The Thing Pollution-Heads Celebrating Climate-Policy Sabotage Don’t Understand

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

The Trump administration is relentlessly attacking renewable energy and electric vehicles, cancelling consumer incentives and killing important regulations. They are trying to challenge and repeal long established science, as if pretending something isn’t real will make physical reality into a preferred cartoon world in which there are no real consequences.

There are obvious problems with this from a health and climate perspective, but that’s not what we’re focusing on today. (For some reason, people who voted Trump into power are simply not concerned about pollution or our climate.) But there’s something else they don’t understand about the transition to cleantech.

The world is transitioning to electric vehicles and renewable energy. There’s no doubt about that. It is the future of the global economy. Oil may run the show today, but it won’t in a decade. Oil nations may be able to easily buy major sports teams, pay billions of dollars for top athletes to join their leagues, and effectively own politicians around the world, but that is not going to last forever.

The US, of course, is an oil nation, and it is often as corrupt and disinformative as ones that are infamous to Americans. At the moment, the oil & gas lobby is very clearly trying to hold the US back when it comes to the transition to electric vehicles and clean energy. But the world is not waiting for us, and the technology will march on.

What people cheering on the defunding of clean energy and EV programs don’t understand is that we in the US, and our economy, are simply going to be left behind more and more as these technologies advance. It’s already the case that the most advanced new EVs launch elsewhere (in China and Europe), even when they are coming from American companies! Increasingly, other countries are getting more advanced, newer tech, and we are being seen as a second-tier market. While all these other markets are incentivizing and supporting their cleantech industries, and even arguing about who is doing so “too much” and thus making competition in the global market unfair, we are pulling back our support? If we keep going down this path, we are going to end up more like a “3rd world country” for the most important new tech in the global economy. That doesn’t seem smart.

In recent years, these industries have grown fast in the US, but they’ve grown faster elsewhere. With these efforts to pull back support in the land of stars and stripes, those other markets will only pull further ahead.

Then, yes, there is also the fact that our air will be more polluted, causing countless health problems (heart disease, other cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer, asthma, chronic lung disease, etc.) and who knows how many premature deaths?

This is something to cheer? People think this is somehow going to save Americans money? That’s just not logical. But oil-soaked propaganda is apparently much more powerful than logic for a large portion of the voting public.

This article is also being published as our weekly column on Substack. You can subscribe there to help support CleanTechnica’s years of work in the cleantech media industry.

Sign up for CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!