Donald Trump's surprise upset over Hillary Clinton has left many in the clean energy industry stunned, and now scrambling to get a sense for what a Trump presidency will mean for the future of renewable energy.
Over the campaign trail's many months, Trump has been light on specific policy details concerning the environment, but he's used heavy and emphatic rhetoric around his anti-EPA, anti-wind, and pro-coal stances.
And remember, this is the man who said "climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.”
Trump would be the only leader of a major industrialized nation to deny man-made climate change. As the nation, and the world, moves to address the issues of global warming, energy experts are now searching Trump's public statements on climate change to decipher what was campaign rhetoric versus what were actual policy plans, and hoping much of Tump's talk is just that.
"It's hard to know what he said on the campaign trail that will translate into policy," said Amy Francetic, SVP of Chicago-based renewable energy company Invenergy and the co-founder of the Clean Energy Trust. "We’ve been, just like everybody else, pouring through what he’s said and who he’s surrounding himself with, and any inklings of policy statement that might have been expressed."
Here's what Trump has said on the campaign trail:
- He's said he wants to cut the Environmental Protection Agency, adding that "what they do is a disgrace." He's said "we'll be fine with the environment" without the EPA.
- Trump wants the US out of the Paris Climate deal, a plan by over 100 countries to reduce carbon emissions. "Any regulation that's outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers or contrary to the national interest will be scrapped and scrapped completely," he said in May.
- Trump said he wants to "save the coal industry" and cut government spending on global warming programs.
- He said he doesn't like wind energy. “The wind kills all your birds. All your birds, killed. You know, the environmentalists never talk about that.”
- Trump has selected known climate change skeptic Myron Ebell to lead his EPA transition team.
- Trump said he wants to get rid of Obama's Clean Power Plan, which looks to reduce US carbon dioxide emissions.
The Clean Power Plan may be the item that's most at jeopardy, at least immediately, Francetic said. The plan is waiting for a Supreme Court decision, and with a Trump presidency and a republican controlled Congress, it could very well be on the chopping block. "I think that is pretty well at risk," she said.
"The thing that would be really bad in my mind is to really discount all the science that has driven what I would say is near-global consensus on the root causes on climate change and what’s necessary to address that," Francetic said. "It really felt like the world was coming to some sort of a conclusion around how much danger we were in, and how fast the climate was changing ... The area of greatest concern would be to remove science and reason from that."
Now, climate experts are left hoping that the man who said "climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese" will still be open to being educated on the issues of global warming. The glass-half-full view, Francetic says, is that the renewable energy industry is a large job creator and has bi-partisan in many red states like Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma and others who've turned to wind and other clean energy sources.
"When (Trump) looks at the industry and he understand how important the renewable industry is for the economy and what an economic engine it is, it's going to be really hard to turn that off," she said.
Despite the campaign rhetoric, Francetic is hopeful for the future of clean energy innovation, particularly from the millennials who've made it a top priority for their generation.
"Young people are driving a lot of the clean energy innovation, and when you analyze the younger vote, it wasn’t well represented (on election day). If things don’t go the way we want in the next few years, there are a lot of folks coming up who feel really strongly that something has to be done to address the climate."
"That's not going away," she said. "One president, one person, isn’t going to be able to reverse that passion that I think has been permanently unleashed in the younger generation. That gives me a lot of hope."
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