Team Trump Tries to Export Its Fossil Fuel Madness
We’re reaching the point with the second Trump administration where, as Wall Street investors would say, the crazy is “priced in.” There’s absolutely no reason to expect anything other than aggressively dishonest and profoundly stupid governance. Would you say, at this point, that you’re surprised to learn that the new #2 at EPA, who will be running the day-to-day operations,
made nearly $3.2 million in 2024 representing a range of corporate interests against pollution cases and enforcement actions. His clients included Chevron, Sunoco Pipeline, and Energy Transfer, a major oil and gas company that is currently litigating a high stakes trial against Greenpeace, according to a recent financial disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics.
And he wasn’t even the most egregious EPA nominee—another high-ranking future official told the Senate that as far as he was concerned the job was not to prevent climate change, it was to adapt to it once it happened. Thanks!
These kind of things are terrible, and also at this point entirely predictable. Indeed, it was all foretold with breathtaking candor in Project 2025, and then the nation voted for President Trump anyway. (Perhaps someone actually believed his demurrals about his plans during the campaign). We need to resist at every turn—please join us at Third Act as prepare for the next big round of actions on April 5—but at this point there is great damage we simply can’t avoid.
It makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn't vote for this charlatan.
I think it makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn’t vote for this charlatan. News continued to flow in from around the globe last week of countries succumbing to White House extortion to buy more liquefied natural gas, on pain of getting tariffed otherwise. And then there’s Ukraine—and if you want to watch a truly stinging takedown of Trump’s treachery, check out this from a center-right French parliamentarian. Better yet, read Antonia Juhasz’s long account for Rolling Stone of the truly extortionate “mineral rights” deal that Trump is demanding from Zelensky. She quotes Svitana Romanko, who will be familiar to readers of this newsletter—a longtime climate campaigner who has emerged as Ukraine’s most passionate environmentalist.
I have no doubt that a hidden agenda is getting access and decision-making rights to gas and oil pipelines, especially gas that’s so critical given that the European market is so important for Russia and has always been.” This is “really threatening to everything we’ve done so far” to weaken Russia’s war-fighting ability and influence, including “getting the full ban on Russian oil and gas to the European Union,” she adds.
Though it gets drowned out in the news over Russia, Canada, and Mexico but just as disgusting and revealing was the initiative unveiled this week by America’s new energy secretary, fracking baron Chris Wright, who told his counterparts from across Africa that the future was…fossil fuels, above all coal. The Africans were gathered at a Marriott across from the White House for some sense of what would happen to them now that the Trump administration has summarily shut down Power Africa, the program begun by President Obama that has connected tens of millions of homes on the continent to electricity.
According to Times reporter Max Bearak, Energy Secretary Wright sold the shutdown as a gift. “This government has no desire to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It’s a paternalistic post-colonial attitude that I just can’t stand.” He then went on to say:
“We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” Mr. Wright said. “That’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense. Coal transformed our world and made it better.”
And while Mr. Wright said climate change was a “real, physical phenomenon,” he said it wouldn’t make a list of his top 10 problems facing the world.
The amount of actual nonsense crammed into those two paragraphs is…amazing. Yes, coal transformed the world during the industrial revolution. But now it’s transforming the world again, by altering the climate—which is not only the world’s biggest problem by far, but is making all the others much worse. African countries worry about public health, about hunger, about building infrastructure: here’s what the World Meteorological Organization calculated in 2023:
On average, African countries are losing 2–5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and many are diverting up to 9 percent of their budgets responding to climate extremes.
More to the point, the idea that coal is the answer for Africa is belied by history. Which is to say, we’ve known about coal—and natural gas—for a very long time, and there are somehow still 600 million Africans unconnected to the electric grid. If coal was going to do the job, perhaps it would have done so by now.
The problem, in Africa, is the lack of a grid—the huge and hugely expensive collection of poles and wires that distributes power from centralized coal-fired power stations. I remember sitting in Tanzania, years ago, with a Silicon valley entrepreneur named Xavier Helgesen: “The belief was, you’d eventually build the U.S. grid here,” he said. “But the U.S. is the richest country on earth, and it wasn’t fully electrified until the nineteen-forties, and that was in an era of cheap copper for wires, cheap timber for poles, cheap coal, and cheap capital. None of that is so cheap anymore, at least not over here.”
Happily, there’s now a way around that problem: it’s called distributed solar power. And, as I’ve been writing, it’s exploding in Africa. I saw some of the first solar mini-grids on the continent five or six years ago—now there are thousands. There was a World Bank effort launched last fall to find $90 billion—one quarter of an Elon at today’s market prices—to provide power for 300 million of those 600 million Africans. (That one man could electrify the whole continent and still have $180 billion left over gives you some sense of the grotesque inequality now haunting our earth). But if that happened, it would be another step leading the world away from fossil fuels and the “energy dominance” that the Trump team dreams of.
“When we say ‘all of the above,’ you might ask, is that code for carbon? And yes, it is code for carbon,” said Troy Fitrell, a senior State Department official and former ambassador to Guinea. “There are no restrictions anymore on what kind of energy we can promote.”
In case you’re wondering how all this is going to happen, it’s worth remembering that one of Trump’s first acts in office was to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign governments. As the evangelical magazine Christianity Today (in an earlier day, evangelicals had actually argued for the law, on the grounds of, you know, honesty) pointed out yesterday,
Taken by itself, the FCPA freeze could merely be a messy attempt to limit the authority of the DOJ and the SEC. But halting FCPA in tandem with limiting enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force poses a shift in American policy likely to affect not just American oversight of American bribery abroad but also the US government’s ability to monitor foreign agents in America.
If the U.S. is able to bully or bribe African governments into building more coal-fired power plants, let me make a prediction. Just as we’ve seen in Pakistan this past year, the expensive and unreliable power those plants deliver on underbuilt grids will be one more factor pushing people towards cheap solar. In fact, as I’ve described in this newsletter already, that process is underway across much of Africa already, as people and companies buy up cheap Chinese solar panels and liberate themselves from the status quo.
It would be cheaper, and provide more power more quickly to more people, to do this systematically with solar minigrids, as Power Africa has been envisioning, instead of one roof at a time. But the turn to the sun will happen eventually anyway; in the end, the greed unleashed by Trump, Wright, and their friends will be insufficient to alter either physics or economics. Much damage will be done in the meantime, though—to Africans, to the climate, and to whatever remains of the idea of American leadership. The Chinese are doubtless chortling; indeed by this point the laughter must be nonstop. If you want to read one account of China’s rise to the renewable pinnacle, this Washington Post piece might be it. Among other things, it makes clear that as the U.S. pushes coal, Beijing is actually offering something people want and need:
In 2024, Chinese exports of EVs, batteries, and solar and wind products to the Global South surged to account for a record 47 percent of the total.
“It’s probably a good thing for the climate because these clean technologies are diffusing all over the world,” says Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who was a senior adviser on Chinese climate issues in the Obama administration. “But it is also probably resulting in the United States losing even more market share globally.”
At this point we sure deserve that loss. Here’s the big and wonderful news from China this week: gasoline sales fell…9 percent last year, as EVs took hold in the country. If I were Big Oil I’d be desperately trying to leverage the White House too, I guess.
