Putting the Worst Green Ideas in the Dustbin of History
Trump’s executive orders on energy could inadvertently be a big favor to the climate.
In the days after Donald Trump’s reelection, I shared a note about how Persuasion was planning on covering his second presidency. As I said then, we will aim to focus on important changes rather than ephemeral fights. And we will loudly oppose the administration when it oversteps the rightful bounds of its authority or violates the principles of philosophical liberalism even as we note when it does something to further these values.
In that spirit, we have a number of critical articles and conversations (including one next week with Francis Fukuyama) coming your way over the next days and weeks, assessing Trump’s foreign policy and his announcement to deploy troops at the southern border. And today, we are also publishing this interesting assessment from our contributing editor (and resident climate guru) Quico Toro, who argues that Trump’s executive orders about the environment might inadvertently prove to be a boon to the climate.
– Yascha
Whether Donald Trump actually believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, or whether he just says it to get under his opponents’ skin, we don’t know. What we do know is that he drips with contempt for environmentalism and those who espouse it. So it surprised no one that, amid the rash of Week One executive orders, many of them—ranging from pardoning January 6 Capitol rioters to overturning birthright citizenship by executive fiat—deeply irresponsible, he made sure to do his utmost to piss off the greens. The executive order titled “Unleashing American Energy” seems built entirely around the maxim that whatever progressive climate activists support must be bad. Environmentalists were suitably appalled, which figures: appalling them seemed to be the whole point.
This seems like a simple story of a callous administration gleefully wrecking the environment to line the pockets of its backers in the fossil fuel industry. And there’s certainly some of that. But it’s not so simple. The green consensus overturned by Trump’s executive order was badly built around a series of half-baked ideas that create serious problems when you try to implement them. Trump has no idea, but in killing their worst ideas, he’s just done the climate movement a big favor.
For a decade, mainstream environmentalism has been organized around a simple formula: electrify everything, then switch electric generation to renewable sources, especially wind and solar. This was the guiding spirit of Biden’s landmark climate law, the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Trump is especially keen to dismantle. The IRA’s central plank was a series of juicy tax incentives to subsidize wind and solar production, setting off a boom in generation capacity that was supposed to revolutionize American energy markets.
Pushed with great enthusiasm by activists who didn’t really understand the nuts and bolts of energy markets, the rush towards weather-dependent renewables carried risks that are only now being recognized. Intermittency—renewables’ propensity to flake out when the weather isn’t cooperating—turned out to create complications the climate movement hadn’t properly thought through. For all the hype, hydrogen and grid-scale batteries are far from being ready to take up the slack. Renewable-heavy grids, it turned out, only work if backed up by hugely expensive back-up power sources, usually reliant on fossil fuels. Wherever regulators pushed up the share of renewables in the grid, prices rose, price volatility rose, and grids became more fragile.
This was foreseeable, and ought to have been foreseen. But ideology is a hell of a drug, so the unthinking push towards unstable, unaffordable energy picked up steam around the world. The places that have gone farthest in this direction have ended up with some of the world’s highest and most volatile energy prices. Energy intensive manufacturing has begun to flee these places, which figures: who wants to run a factory where the cost of energy depends on the weather forecast?
It’s still taboo to say this frankly in right-thinking spaces, but it’s becoming obvious that the green consensus was badly misconceived from the start. The more weather-dependent renewables you add to the grid, the more volatile and unreliable it becomes. Pushed far enough, this trend portends a crisis. High and volatile prices aren’t even the worst of it: Industry watchdogs in the United States have been warning for some time that switching from old fossil fuel plants to renewables leaves the Midwest and the Northeast at risk of blackouts.
The rush towards a weather-depending grid threatens to make climate politics synonymous with winter blackouts and economic doldrums. Which is why a small but growing dissident movement within the climate community—sometimes called “energy realists”— increasingly argues that energy abundance is absolutely non-negotiable in the fight against climate change: voters won’t stand for climate policies that pick their pockets and leave them in the dark in the middle of winter. Nor should they.
This is pretty much my view. We energy realists tend to think there’s only one way to square energy abundance with zero emissions: nuclear power. The case for nuclear is simple: it’s the only technology that can get us to zero emissions safely and affordably.
For energy realists, Trump’s executive order isn’t the unmitigated disaster greens see. We see problems, for sure. We also see—dare we say it?—some promise.
The orders include a sweeping mandate to all federal agencies to “suspend, revise, or rescind all agency actions identified as unduly burdensome” to the development of domestic energy resources. Though the order is obviously built around the priorities of the fossil fuel industry, it explicitly includes nuclear resources.
More importantly, it instructs agencies to simplify permitting across the energy industry, by easing requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act—better known as NEPA. This Nixon-era law had grown over the years into a NIMBY’s best friend, creating a labyrinthine permitting process that made it absurdly easy for anti-development groups to tie up any project they didn’t like in legal fights that could last years, even decades. NEPA is one of the biggest reasons it’s gotten so hard to build projects of any level of ambition in the United States, and is a key reason why so few new nuclear power plants get built.
If you squint, there is an optimistic case to be made for Trump’s early executive orders on climate grounds. They don’t know it, but Trump is doing the greens a big favor by forcibly removing the shovel they were using to dig themselves deeper and deeper with regard to wind and solar. Allowed to run for another four years, America’s wind and solar buildout would’ve brought the country to the kind of energy crisis that would have turned environmentalism into a toxic brand for a generation. Now, that’s unlikely to happen.
Instead, by including nuclear in his all-of-the-above energy abundance agenda, Trump could give a leg up to the one zero-emissions technology that actually could bring lasting, politically attractive and economically sustainable decarbonization.
Most people don’t understand this yet, but the next generation of advanced nuclear reactors now wending their way through the world’s research labs are an order of magnitude better than the previous generation. None of them have reached the point of commercial development, but once they do, there’s a very real chance they’ll crowd out fossil fuel generation within a few decades, simply because they’re better in every way: cleaner, cheaper, healthier and much safer. If his administration gets serious about licensing fourth generation nuclear power plant designs, Trump could—paradoxically—be remembered for sounding the death-knell of the fossil fuel economy.
Of course, he’s not doing this because he cares about the environment—he plainly doesn’t. But politicians end up with legacies at odds with their intentions all the time. Take Richard Nixon: making it impossible to build anything important in America was obviously not what he hoped to be remembered for, but by signing NEPA, that’s the legacy he earned.
One week’s worth of executive orders won’t bring about this hoped-for nuclear shangri-la, of course. Much will depend on implementation. But if Trump’s smarter-than-you-realize Energy Secretary Chris Wright makes good on his pledge to help bring next generation reactors to market, it’s just about imaginable that an executive order designed specifically to piss off environmentalists could turn into a net positive for the environment.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
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This article contains many contentions about weaknesses in use of renewables: grid unreliability, higher costs, etc. etc. etc. None of them lead to links supporting these complaints. Where are they?
For an opposing view, let's take Texas ( https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0114 ): "Another hot summer in Texas put the electric grid to the test, but increased capacity from solar and battery storage met the call. By a wide margin, these sources combined have led capacity growth of the ERCOT grid..."
I've seen similar stories elsewhere. I find your unsubstantiated complaints, shall we say, unpersuading :-)
Here Here! If the world had responded to the 1970s energy crisis with safe Nuclear energy, as France has, we would maybe be 25-50 years away from a climate crisis! Obviously, it must be safe! However, saying that ANY level of radiation is unsafe is misleading and wrong. Also, spent fuel must be reprocessed into new fuel (which, by the way, gives you exponentially more fuel). I could go on and on. I am a bleeding heart liberal socialist, but feel that anti-nuclear liberals are partly responsible for the climate crisis, also resulting in the US losing ground to other countries nuclear programs.