Energy and Environment

The United States is pulling back from large-scale demonstration projects for emerging energy technologies, even as China steps up.

This is a limited excerpt from the Climate Realism Initiative Newsletter. Sign up to receive monthly insights from the initiative's fellows and staff, including articles, videos, podcasts, events, and more.  Dog Days of Summer: Extended Edition  The United States marked the unofficial start of fall recently with—what else—the August 26 release of that inescapable autumn indicator: the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. Clocking in at as many as four hundred calories and fifty grams of sugar, that most basic of fall icons is an ideal beverage for a season of blankets and loose-fitting sweaters. But this year, far from arriving on the cusp of flannel weather, the PSL launched under a heat advisory. At Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, temperatures crept toward the nineties.   Though the summer of 2025 is not quite on pace to match the blistering temperature records of 2024, it is likely to be longer than those of the mid-aughts PSL debut. A recent analysis of American summers found that the season’s temperatures were spilling over their historical boundaries virtually everywhere in the continental United States.   New York and Washington, DC, today experience about a week’s more heat than they did thirty years ago. Chicago, Denver, and Atlanta sweat for about an extra two weeks. In Miami, summer lasts more than a month longer than it did in the mid-1990s, and summer-like temperatures now stretch over more than a third of the year.   For those who prefer baseball to football and beaches to bonfires, a few extra weeks of summer could sound like a welcome gift. But excess heat has consequences far beyond a seasonally discordant debut for America’s favorite novelty coffee beverage. Prolonged summer temperatures mean that millions of children are starting school in sweltering classrooms. A recent meta-analysis of studies covering 14.5 million children in more than 60 countries found that heat exposure significantly degraded students’ academic performance, not just on individual school days but also cumulatively over the course of the year. Students’ test scores, according to one of the review’s authors, could be measurably affected by excessive heat in the previous academic year.   Hot days, in other words, add up.   Climate change is projected to exacerbate that dynamic. One of the studies included in the review found that, at 1.5°C (2.7°F) of warming above pre-industrial levels—a benchmark scientists expect to reach before 2050—cognitive performance in elementary school students could fall by nearly 10 percent. As those deficits compound through middle and high school, the picture is ominous for the economic, social, and intellectual lives of those students and for the United States more broadly.   American schools are not alone in those challenges, of course. In Europe, where temperatures are rising faster than almost anywhere else on earth, officials have been forced to restrict access to playgrounds, delay major exams, and even temporarily close schools to protect children from spiking temperatures. During a record-breaking heat wave in Asia last year, tens of millions of students faced shuttered classrooms or shortened schooldays.   Air conditioning can significantly reduce the academic interruptions from excess heat and improve student outcomes. During President Joe Biden’s administration, Congress allocated more than $500 million to help schools improve energy efficiency and install renewable energy systems. Though that amount was far less than school districts needed, those steps made air conditioning more affordable to at least some poorer schools.   Across two funding rounds, schools across the country bid for grants for new windows, heat pumps, lighting, and cooling systems—upgrades one school called, “a game-changer.” The remaining funding, however, has been frozen by the Trump administration, leaving it in legal limbo right as students are returning to classrooms.   Even where it is available, however, air conditioning is not a panacea. Its high cost and significant energy demand have led policymakers around the world to experiment with alternatives.   Paris is in the midst of a multi year project to convert all of its school playgrounds into shaded green spaces, which have been shown to reduce temperatures and improve student achievement. In Spain, the regional government of Andalusia is installing water-based cooling systems that can dramatically reduce temperatures inside schools using just 10 percent of the energy of traditional air conditioning. On a variety of public buildings, including schools, India is installing passive cooling systems such as reflective rooftops, building insulation, and improved ventilation, all of which can help lower temperatures inside.    Those and other approaches could provide a valuable roadmap for future U.S. policymakers. As of 2020, more than 40 percent of school districts were in need of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning improvements. As climate change drives temperatures ever higher, political pressure could well build to provide those students with some relief.   In the meantime, the Pumpkin Spice Latte is available iced.  

Malnutrition has reached alarming levels in Gaza, aid officials say, with famine declared in the territory’s most populated region, and hunger now reportedly affecting civilians as well as journalists, doctors, and other personnel on the ground.  

U.S. moves to slash the energy research budget could have much further-reaching consequences for global development and the race to clean energy.

As the largest global purchaser, the United States has a unique opportunity to catalyze market demand for green technology through the implementation of a green procurement regime, advancing both climate mitigation goals and the competitiveness of American green technology.

Three years after a $94 billion pledge, uneven progress and poor transparency hinder global clean energy demonstrations aimed at net-zero by 2050.

This is a limited excerpt from the Climate Realism Initiative Newsletter. Sign up to receive monthly insights from the initiative's fellows and staff, including articles, videos, podcasts, events, and more.  Microsoft, Netscape, and the Trump Energy Policy   July marked the end of the first six months of the second Trump administration—an almost inconceivably consequential period that saw the United States withdraw from international climate agreements and repeal much of the Biden administration’s climate legislation. Those dramatic policy reversals have drawn heated criticism from climate advocates, who warn that the United States is failing to compete with China in the industries that will dominate the world’s energy future. That framing, however, risks obscuring the strategy that the Trump administration appears to be pursuing.   Like any incumbent technology leader faced with an upstart competitor, the United States has two choices: it can work to out-innovate its new rival, or it can try to use its market power to reinforce the status quo. The Trump administration seems to have chosen the latter course.   Rather than engage in serious competition with China in renewable energy technologies, a sector in which Beijing already enjoys a significant lead, the administration is pressing the U.S. advantage in fossil fuels.  It is taking steps to boost the supply of U.S. oil and gas, easing drilling restrictions on federal lands and loosening permitting requirements for pipelines and other fossil infrastructure. At the same time, it’s pulling multiple levers of power to suppress demand for alternatives. Congress cut public support for renewable energy generation and electric vehicle adoption, reducing competition for fossil fuel-powered incumbents. The United States has also used trade negotiations to secure major energy purchase pledges from the European Union and South Korea, and Vietnam said that it would import more U.S.-made SUVs.  This is not, at least in the abstract, a crazy approach. Microsoft, for example, pursued a similar strategy in the 1990s. Microsoft’s Windows was then the predominant operating system, installed on more than 80 percent of all desktop computers. For years, its comfortable position atop the market was self-reinforcing: software developers wanted to write applications that could be widely adopted on a single system, and businesses and consumers wanted computers with numerous and interoperable applications. Windows PCs satisfied both sets of demands.  The internet, however, threatened to undermine that equilibrium. Netscape Navigator, a web-browsing program not made by Microsoft, surged far beyond Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in both technological quality and consumer adoption. Worse, Navigator opened new doors for software developers, enabling them to more easily develop applications for operating systems other than Windows. Over time, that could have eroded Microsoft’s dominant position in operating systems, threatening its core business.   Faced with that prospect, Microsoft played hardball. It spent millions improving the quality of Internet Explorer, and then millions more driving Navigator from the market. It gave Explorer away for free to consumers and internet providers. It bundled Explorer with its Windows operating system and offered free desktop space on Windows PCs to internet providers who committed to using and promoting Explorer. In some cases, when internet providers were already contracted to buy licenses for Navigator, Microsoft bought out the contracts.   According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Microsoft's actions violated antitrust laws. But the strategy worked. Microsoft settled with the government and enjoyed nearly complete dominance in internet browsing for more than a decade. More importantly, from Microsoft’s perspective, more than 70 percent of desktop computers still run Windows today.  The Trump administration’s approach on energy appears to track, in important respects, Microsoft’s strategy in the 1990s. Its priority isn’t to out-engineer the leaders in competing technologies. It is to produce an acceptably functional product and then leverage its preeminent position to encourage or induce allies and consumers to accept it.  The analogy is not, of course, a perfect one. The United States has extended public support for some low-carbon energy sources, including advanced nuclear and geothermal, signaling an intention to engage in those critical industries. And, as a sovereign state in a competitive international system, Washington enjoys substantially more freedom of action than a private company like Microsoft; what counts as anticompetitive behavior for a firm is often just a Tuesday in a realist foreign policy.   Whether that strategy will work as effectively for the Trump administration as it did for Microsoft, moreover, remains to be seen. Wary of low prices, U.S. oil and gas companies have so far not increased production, and there is good reason to be skeptical that the purchase pledges from international partners will (or even can) be fulfilled. Meanwhile, driven by rising fears of climate change and rapidly falling prices, global demand for renewable power, electric vehicles, and other leading clean energy technologies shows little sign of abating.   Nonetheless, Microsoft’s experience offers a helpful way to conceptualize the administration’s actions. Washington’s priority isn’t to win a slice of the electric vehicle market or make an outstanding battery—it’s to compete against the new energy paradigm itself.

The bill eliminates several tax credits for low-carbon energy sources that received a boost under the Inflation Reduction Act, but some industries—such as nuclear and geothermal energy—will keep many of their existing incentives.

The extreme costs and death toll of recent floodings across Texas, New Mexico, and the Northeast have put into question the future of the United States’ emergency preparedness amid major budget and staffing cuts to critical risk-reduction agencies and programs.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post covers July 12 to July 18. 

As President Trump seeks to cut clean energy funding across the country, nuclear energy emerges as a rare area of bipartisan alignment and a priority for the administration. Yet inconsistent and conflicting federal policies threaten to impede efforts to promote nuclear energy production.

Although fossil fuel phase-outs are critical to achieving global climate goals, protections granted through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions to foreign-owned coal operations expose governments to costly litigation, threatening to thwart state action. 

This is a limited excerpt from the Climate Realism Initiative Newsletter. Sign up to receive monthly insights from the initiative's fellows and staff, including articles, videos, podcasts, events, and more.  Two Roads Diverged   June marked the official start of summer, the season when Americans pile into their cars for that classic warm-weather break: the road trip. Eighty percent of Americans will take a driving vacation in the next few months, and whether that conjures up an image of a classic muscle car eating up lonely desert miles or an overstuffed station wagon en route to Disney World, there are few more indelible icons of an American summer.   Increasingly, however, the talismanic gas-guzzlers of the U.S. interstate system are out of step with the rest of the world’s roads. More than seventeen million electric vehicles (EVs) were sold globally last year, making up more than 20 percent of all new car purchases.   Astute readers might accurately infer that the other 80 percent of purchases were traditional, internal combustion engine vehicles. But it would be inaccurate to conclude that conventional engines will continue to dominate in even the medium term.   Traditional car sales peaked in 2017, and are on pace to decline by more than a third by the end of this decade. Beginning in 2028, the share of conventional cars in the global fleet will begin to fall.   The future of global mobility is increasingly electric.   This is good news for the world’s climate; 15 percent of global emissions come from transportation, and electrification will substantially reduce that figure. Yet too little of this electric future is being made in the United States. Of the seventeen million EVs sold last year, eleven million were sold in China, and virtually all of them were from Chinese-owned companies like BYD, Wuling, Li Auto, and Geely. Only one American brand—Tesla—ranked in the top ten.   Nor is this situation limited to China. In Brazil, the largest EV market in Latin America, Chinese marques accounted for a whopping 85 percent of all EVs sold last year. In Thailand, the largest EV market in Southeast Asia, it was 78 percent. And, in May, BYD for the first time sold more EVs in Europe than Tesla—a watershed moment in a region where the American company has historically been a leader.   Beijing’s nascent market dominance is not an accident. Since 2009, China has invested more than $230 billion across the EV industry. This state assistance—ranging from support for basic research to funding for charging infrastructure and subsidies to bolster domestic demand—was designed to build globally competitive companies in a strategically important sector.  Whether Chinese companies would be as competitive without such extensive public support remains a subject of intense debate. But, discourse aside, the net effect of China’s efforts is an electric vehicle fleet that’s sleek-looking, fast-charging, and tech-savvy, all with a price tag as low as $10,000. Perhaps that’s why, in 2024, 60 percent of the world’s EVs were made in China.   American consumers have been almost completely walled off from these developments by policy decisions made by presidents of both parties. President Joe Biden’s administration quadrupled the first Donald Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, from 25 percent to 100 percent, and later imposed an effective blanket ban on EV imports from China.   The Biden administration paired those actions with initial steps to help the U.S. auto industry develop a domestic EV market—historically a prerequisite to global competition—including investments in the lithium-ion battery supply chain, tightened fuel efficiency standards, funding for charging infrastructure, and tax incentives for certain EV buyers. But few of those efforts bore fruit before the end of Biden’s term, and President Trump and the 119th Congress are working to repeal them.   For would-be U.S. EV buyers, this is a bummer. But for the U.S. auto industry, these combined actions are a catastrophe. Without a robust, competitive domestic market, U.S. automakers will have little incentive to make better EVs, leaving them further and further behind in the global race. Speaking recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Ford CEO Jim Farley called China’s EV industry “the most humbling thing I have ever seen.”   “We are in a global competition with China, and it’s not just EVs,” Farley continued. “And if we lose this, we do not have a future Ford.” 

The legislation promoted by Trump and the White House will undo many of the climate and energy initiatives and tax credit programs passed during the Joe Biden administration.