The head of the Environmental Protection Agency — our former congressman, Lee Zeldin — was positively giddy last week when he announced that he was killing his own agency’s ability to limit pollution by the U.S. oil and gas industry.
“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to … unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S.,” Mr. Zeldin crowed.
Who knew? The EPA’s job is to help the oil and gas and auto industries?
Even if we choose to dismiss prevailing science, which shows that burning fossil fuels pollutes the air we breathe and is warming the planet at a rate that will eventually make it unlivable as we know it, Zeldin and his boss, President Donald Trump, are ignoring massive economic realities — to America’s great peril.
But is it any wonder? Big oil poured an estimated $445 million into the 2024 election cycle, in support of Trump and his congressional allies. In response, Trump campaigned on “drill, baby, drill,” and now Zeldin is moving fast to remove every limit on an already booming fossil fuel industry, and reverse two decades of climate policies.
The political gamble is short-term economic gains. Unleashing Trump’s “golden era of American energy” could mean more oil and gas jobs, and profits.
But, even if it works, it won’t last — because the world is turning to the sun to power everything. And fewer and fewer outside of America want American gas guzzlers anymore.
China, for example, this spring, was installing 100 solar panels per second, and putting up 3 gigawatts of solar power a day, roughly the equivalent of one coal-fired power plant daily. That rate of solar adoption is only speeding up.
Worth noting: China is also an important market for American fossil fuels, but in response to Trump’s tariffs, it showed this spring that it can go without buying U.S. fossil fuels.
Europe, another significant consumer of American natural gas, has pivoted hard to sustainable sources after Russia invaded Ukraine. Germany’s largest source of power this April was solar. On an annual basis, solar meets some 15 percent of Germany’s energy needs, and the German government plans to double that figure over the next four years.
Even Saudi Arabia, whose economy is underpinned by pumping and exporting oil and gas, and its neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, have some of the largest solar fields on the planet. Saudi Arabia plans to have half its energy needs met by solar by the year 2050.
Here, stateside, California and Trump-country Texas are leading the solar boom, with Texas generating more solar power than any other state and California routinely meeting all its energy needs with solar and wind power. This summer, California, the fourth-largest economy in the world, is using 40 percent less natural gas than it did two years ago to generate electricity.
Look no further than that to explain why the fossil fuel industry is throwing money at every compliant politician it can find.
What does all this mean? The demand for solar energy and solar-energy technology is booming worldwide. And while demand for oil and gas and its associated technologies are also increasing, they are predicted to plateau in the next four or five years. The growth — the serious long-term money — is in sustainable energy.
The solar boom is driven in large part with the help of government incentives and subsidies — from Germany to Saudi Arabia, from Australia (where rooftop solar is two to three times cheaper than it is here in the United States) to China. Smart, forward-thinking policy and economic planners see the future and are driving their economies where any rational analyst knows the world is going.
But resilient economies are only part of the impetus. Zeldin sneers that climate change is a “religion” — but he’s the one who is taking the leap of faith against all the prevailing science that burning fossil fuels is an existential threat to life on Earth. World consensus on this is indisputable, confirmed by countless international surveys and summits.
Just last week, the International Court of Justice issued a strongly worded opinion saying nations must protect people from the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change, and the failure of nations to take action to protect the climate system could constitute “an internationally wrongful act.” The court’s ruling has no real teeth, but the justices based their opinion on the science brought in a petition by a small Pacific Island and signed by more than 100 other nations.
But we live in a sea of lies these days, and as the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt predicted, “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
In other words, if we can believe nothing, we’re going to tend to believe what suits us, what’s convenient. While burning gas and oil is wreaking havoc on our climate system, burning on is convenient. For now.
(By the way, Zeldin isn’t only turning up the spigot on carbon dioxide. His decision to roll back Clean Air Act regulations comes as he is also weakening rules that protect us from cancer-causing pesticides, herbicides and so-called “forever chemicals,” also known as PFAs, now often found in drinking water.)
Will Trump be able to say “told ya!” in a year or two? Yup, American oil and gas is likely to have a Trump presidency joy ride. But the rest of the world is pulling away, in vehicles, houses, businesses and manufacturing fueled by the sun.
As energy analyst Rob Carlson told The New Yorker’s Bill McKibben recently, continuing to burn fossil fuels will “ultimately degrade the country’s long-term global competitiveness.”
How to respond? Support solar. At home, if you can, and in our municipalities. While this administration is doing everything it can to ensure that Americans pay the most of anyone on the planet for solar power, there are steps municipalities can take to lower rooftop and utility-scale solar adoption.
Meanwhile, the cost of solar power is dropping every day, and no matter what anyone tells you — and you see it in these pages weekly — utility -scale, commercial and residential solar power is cheaper than oil and gas and coal, and getting more so. Just look it up.
The biggest cost drivers are tariffs, permitting fees and review-process delays. That’s where municipalities come in. The good news: Both East Hampton and Southampton towns have fast-track processes for rooftop solar, and there are two bills in committee at the New York State Assembly to shorten the solar permitting process by requiring municipalities to use automated solar permitting platforms.
That would ruffle some feathers here on the South Fork, where solar applications in seemingly solar-indifferent municipalities run up against traditional aesthetics and historic preservation rules. It can take months to clear the citizen board hurdles in Sag Harbor and Sagaponack villages — and Sagaponack levies a whopping $950 application fee specifically for solar applications.
I wonder how long it’s going to take for residents, even in buttoned-up villages, to say, “I’ve got a right to the sunshine that’s falling on my home: It’s worth tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. And what right do you have to force me to be beholden to PSEG?”
So, speak up, people.
One final thing. If you are thinking about catching some of the sun’s power, consider doing it now, in 2025, to benefit from the federal tax credit that’s expiring this year.
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