Trump Wants to Kill Clean Energy. He’s Too Late.

President Trump’s first few weeks in office feel like a bad movie remake. He has once again withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement, aggressively sloganeered against renewable energy, frozen government grants and love-bombed fossil fuels. Together, these moves feel ominous for the fight against climate change.

While there’s plenty of well-founded uncertainty about how his administration will shape energy markets, much of what Mr. Trump has done so far amounts to bluster or actions that are unlikely to be sustained. For 20 years, we’ve seen a movement toward cleaner, cheaper sources of energy, and the executive branch’s levers to disrupt it are not powerful enough to overcome it. What’s more, if he tries to stop the substantial clean energy investments flowing from the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law into Republican districts nationwide, as he has threatened, it’s hard to believe that his own party will allow it.

Mr. Trump has inherited a strong energy economy from the Biden administration. America is producing more energy — including oil, gas, wind and solar — than at any other point in history. Exports of oil and gas are also at record highs.

Over the past 20 years, America’s greenhouse gas emissions have dropped through increased efficiency and as wind, solar and natural gas have displaced coal in the power sector. America’s total annual energy consumption has stayed level for over two decades, despite the economy nearly tripling and the population growing about 20 percent. It will be hard for him to disrupt that momentum.

In his first term, Mr. Trump promised to save coal and stop renewables. But he failed; complying with regulations on mercury emissions made it harder for coal plants to operate, and cheap wind, solar and natural gas outcompeted coal in the markets. In fact, wind, solar and battery farms have made up a vast amount of construction in the power sector in the past 15 years, and hundreds of thousands of people nationwide now depend on those facilities for their livelihoods. Clean energy isn’t a niche, mom-and-pop industry of enthusiasts and tinkerers anymore.

Though Mr. Trump has surrounded himself with climate skeptics, many top officials in his administration support geothermal energy, nuclear power and carbon capture projects, all of which help stave off the worst effects of climate change. Last week the secretary of energy, Chris Wright, announced he wants to streamline permitting for new energy infrastructure, expand the energy system rather than shrink it, improve the transmission system to prepare for growing demand for electricity and unleash commercial nuclear power. The secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, is focused on undoing many Biden policies, but he is pushing for a more robust domestic supply chain for minerals used for batteries and renewables, as well. All of these efforts would be beneficial for clean energy.