The era of federal support for an energy transition, supposed to last a decade under the Inflation Reduction Act, will mostly come to a close on New Year’s Eve, when the cost of clean energy projects could rise by a third or more. This raises a question.
Since the big domestic policy bill that was recently passed cut the knees out from under federal support for sun, wind and batteries, how long will that dark age last and how much damage will it do?
One potential answer — a foreboding one — comes from the 1980s. In one of his final budgets, President Jimmy Carter proposed funding to help America get 20 percent of its energy from the sun by 2000. But then his successor, Ronald Reagan, shut down that process, going so far as to rip the solar panels off the White House roof. It took more than 35 years to get us back on track, with the passage of the I.R.A. in 2022 under President Joe Biden.
Yet even though the damage from the congressional action will be very deep, it almost certainly won’t last as long this time. And that’s for two reasons.
For one, it wasn’t until 1988, Mr. Reagan’s last year in office, that the scientist James Hansen turned global warming into a political issue by declaring before Congress that there was an irrefutable connection between greenhouse gas emissions and the increase in the earth’s temperatures.
The Trump administration scoffs at climate science, of course, but events will continue to make it relevant. Some will be sharp and shocking, like the Texas floods this month that drew their power from the kind of epic rainfall that a warmer atmosphere makes more likely. And some will be more grinding: the insurance crisis that has already begun to spread beyond California and Florida.
But the real difference between now and the 1980s is price. Back then, the solar cell capable of converting the sun’s energy into power was a relatively new invention, found mainly in calculators and wristwatches. Mr. Carter intended to drive the price down so that the cells would become more widely applicable. That eventually happened, but not because of the United States.
Two decades later, wise policies in places like Germany and China touched off an engineering miracle that improved the technology and has lowered the cost of solar panels 99 percent since 1980. For the past three or four years we’ve lived on a planet where the cheapest way to generate energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.
The world also now has great ways to use that electricity: the electric vehicle and the electric bike to get around, the heat pump to warm or cool your home, the induction cooktop to replace the open gas flame in your kitchen.
We’re at the point where human beings could dispense with burning fossil fuels, sparing us from not only the worst of the climate crisis but also the roughly nine million deaths a year that come with breathing the pollution from all that combustion. We would save money — most estimates of the cost of the recent legislation include more than $100 a year in extra electricity costs for American families, because we stay dependent on natural gas.
Rational decision makers around the world have noticed the possibilities. Last year almost 96 percent of new electricity generation globally came from sun and wind technologies and batteries. India, where coal-fired power declined 3 percent in the first half of the year, announced on Monday that it had met its 2030 goal of providing half its electric capacity from renewables five years early. China installed almost 100 solar panels a second in May, smashing its record. Even Poland, the heart of the European lignite belt, got more of its electricity from renewables in May than from coal.
You would say this is good news — unless you owned an oil or gas company, or a coal mine. Then you’d understand it as a threat to your business model, and if you lived in a country that allowed essentially unlimited political expenditures, you might try to use your existing cash flow to game the system.
You may recall that during his campaign President Trump reportedly told the country’s oil barons that if they donated $1 billion to help elect him, they could get a lot of what they wanted; in the end, they spent nearly half a billion in donations, lobbying and advertising during the election cycle, and that, apparently, was enough to very nearly win them carte blanche.
Not only is the administration removing environmental regulations on oil and gas drilling and pulling the funding from anything remotely green, it’s also using the threat of tariffs to bully countries into buying America’s natural gas. It’s an all-out effort to slow down an inevitable transition.
I believe it is inevitable that our country will eventually follow the rest of the world and that in 40 or so years, America will run mainly on sun and wind.
The problem, though, is that if it takes us anything like 40 years, then the world that runs on sun and wind will be catastrophically hot.
