Solar Is the Cheapest Power in History, But States Are Retreating From It
Israel and Hezbollah Truce Gives Oil Markets a Reason to Pause The breakthrough surpasses South Korea's… Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… A high-stakes push-and-pull is taking place in the United States clean energy sector as state-level laws, federal-level policy, and that infamous invisible hand all tug in different directions.
A staggering amount of different legal actions on the part of the Trump administration, the judicial system, and state politicians have created an incredibly complex landscape for clean energy adoption across the country.
And while the economics of renewables are looking better than ever, the political positioning of the clean energy transition is looking grimmer in nearly every corner of the nation.
“Energy costs, vanishing federal subsidies and an administration in Washington hostile to clean energy are giving officials reasons to retreat from efforts to deal with climate change and the political cover to do so,” Andres Clarens, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia, wrote for The Conversation this week.
During the first Trump administration, many states and cities saw the writing on the wall in terms of the reversal of clean energy goals and the abandonment of legally binding decarbonization agreements like the Paris accord, and took matters into their own hands.Almost fifty percentof the population of the United States live in a locality that enshrined a clean energy commitment into law in the early 2020s.
But now those states and localities are walking those commitments back.
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From California to New York and Virginia, state- and city-level officials are repealing and softening earlier commitments.
Part of the reason is that the political climate has made achieving these goals increasingly difficult in a legal sense, with the Trump administration going so far as tosue Californiafor its electric vehicles mandates, which the White House officials have called “oppressive” and “unlawful.” But the other reason is that the political headwinds have given officials a convenient out for failing to reach their own goals.
New York, for example, was the first state in the U.S.
towalk back its binding climate targetin May of this year.
Instead of pledging to achieve a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, they state moved the goalpost to 2040 and watered down the terms of the agreement.
| Product | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Brent Crude | $102.14/bbl | +0.34% |
| WTI Crude | $96.90/bbl | +0.21% |
| EN590 Diesel | $846/MT | +0.18% |
| Jet Fuel A-1 | $1090/MT | +0.55% |
| Mazut M100 | $450/MT | -0.15% |
| Bitumen 60/70 | $470/MT | +0.08% |
| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
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