florida Senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

A second Trump administration would implement policies that roll back progress on climate with or without J.D. Vance as vice-president. But his selection will add yet another politician with ties to the fossil fuel industry to Trump’s inner circle.

“Donald Trump was the worst president ever for clean air, clean water, and protecting a livable future,” Jealous said. “With the selection of JD Vance as his VP pick, that climate-denying legacy would only worsen in a second term. Voters should reject this ticket and the reckless policies it would bring with it.”

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“I have instructed the Secretary of Energy,” Trump continued, “to formulate a plan which will make funds available so that these very important companies and jobs will be secured long into the future.”

At the same time, others were wondering if fossil fuels even have a future. The price of Brent crude had fallen to US$20 a barrel, an 18-year low. Oil-futures prices in Texas, where producers were running out of room to store inventory, dipped into the negative – meaning some producers were paying US$40 a barrel just to get rid of the stuff. With Russia and Saudi Arabia flooding the world oil market while COVID-19 stopped most traffic, industry analysts speculated that an inflection point had been reached.

In a story headlined “Oil Companies Are Collapsing, but Wind and Solar Energy Keep Growing,” The New York Times said renewable energy sources would generate a record 20.7% of electricity in the U.S. this year, up from 18% last year. “While work on some solar and wind projects has been delayed by the [virus] outbreak, industry executives and analysts expect the renewable business to continue growing in 2020 and next year even as oil, gas and coal companies struggle financially or seek bankruptcy protection.”

Though oil prices have rebounded somewhat from their record lows (Brent was back above $40 a barrel this summer), the International Energy Agency recently said 2020 would see the lowest oil demand in 25 years: “Even assuming that travel restrictions are eased in the second half of the year, we expect that global oil demand in 2020 will fall by 9.3 million barrels a day versus 2019, erasing almost a decade of growth.”

The pain came home to roost when oil giant Exxon last week announced a second-quarter loss of US$1.1 billion, with gross revenues of $32.6 billion underperforming analyst forecasts by a hefty $5.5 billion. Exxon shares have fallen 38% so far this year – and oil prices could tumble again.

Recently, the Telegraph noted that “there is mounting evidence that a second wave of COVID-19 could send prices spinning into a nosedive once more.” Earlier this week Stephen Innes, Chief Global Markets Strategist at AxiCorp said, “Most oil market participants expect more downward pressure on oil … with COVID-19 ravaging the landscape and OPEC+ adding more barrels into play.”

Meanwhile, the Times reported that U.S. solar capacity – spurred on by falling prices for solar panels – grew 23% in 2019. “We blew through all of the projections,” said Caton Fenz, CEO of ConnectGen, a Houston-based developer of wind and solar power. “We’re surfing a long-term wave.”

While the COVID crisis stalled most corporate initiatives, including Big Oil’s recent commitment to big renewables, the global shift remains underway. Just last week, BP announced it’s slashing its oil and gas production by 40% and increasing its low-carbon investments tenfold by 2030 (to $5 billion per year), as part of its 2050 net-zero targets.

At Corporate Knights’ Building Back Better roundtable on energy innovation in late May, federal Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan declared that embracing green energy is not a retreat, but an advance.

“Net-zero is not just a plan for our environment. It is a plan for our economic competitiveness. And increasingly, this is where markets are going,” O’Regan said.

Noting that Sweden and Norway’s sovereign funds and institutional investors such as BlackRock are shifting away from fossil fuels, he added, “Ultimately, you follow the money. And the money is increasingly steering us toward net-zero solutions.”

A version of this story appeared in the Summer Issue of Corporate Knights.

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Despite the White House’s efforts to prop up the coal industry, the U.S. was on track to shut down more coal plants in 2018 than in any other year. “The thing that has changed fundamentally the whole picture is that renewables have gotten so cheap,” says Jim Barry, global head of BlackRock’s infrastructure investment group. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with US$6.29 trillion in assets under management.

The Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP) aimed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric generating units – partly by replacing coal production with cleaner plants powered by solar, wind or natural gas. Two months after Donald Trump took office, the administration of the President of the U.S. (POTUS) announced plans to repeal the CPP as part of its campaign to reduce industry regulations. Activists tried to block the Trump administration’s efforts, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in October against any further court challenges to repealing the CPP.

According to the Washington Post, over the next decade the revised regulations would allow GHG emissions 12 times greater than those permitted under the CPP – a major setback to human health and U.S. efforts to reduce climate change. But industry reports say things may not get that bad – because the coal industry’s slide into oblivion is continuing despite the Republicans’ best efforts.

A research report published in October by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) calculated that 2018 would see a record decline in U.S. coal-plant capacity – with the shutdown of 44 units at 22 plants, amounting to a capacity decrease of 15.4 gigawatts. IEEFA analysts predicted that scheduled shutdowns over the next six years would reduce U.S. coal-fired capacity by 15 per cent – not including future closures that haven’t yet been announced.

The report said older coal-fired plants just can’t compete, “as renewables and gas-fired generation are proving cheaper and more flexible.“ The report’s author, data analyst Seth Feaster, told Green Tech Media the IEEFA knows of several more coal plants now under review. “We are also aware of some other plants and units that are now running at low capacity factors, and are likely to get closed in the next few years.”

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Lately, this motto has been put to the test.

In October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) painted a stark picture of the high cost we can expect to pay if global temperatures rise by 2˚C instead of 1.5˚C. The half-degree of extra warming doubles the decline in crop yields, fisheries, species extinction, and portion of the population exposed to extreme heat, which in turn adds up to 150 million premature human deaths, mass species extinction and hundreds of millions of climate refugees this century. The problem, based on the Climate Action Tracker models, is that we are currently on track to heat up the planet 3.3˚C by 2100 – a “Hothouse Earth” scenario in which all bets are off.

The IPCC says any hope of hitting even 2˚C requires that global emissions peak and begin rapidly falling in the next 12 years. Up until quite recently, this looked in the cards with global emissions stabilizing in 2014-2016 alongside modest economic growth. This inspired then President Obama to pen a piece in Science magazine declaring that carbon emissions had been decoupled from economic growth in the U.S., citing economic growth of more than 10% over his two terms in office despite a 9.5% fall in CO2 from the energy sector. The decoupling point was particularly hopeful, as the only other ways to reduce emissions (curtail economic growth, population controls, energy rationing) are political non-starters.
Unfortunately, industrial carbon emissions have roared back with a vengeance – rising by 1.7% in 2017 and an estimated 2.7% in 2018 to reach an all-time high, mainly because economies grew faster than clean energy supplies, according to the Global Carbon Project.

The “yes, we can” optimism concerning decoupling was panned by economists Enno Schröder and Servaas Storm as “wishful thinking” in their paper Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions: The Road to ‘Hothouse Earth’ is Paved with Good Intentions. The authors conclude that nothing short of a revolution that reverses the prevailing economic logic favouring lax regulation, deference to the fossil fuel lobby and short-term financing interests can avert climate catastrophe.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine two more unlikely proponents of such a revolution than the current chief occupants of the White House and Brazil’s Palácio da Alvorada. These two zealots recall the Once-Ler villain in my son’s favourite book, The Lorax, with their respective enthusiasms for smogulous [coal] smoke and hacking down [Amazon rainforest] trees.

Thankfully, whatever backwards-looking politicians or statistical analysis may say, however, is less relevant than what is happening right in front of our eyes. Donald Trump and his lot can flap their fossil-fuel marinated wings all they want, but it’s not going to stop the high-carbon, pollution-intensive economy from crashing down to earth.

To wit, since Trump’s inauguration, a U.S. coal plant has been shut down every 15 days, with 2018 being the nation’s top coal-plant killing year ever. This is happening for the same reason that China and the entire developing world installed more new renewables than fossil power last year for the first time ever and why 42% of global coal fleets are unprofitable: Renewables are now cheaper in many major power markets. And we’re just at the beginning of the innovation S-curve for renewables and storage.

In other portents for the future, 2018 likely marked the peak production of internal combustion engine vehicles, according to Accenture, which are imminently set to be made obsolete by cheaper electric and fuel cell vehicles. And satellite imagery tells us that global tree cover expanded about 2.24 million km2, or 7.1%, between 1982 and 2016.

So yes, we have our work cut out for us, and a little political leadership wouldn’t hurt, but we also now have powerful examples and affordable tools to get on with it. We are not slaves to the past or the present. In the fullness of time we can achieve whatever future we want. That’s why in spite of reality, I am still optimistic.

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