Team Trump tries to spread the crazy abroad

This week's gambit: Africa should rely on...coal.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright getting ready to mislead Congress at his confirmation hearing while a protester tells the truth in the background

We’re reaching the point with the second Trump administration where, as Wall Street investors would say, the crazy is “priced in.” There’s absolutely no reason to expect anything other than aggressively dishonest and profoundly stupid governance. Would you say, at this point, that you’re surprised to learn that the new #2 at EPA, who will be running the day-to-day operations,

made nearly $3.2 million in 2024 representing a range of corporate interests against pollution cases and enforcement actions. His clients included Chevron, Sunoco Pipeline, and Energy Transfer, a major oil and gas company that is currently litigating a high stakes trial against Greenpeace, according to a recent financial disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics.

And he wasn’t even the most egregious EPA nominee—another high-ranking future official told the Senate that as far as he was concerned the job was not to prevent climate change, it was to adapt to it once it happened. Thanks!

These kind of thing are terrible, and also at this point entirely predictable. Indeed, it was all foretold with breathtaking candor in Project 2025, and then the nation voted for President Trump anyway. (Perhaps someone actually believed his demurrals about his plans during the campaign). We need to resist at every turn—please join us at Third Act as prepare for the next big round of actions on April 5—but at this point there is great damage we simply can’t avoid.

I think it makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn’t vote for this charlatan. News continued to flow in from around the globe last week of countries succumbing to White House extortion to buy more liquefied natural gas, on pain of getting tariffed otherwise. And then there’s Ukraine—and if you want to watch a truly stinging takedown of Trump’s treachery, check out this from a center-right French parliamentarian. Better yet, read Antonia Juhasz’s long account for Rolling Stone of the truly extortionate “mineral rights” deal that Trump is demanding from Zelensky. She quotes Svitana Romanko, who will be familiar to readers of this newsletter—a longtime climate campaigner who has emerged as Ukraine’s most passionate environmentalist.

I have no doubt that a hidden agenda is getting access and decision-making rights to gas and oil pipelines, especially gas that’s so critical given that the European market is so important for Russia and has always been.” This is “really threatening to everything we’ve done so far” to weaken Russia’s war-fighting ability and influence, including “getting the full ban on Russian oil and gas to the European Union,” she adds.

Though it gets drowned out in the news over Russia, Canada, and Mexico but just as disgusting and revealing was the initiative unveiled this week by America’s new energy secretary, fracking baron Chris Wright, who told his counterparts from across Africa that the future was…fossil fuels, above all coal. The Africans were gathered at a Marriott across from the White House for some sense of what would happen to them now that the Trump administration has summarily shut down Power Africa, the program begun by President Obama that has connected tens of millions of homes on the continent to electricity.

According to Times reporter Max Bearak, Energy Secretary Wright sold the shutdown as a gift. “This government has no desire to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It’s a paternalistic post-colonial attitude that I just can’t stand.” He then went on to say:

“We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” Mr. Wright said. “That’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense. Coal transformed our world and made it better.”

And while Mr. Wright said climate change was a “real, physical phenomenon,” he said it wouldn’t make a list of his top 10 problems facing the world.

The amount of actual nonsense crammed into those two paragraphs is…amazing. Yes, coal transformed the world during the industrial revolution. But now it’s transforming the world again, by altering the climate—which is not only the world’s biggest problem by far, but is making all the others much worse. African countries worry about public health, about hunger, about building infrastructure: here’s what the World Meteorological Organization calculated in 2023:

On average, African countries are losing 2–5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and many are diverting up to 9 percent of their budgets responding to climate extremes.

More to the point, the idea that coal is the answer for Africa is belied by history. Which is to say, we’ve known about coal—and natural gas—for a very long time, and there are somehow still 600 million Africans unconnected to the electric grid. If coal was going to do the job, perhaps it would have done so by now.

The problem, in Africa, is the lack of a grid—the huge and hugely expensive collection of poles and wires that distributes power from centralized coal-fired power stations. I remember sitting in Tanzania, years ago, with a Silicon valley entrepreneur named Xavier Helgesen: “The belief was, you’d eventually build the U.S. grid here,” he said. “But the U.S. is the richest country on earth, and it wasn’t fully electrified until the nineteen-forties, and that was in an era of cheap copper for wires, cheap timber for poles, cheap coal, and cheap capital. None of that is so cheap anymore, at least not over here.”

Happily, there’s now a way around that problem: it’s called distributed solar power. And, as I’ve been writing, it’s exploding in Africa. I saw some of the first solar mini-grids on the continent five or six years ago—now there are thousands. There was a World Bank effort launched last fall to find $90 billion—one quarter of an Elon at today’s market prices—to provide power for 300 million of those 600 million Africans. (That one man could electrify the whole continent and still have $180 billion left over gives you some sense of the grotesque inequality now haunting our earth). But if that happened, it would be another step leading the world away from fossil fuels and the “energy dominance” that the Trump team dreams of.

“When we say ‘all of the above,’ you might ask, is that code for carbon? And yes, it is code for carbon,” said Troy Fitrell, a senior State Department official and former ambassador to Guinea. “There are no restrictions anymore on what kind of energy we can promote.”

In case you’re wondering how all this is going to happen, it’s worth remembering that one of Trump’s first acts in office was to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign governments. As the evangelical magazine Christianity Today (in an earlier day, evangelicals had actually argued for the law, on the grounds of, you know, honesty) pointed out yesterday,

Taken by itself, the FCPA freeze could merely be a messy attempt to limit the authority of the DOJ and the SEC. But halting FCPA in tandem with limiting enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force poses a shift in American policy likely to affect not just American oversight of American bribery abroad but also the US government’s ability to monitor foreign agents in America.

If the U.S. is able to bully or bribe African governments into building more coal-fired power plants, let me make a prediction. Just as we’ve seen in Pakistan this past year, the expensive and unreliable power those plants deliver on underbuilt grids will be one more factor pushing people towards cheap solar. In fact, as I’ve described in this newsletter already, that process is underway across much of Africa already, as people and companies buy up cheap Chinese solar panels and liberate themselves from the status quo.

It would be cheaper, and provide more power more quickly to more people, to do this systematically with solar minigrids, as Power Africa has been envisioning, instead of one roof at a time. But the turn to the sun will happen eventually anyway; in the end, the greed unleashed by Trump, Wright, and their friends will be insufficient to alter either physics or economics. Much damage will be done in the meantime, though—to Africans, to the climate, and to whatever remains of the idea of American leadership. The Chinese are doubtless chortling; indeed by this point the laughter must be nonstop. If you want to read one account of China’s rise to the renewable pinnacle, this Washington Post piece might be it. Among other things, it makes clear that as the U.S. pushes coal, Beijing is actually offering something people want and need:

In 2024, Chinese exports of EVs, batteries, and solar and wind products to the Global South surged to account for a record 47 percent of the total.

“It’s probably a good thing for the climate because these clean technologies are diffusing all over the world,” says Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who was a senior adviser on Chinese climate issues in the Obama administration. “But it is also probably resulting in the United States losing even more market share globally.”

At this point we sure deserve that loss. Here’s the big and wonderful news from China this week: gasoline sales fell…9 percent last year, as EVs took hold in the country. If I were Big Oil I’d be desperately trying to leverage the White House too, I guess.

+Taking their lead from the new administration, oil companies and banks are now no longer talking about their plans for carbon reduction. BP is completing its second “pivot” back to oil and gas in 25 years (As usual Brett Christophers provides insightful comment) and the global consortium of banks that pledged to cut their emissions financing is a) no longer global, thanks to the departure of the big American banks and b) about to give up on the 1.5 Celsius target that had been its mantra. Wells Fargo made a particularly egregious move last week, as the watchdog group As You Sow pointed out.

Indeed the fear among the rich and powerful is so deep it’s given rise to a new name: “greenhushing.” As Coco Liu and Olivia Rudgard explain,

In 2024, 63 out of the 100 largest publicly listed firms in Britain were under-promoting their work in environmental protection, according to an analysis by the Manchester, UK-based research firm Connected Impact, which examined the differences between what companies disclosed in public filings and what they presented in promotional materials. When it came to US companies, the researchers found the desire for staying unnoticed was even greater — as many as 67 major public and private firms resorted to greenhushing.

As one executive explained, “this isn’t a good time to put a red flag in front of the bull.” It’s not just the climate they’re clamming up about either. The Guardian reports that State Street, the investment giant that commissioned the “Fearless Girl” statue to face Wall Street’s rampaging bull, has decided to end its diversity programs.

The change may seem small, but it speaks to a larger chilling effect that Donald Trump’s second term is having on DEI initiatives. Since Trump’s election, multiple companies including McDonald’s, Target, Meta and Amazon, publicly announced they were dropping their DEI goals. The Trump administration signed executive orders ending DEI within the federal government and has promised it is looking into how to curtail DEI in the private sector.

A Bloomberg report pointed out that BlackRock and Vanguard, two major investment firms in the US, similarly seemed to drop language encouraging diversity in corporate boards in their guidelines.

+In a truly lovely story about the possibilities for a new world, the veteran journalist Keith Schneider lays out the advanced planning to run Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington—perhaps the most contaminated site in America—into a large-scale solar farm, with panels enough to provide power to three million homes.

If all goes according to plan, the Hecate project, which is expected to be completed in 2030, will be by far the largest site the government has cleaned up and converted from land that had been used for nuclear research, weapons and waste storage. It is expected to generate up to 2,000 megawatts of electricity — enough roughly to supply all the homes in Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver — and store 2,000 more in a large battery installation at a total cost of $4 billion. The photovoltaic panels and batteries will provide twice as much energy as a conventional nuclear power plant. The nation’s current biggest solar plant, the Copper Mountain Solar Facility in Nevada, can generate up to 802 megawatts of energy.

It will not surprise you to learn that the biggest obstacle to the plan is “whether the Trump administration will thwart efforts that the Biden administration put in place to develop more clean electricity generation.” I’d predict yes—except that cleaning up this boondoggle might be too good a deal even for this administration to pass up. Then again…

+A lovely look at traditional irrigation methods in Bali, now under threat. Since the single biggest effect of climate change may well be on the planet’s hydrology—how water moves around the earth—it behooves us all to think a little about the ways humans have figured out to conserve and distribute this most important of resources.

And speaking of beautiful, we have the first biography of the musician Paul Winter—who has been a truly important voice for the environment for decades. When you’re anxious (and that’s me most of the time these last weeks) you could do worse than listening to his Grand Canyon recordings

Oh, and Florence Reed and her wonderful colleagues at Sustainable Harvest International have a new documentary on the rise of regenerative farming. You’ll hear from Eliot Coleman, Vandana Shiva, maybe even me.

And then there’s the endlessly interesting writer Lauren Markham, with her “13 Ways of Looking,” an effort to memorialize in words but also pictures the things we’re losing to climate change. “Back when I was hungry for the world, and not yet grieving it, cameras offered me a slowing down of time. The lens was a portal, not a retreat. The most moving memorial is a portal, too: it offers a direct encounter with something we might otherwise wish to avoid. A memorial asks us to feel the weight of something and return to our lives altered by it.”

One more nifty new thing: veteran journalist Jim Lardner has a new podcast devoted to the resistance—first guest is the endlessly fascinating Ivan Marovic who played a large part in unseating Serbian strongman Slobadan Milosevic. Listen and learn!

+New York State is on track to become the first in the nation to ban gas hookups in new buildings, after a ruling last week from the state’s Fire Prevention and Building Code Council. Good news because buildings are the Empire State’s leading source of emissions

The new draft code also tightens a slew of other standards in a bid to make buildings more energy efficient and save residents money over the long term. But it leaves out several key provisions recommended in the state’s climate plan — possibly running afoul of a 2022 law.

Specifically, the draft energy code leaves out requirements that new homes include on-site energy storage and be wired such that owners can easily add electric vehicle chargers (when the property includes parking space) and solar panels. The state’s 2022 climate plan listed these three provisions as “key strategies” to achieve New York’s legally binding emissions targets. On-site energy storage also makes homes more resilient when disasters strike, the plan noted, providing backup power in the event of a blackout.

+American ranchers are renting out their sheep flocks to solar farms for weed control, and it’s helping the bottom line

Sheep-herding for solar is one of the ways farmers are scrambling to diversify their income, as a multi-year slump in the U.S. agricultural economy has hit crop producers particularly hard, economists said.

If one Illinois farmer had raised cotton last year, his farm would have seen a $200,000 loss, he said. Making money farming sheep only for meat would be tough too. Instead, he cleared a profit of about $300,000, thanks to the solar sheep grazing payments and starting to sell lamb meat to a restaurant supplier, he said.

+Hard to satirize Donald Trump, but Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer makes an excellent stab in this essay. As he points out, not even enviros have been able to increase the cost of energy the way that Trump’s Canadian tariffs threaten to, so perhaps he’s a closet green after all

Just think about it. Transportation is the most carbon-intensive sector of the U.S. economy, and big personal vehicles — SUVs and pickups — are responsible for the largest share of that pollution. Selling those big trucks to Americans is what drives Ford and General Motors’ profits, and those two companies have developed complex supply chains that can cross the U.S., Mexican, and Canadian borders half a dozen times before their vehicles’ final assembly. The biggest trucks — like the Chevy Silverado — have a particularly arcane value chain, spanning Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Japan.

Environmentalists have struggled to figure out how to deal with Americans’ affinity for these big cars. But you, Mr. Trump, you knew just what needed to be done. You slapped giant tariffs on cars and trucks and auto parts, which could spike new car prices by $4,000 to $10,000, according to Anderson Economic Group.

+To end with some chunks of good news:

#The U.S. appears to have its first entrant in the ‘balcony solar’ craze sweeping Europe. If you’re in California, a company called Brightsaver stands ready to sell and install plug-and-play solar systems with no upfront costs.

#And the genius for resistance continues to grow. Old friend and ingenious social media organizer Alex Haraus is one of the clever minds collaborating with the rapidly rising Resistance Rangers, bringing the fight against Trump to national parks and forests

alex.haraus

A post shared by @alex.haraus

#A new study indicates that pet dogs find EVs more relaxing than internal combustion engines. I know a fair number of people who care more about the comfort of their pooch than the future of the planet, so this will be a powerful new argument!

#And finally, last week I told you about the American nordic skiers who were racing in special suits at the world championships to dramatize melting glaciers. Well, as a fascinating account from Nat Herz at Faster Skier makes clear, that’s not all they were doing. After climate protesters threatened to invade the course and disrupt the 50k race that climaxes the championship, two American skiers—Julia Kern (who won herself a silver medal in the team sprint) and Gus Schumacher—sat down with the activists and hammered out an agreement that advances their cause considerably: it’s a letter from many of the sports stars asking that their federation figure out how to end fossil fuel financing of the winter sport.

That they were able to do this in the middle of the busiest week of the year makes all the more shameful the sell-out of our actual diplomats, busy trying to foist coal on Africa.

“I absolutely love ski racing. But to use that platform to make meaningful change, that is purpose,” Kern said in an interview after Friday’s women’s relay, where the U.S. placed sixth. She added: “My purpose in skiing isn’t the results. It’s a lot more than that. And I think it is really helpful to be reminded: We’re doing this for more than just ourselves.”

It’s good to be reminded our country is still capable of this kind of grace.