By: Leo Mazzocco
The Trump administration is pushing for a shift back to fossil fuels. What do the experts predict this means for the U.S.?
This January, Donald Trump became the 47th President of the United States of America. Almost immediately, he released a wave of executive orders to enact his vision of the ideal American Union. A key tenet of this vision is shifting away from renewable energy sources to revitalize industries which rely on fossil fuels. The 2024 GOP platform reads, “Republicans will increase Energy Production across the board, streamline permitting, and end market-distorting restrictions on oil, natural gas, and coal.”
To achieve this goal, President Trump has created tariffs, rescinded electric vehicle targets, withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, deregulated the oil drilling industry, and threatened to reduce spending on clean energy research.
To gain perspective on the impact of these changes, I met with Professor of Public Affairs Gregory Nemet, who studies energy and environmental policy and is actively involved in cross-campus graduate programs in energy analysis and policy. Professor Nemet has been a professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs since 2007.
According to Nemet, although Trump’s policies take many different forms, “a lot of their actions have the same effect, which is to discourage the transition from dirty energy to clean energy,” Nemet explains.
This represents a large shift from the Biden administration, whose policies focused on facilitating the energy transition. As Nemet describes, “Biden’s policies were aimed to really take the transition from dirty to clean to the next level, to try and get us from maybe a third of our economy being run on clean energy to almost all of it.”
Now, there are question marks around if this transition will happen in the United States at all. With a lack of support on a federal level, companies which have made green technology a core aspect of their identity now question their plans.
One possible pivot for companies would be to look abroad. Nemet predicts that “companies will begin to look to other markets, so they can sell and produce these products in places that aren’t as hostile to them.”
The Trump administration, however, believes that these policies and tariffs will have the opposite effect and encourage companies to invest in domestic production. According to Nemet, this belief is based upon a misunderstanding of market forces. Corporations need not only disincentives from purchasing foreign goods, but also an incentive to produce within the United States.
Nemet likens this form of policy to a carrot and stick, saying “the ‘stick’ is tariffs on imported products and the ‘carrot’ is some help with manufacturing. With only tariffs, I think that you won’t see as much of a direct effect on onshoring manufacturing here. It would be a risky bet to invest big based on tariffs that could later change within the lifetime of that investment.”
In addition to these economic policies, the Trump administration has made a commitment to cut research grants at the federal level. Although major cuts have yet to reach UW-Madison, efforts to reduce funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health threaten the university’s respectable research status. These federal reductions require tough decisions from university officials on what programs to continue and which to scale back.
However, research funding cuts do not just affect professors. The technologies produced at universities drive innovation in the private sector as well.
“A lot of their actions have the same effect, which is to discourage the transition from dirty energy to clean energy.
– Gregory Nemet
As Nemet explains, “A lot of research money ends up going into technologies that get commercialized by small companies or get picked up by large companies to get developed into a product.”
It is impossible to say what the ultimate effects of this wave of legislation will be in private and public sectors. However, the industry for green technology now faces many new uncertainties. As engineers, we must overcome these research and financial challenges to continue our advance toward a cleaner, healthier future.