{"id":159390,"date":"2026-02-01T19:44:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T19:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/159390\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T19:44:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T19:44:10","slug":"scholar-predicted-trump-attacks-on-renewable-energy-but-says-the-transition-is-still-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/159390\/","title":{"rendered":"Scholar predicted Trump attacks on renewable energy, but says the transition is still alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article<\/a> was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.<\/p>\n

Three weeks after\u00a0the Nov. 5, 2024, election that ushered President Donald Trump back into power, Sanya Carley, the faculty director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the book\u00a0\u201cPower Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition,\u201d penned\u00a0an op-ed in the\u00a0Philadelphia Inquirer<\/a>\u00a0with a series of predictions that proved to be prophetic.<\/p>\n

On his campaign promise to \u201cdrill, baby, drill,\u201d she forecasted: \u201cPresident Trump will prioritize executive orders \u2014 likely in his first few days in office \u2014 that\u00a0open more federal lands<\/a>\u00a0to oil and gas leasing and\u00a0reduce the permitting and other regulatory requirements<\/a>\u00a0associated with drilling and extraction operations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a matter of months, that came true, as did her premonition that Trump would \u201cintroduce an\u00a0executive order<\/a>\u00a0early in his term seeking to slow or delay the permitting process for offshore wind projects\u201d and\u00a0eliminate<\/a>\u00a0the Biden-era Justice40 initiative that sought to ensure 40% of federal climate investments go to communities overburdened by pollution.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The months that followed have been marked by a slew of attacks on renewable energy from all angles and across multiple agencies and branches of government. <\/p>\n

A year into Trump\u2019s second presidency, Capital & Main caught up with Carley to discuss what\u2019s happened, her predictions and how they\u2019ve played out. A scholar of energy justice and the energy transition, Carley said the whiplash of the last year has undoubtedly hurt consumers and decarbonization efforts alike. But, she said, she\u2019s certain \u201cthe energy transition is still underway.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n

Capital & Main: Before we discuss the year since Jan. 20, 2025, I want to start by backing up even further, to November of 2024 with your\u00a0op-ed in the\u00a0Inquirer<\/a>. Your predictions came true with startling accuracy. Take me back to that time.<\/p>\n

\"Woman<\/a>Sanya Carley is the faculty director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy of Sanya Carley)<\/p>\n

Sanya Carley:\u00a0Well, exactly as predicted, he did, in fact, issue a number of executive orders. That is the tool that he used previously in the first Trump administration \u2014 a series of executive orders. I would call it the administrative presidency \u2014 relying very heavily on executive force. What\u2019s really quite interesting this new time is it\u2019s an administrative presidency on steroids. The use of a slew of executive orders, just a bombardment of them, but accompanied with emergency declarations, and using these emergencies to be able to use regulatory and policy tools that he might not have been able to otherwise, that might have needed to be approved by Congress.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s also at the same time that there were so many federal employees that were laid off, so people that were administering many of these programs disappeared. And so it was much more, I would argue, than the first presidency, executive orders, accompanied with these other things. Trump has put a lot of judges in place. And as a result, those items that end up in the courts, of which there are many, there are now more judges that are deciding in favor of Trump than there were previously. So those are the kind of elements of this all happening at once.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It seems like the administration has taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to halting the clean energy transition \u2014 between executive orders, orders from agency heads and Trump signing bills sent to him by Congress. The administration has gutted agencies, repealed tax credits and grants and ordered certain renewable projects closed and other fossil fuel ones to stay open. Have any of these deregulatory mechanisms been more impactful than others?\u00a0<\/p>\n

The repeal of (core components of) the (Inflation Reduction Act) in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is probably the most impactful. There were so many prongs. There were so many efforts embedded within the IRA focused on clean energy development, but also job development and creation and justice elements, and all of those have been affected by the pullback of the IRA programs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You mention the energy emergency declaration. It\u2019s interesting because, when the administration issued this, scholars and environmentalists quickly\u00a0debunked<\/a>\u00a0it, pointing to record fossil fuel production. But an energy affordability emergency is now taking shape, and that has largely been spurred by the growth of data centers. Efforts to dismantle clean energy development don\u2019t seem to be doing much to help it. What kind of emergency do you think is really happening?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I think the emergency in the Trump administration\u2019s mind is that we\u2019re headed on a track toward a clean energy transition, and we need to shift. I think the emergency in the minds of the majority of Americans is that we have an affordability crisis. The two are kind of colliding, and so a lot of the chaos that the Trump administration is creating in the energy industry is leading to abandoned projects, it\u2019s leading to situations where power plants are being forced to run even though they\u2019re not economically efficient or economically appropriate to run, and demand is going up significantly from data centers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the administration has essentially done everything it can to remove any guardrails for the development of these data centers and to encourage fossil fuel growth at the same time, and so as a result, there will be a lot more investment in fossil fuels going forward to provide for these data centers. And all of these things will add costs, so they will contribute to the affordability crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just to be very concrete, forcing a coal power plant to stay online adds significant costs to ratepayers in any given location surrounding these plants.<\/p>\n

What do these costs look like? I\u2019m thinking of the Eddystone power plant near Philadelphia that was\u00a0slated to retire<\/a>\u00a0in May before the administration ordered it to stay open.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s either passed to the consumers directly as a rider or a charger, which is essentially just a very direct cost to cover something that\u2019s spread across all of the customers, or as a result of costs going up for the utility company, they go to the Public Utility Commission and ask for a new rate case so that they can raise rates. And what we\u2019re seeing happening right now is rate cases are proliferating, and energy bills just continue to go up. Energy prices have risen on average\u00a030% over the past five years<\/a>\u00a0across America \u2014 faster than the rate of inflation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A lot of your work focuses on the human costs of the energy transition. Were there any mistakes that the Biden administration made in ushering in a renewable energy era that we could now learn from?\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are plenty of places where the Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, made great progress in thinking about humans and thinking about justice issues in particular. One example is tax credits for electric vehicles and changing the eligibility requirements. This just helps those low-income customers that wouldn\u2019t have been able to afford an electric vehicle or didn\u2019t have the tax liability to be able to recover some of those credits. So it\u2019s an example of taking an existing policy and tweaking it a little bit so that it\u2019s more inclusive and thereby reaches a broader population.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And now, we\u2019re in a moment of whiplash. Many deregulatory steps from the administration have been met by legal challenges, so we\u2019ve been in a limbo on many fronts for a while. What impact is that having on the overall energy transition?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, the whiplash and the route to litigation is very consistent with the first Trump administration. So we\u2019re seeing common threads. Even just this week, there\u2019s some early thinking that the\u00a0repeal of IRA funding<\/a>\u00a0that went to blue states was\u00a0illegal<\/a>\u00a0and that those funds need to be reinstated. What is the consequence of the whiplash? The energy transition is still moving forward. We are still seeing significant solar development. We are still seeing significant clean energy development, distributed energy resources, all of these things are moving forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The energy transition is still underway, but the whiplash has very serious implications for our economy and for the investment culture of America. No new company is going to want to move to America right now and try to build offshore wind. The political environment is way too uncertain. Nobody wants to enter all of these legal battles.<\/p>\n

Now, what are the implications for local communities? I\u2019ve written before on the whiplash for coal communities. Coal communities will vote in their best interest, which is to keep coal operations running, even if they desire to have a different future, because that\u2019s the future that they\u2019ve had, and that\u2019s their economic stability. With these kinds of monoeconomies, there\u2019s very little other opportunity for growth. Having this kind of back and forth between administrations of closing all coal plants versus forcing them to stay online, forcing more production, it\u2019s just incredibly difficult for them to kind of think about their long-run trajectory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hopeful to hear your reminder that the energy transition hasn\u2019t been halted completely. How would you define the last year in the context of decades of change?\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you think of a graph, we\u2019ve seen some plateaus, but I don\u2019t anticipate the plateaus will decline. I anticipate that it\u2019s a plateau to bear through the current political and legal environment before all of these technologies can continue to accelerate. <\/p>\n

I mentioned solar before. Solar has still been on a phenomenal growth trajectory, especially across the entire world. Again, it\u2019s the\u00a0leading source of growth<\/a>\u00a0in the energy industry in the United States. I think in the next year we might see some challenges with solar, just because the (One Big Beautiful Bill Act)\u00a0repealed<\/a>\u00a0the Investment Tax Credit and Production Tax Credit (for wind and solar), and so as a result, anything that wasn\u2019t already in development by the end of this year will no longer have access to those credits. So we\u2019ll probably see a plateau there, or at least a slowing down of the growth of solar. Generally, we\u2019re still very consistent trend-wise.<\/p>\n

So, how pessimistic should we feel?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I think we should not be pessimistic. I think we should be optimistic. I think where we can be pessimistic, one, is around the general use of policy and regulation in a way that\u2019s kind of inconsistent with our democratic system, and not knowing what that could lead to in the future. And then, two, is the affordability crisis. That is\u00a0not\u00a0brought on by the energy transition, but it is very strongly connected to the policy and regulation of this administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, addressing that challenge going forward, that is something that we can be pessimistic about, but we also need to think very deeply about opportunities for change in the industry. It could be rate reform, thinking about alternative rate design. It could be creating alternatives to certain kinds of markets that are in place, rethinking capacity markets. Another one is a\u00a0virtual power plant<\/a>.\u00a0What kind of stipulations do we want to put on data center growth? These are all the kinds of questions that we need to face right now as we\u2019re addressing affordability challenges.<\/p>\n

Capital & Main<\/a> is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports from California on the most pressing economic, environmental and social issues of our time, including economic inequality, climate change, health care, threats to democracy, hate and extremism and immigration.\u200b<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main<\/p>\n

READ NEXT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission. Three weeks after\u00a0the Nov.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[9190,536,38212,643,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-159390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-clean-energy","tag-donald-trump","tag-energy-policy","tag-environment","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}