How to make clean energy progress under Trump in the states—blue and red alike

Heat Exchange

MIT Technology Review’s guest opinion series, offering expert commentary on legal, political and regulatory issues related to climate change and clean energy. You can read the rest of the pieces here.

This has left many in the climate and clean energy communities wondering what do we do now? The answer, I would argue, is to return to state capitals—a policymaking venue that climate and renewable energy advocates already know well. This can be done strategically, focusing on a handful of key states rather than all fifty. 

But I have another piece of advice: Don’t get too caught up in “red states” versus “blue states” when considering which states to target. American politics is being remade before our eyes, and long-standing policy problems are being redefined and reframed.  

Let’s take clean energy, for example. Yes, shifting away from carbon-spewing resources is about slowing down climate change, and for some this is the single most important motivation for pursuing it. But it also can be about much more. 

The case can be made just as forcefully—and perhaps more effectively—that shifting to clean energy advances affordability at a time when electricity bills are skyrocketing. It promotes energy freedom by resisting monopolistic utilities’ ownership and gatekeeping of the grid. It increases reliability as battery storage reaches new heights and renewable sources and baseload power plants like nuclear or natural gas facilities (some of which we certainly do and will need) increasingly complement one another. And it drives job creation and economic development. 

Talking about clean energy policy in these ways is safer from ideological criticisms of “climate alarmism.” Research reported in my forthcoming book, Owning the Green Grid, shows that this framing has historically been effective in red states. In addition, using the arguments above to promote all forms of energy can allow clean energy proponents to reclaim a talking point deployed in a previous era by the political right: a true “all-of-the-above” approach to energy policy.

Every energy technology—gas, nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal and storage, among others—has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. But combining them enhances overall grid performance, delivering more than the sum of their individual parts.

To be clear, this is not the approach of the current national administration in Washington, DC. Its policies have picked winners (coal, oil, and natural gas) and losers (solar and wind) among energy technologies—ironically, given conservative claims of blue states having done so in the past. Yet a true all-of-the-above approach can now be sold in state capitals throughout the country, in red states and even in fossil-fuel producing states.