2025 – The Year Ahead - ORIGINAL CONTENT

“Predictions are hard, especially about the future.”, Niels Bohr

In 2025,the past is unlikely to be prolog. President elect Trump is reportedly prepared to sign ~300 Executive Orders (EOs) “on day one”. (Sounds like writer’s cramp to me.) The bulk of these EOs would reverse EOs issued during the Biden Administration. Many EOs are expected to deal with energy and climate.

Mr. Trump has stated his intent to withdraw the US from the Paris Accords again, as he dd during his first term. He is being encouraged to submit the Paris Accords to the US Senate for advice and consent as a treaty, Failure in the Senate would remove the US from the Accords permanently. He is also likely to discontinue US contributions to the UN Green Climate Fund and to resist formation of a UN “Loss and Damage Fund”.

Mr. Trump is also expected to cease pursuit of “Net Zero by 2050” and “All-Electric Everything”. This would end the Biden Administration’s war on fossil fuels and return the federal government to conducting regular oil and gas lease sales on federal lands. The Trump Administration is also expected to attempt to speed up permitting for oil and gas exploration and production activities.

The new Administration is also expected to challenge the EPA EV “mandate”, abandon the federal goals for EV sales and reduce or eliminate the federal subsidies and incentives for EV sales. The existing federal program to install EV charging infrastructure would also be eliminated or reduced in scope.

The Administration will attempt to reverse the EPA Endangerment Finding regarding CO2 emissions and withdraw the EPA Powerplant Rule which would have required 90% CCS on existing coal and natural gas powerplants. The CCS technology has not demonstrated the ability to achieve this capture rate at scale or economically.

Electric utilities not bound by state Renewable Portfolio Standards are expected to be able to structure their generation fleets to meet projected demand without requirements to prioritize intermittent renewable capacity. There is the prospect that electric utilities could require that all new intermittent renewable generating capacity be combined with storage sufficient to render the renewable capacity dispatchable.

The Administration might seek repeal of the “Inflation Reduction Act”, but will likely reduce funds dispersed under the Act and perhaps attempt to “claw back” some of the funds already dispersed but unspent.

There remain several aspects of climate science which are unsettled. There is hope that the Administration will halt the funding of climate studies intended to produce scary future scenarios based on unrealistic Representative Concentration Pathways and unverified climate models and redirect funding to unsettled climate science issues such as climate sensitivity, forcing and feedbacks. That might lead to new, more comprehensive climate models which actually model earth’s climate.

The Trump Administration’s expected actions will certainly arouse “wailing and gnashing of teeth” on the part of the consensed climate science community, environmental organizations, NGOs and others who have been “feeding at the federal trough”. However, to encourage energy and climate progress, government must first get out of its own way and then out of our way.