Chaos, uncertainty, “we don’t know yet.” These are words I’ve heard more during Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House than I’ve heard at any other time as a reporter.
That’s not to say there haven’t already been real-world impacts. Trump has gutted the staff of
key agencies dealing with climate policy and science, and shut multiple offices focused on environmental justice. His administration has taken offline thousands of web resources related to climate change and shut down a $5 billion offshore wind project that had just started construction. And then there’s the fact that now everyone, no matter what side of the energy transition they fall on, is talking about “energy dominance.”
With on-again-off-again tariffs, court-challenged funding freezes, “because I said so” regulatory rollbacks, and hazy threats to clean energy tax credits, it’s still hard to know what of Trump’s early actions back in office will stick. The long-term effects of Trump’s initial actions on the climate economy are still just estimates; projections. But I wanted to see what we could say definitively about Trump’s second first 100 days. What does the data tell us?
Trump is moving faster than he did in 2017
By the end of Trump’s first first 100 days, he had signed 24 executive orders, total. As of today, Trump has signed
20 executive orders related to environmental policy alone, out of more than 100 total.
This is partially a volume play. Trump stated in the run-up to the inauguration that he would sign 100 executive orders on his first day. He didn’t, but clearly quantity is part of the point.
Some executive orders are more potent than others. Legal experts say his order directing the attorney general to “stop the enforcement” of state climate programs is unlikely to go anywhere. It’s also not clear that his “reinvigoration of the clean coal industry” is more than wishful thinking. But he’s also terminated
environmental justice programs and positions throughout the government, and ordered agencies to expand timber production and fishing, as well as to expedite fossil fuel development and deep-sea mining.
Trump has the stock market on a yo-yo
Trump’s tariff strategy is still shifting by the day, making it hard to pin down exactly how it will affect the clean energy transition. If global tariffs on steel and aluminum remain in place, everything — fossil fuels and renewables, internal combustion cars and EVs — will feel the pain. Tariffs on China and other East Asian countries will be tough for battery and solar companies, but they could also hurt liquified natural gas companies hoping to sell into those markets.
What we do know is that markets have been hanging on Trump’s every word, and that every utterance of “tariff” has sparked a crash. Even after Trump pulled back his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs, the economy still appears to be bracing for a recession.
Trump is sabotaging his fossil fuel agenda
Fears of a global recession have
also tanked oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude oil, a common benchmark for oil prices, has traded below $65 since April 4, shortly after Trump’s global tariff announcement. Oil companies have said that $65 a barrel is the minimum price they need to profitably drill new wells.
But the trade war isn’t the only headache for U.S. producers. The same day Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, the international oil cartel OPEC+ declared that it would boost production, and will flood the market with more than 400,000 barrels per day in May. Ironically, despite his “drill, baby, drill” agenda, Trump may view both cases as a victory. He has been pushing OPEC and domestic producers alike to bring down the price of oil.
The weekly rig count, a common metric for the health of the oil industry, declined after the tariff announcement, dropping from 489 to 480 from April 4 to 11. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s the largest drop recorded since June 2023, according to Baker Hughes. (And a reminder that the U.S. produced more oil under President Biden than ever before.) Producers don’t appear to be making rash changes on the oil patch just yet, but if prices remain low, experts expect production to plateau, or even decline.
Projects are being canceled … but Trump’s influence is hazy
Perhaps the most difficult question to suss out in the data is the extent to which Trump’s initial actions have caused clean energy projects to collapse.
A recent
report from Clean Investment Monitor, a project of the Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, found that the first quarter of this year saw the biggest loss of investment in clean manufacturing from project cancellations and closures of the past several years. The data is stark and implies that Trump is to blame, but a closer look at the projects complicates that narrative.
For example, American battery manufacturer KORE Power announced in February that it was cancelling plans to build a $1.25 billion factory in Buckeye, Arizona, but the company had quietly
put its production site on the market in mid-January and is now trying to revive the plan as a factory retrofit rather than a new build. Freyr Battery cancelled a $2.6 billion plan to manufacture battery cells in Newnan, Georgia, but the company cited “rising interest rates, falling battery prices, a change in company leadership and a shift in its goals,” according to the Associated Press — Freyr has decided to produce solar panels instead. The closure of two of Solar4America’s manufacturing sites in California and South Carolina, first reported by PV Magazine, were likely due to waning sales in 2024.
Every example I found seemed to present a similarly muddled picture. It’s possible, and even likely, that Trump has spooked clean manufacturing companies and affected demand projections for things like batteries. But companies don’t seem to be citing federal policy explicitly in their decisions — at least not yet.
Investment in new projects also appears to be continuing alongside these cancellations. The Clean Investment Monitor report found that $9.4 billion worth of projects were announced in the first quarter of this year. That's more than the end of last year, but 23% below the first quarter of 2024.
Clean energy generation is another story, presenting cases where there’s no question Trump has played a role in killing projects. On his first day in office, Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum pulling approvals for the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, a project that would have created more than 700 jobs during construction, 20 permanent jobs, and brought millions in tax revenue into the state, but that
faced intense local opposition. The developer behind Lava Ridge, LS Power, quietly took the project off its portfolio map.
But here, too, there’s shades of gray. Many solar farms were set to receive loans from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for example, but are in limbo as the fate of the program gets battled out in the courts. Some may not survive the time it takes for that process to play out, but if the program is ultimately salvaged, other projects could take their place.
The real moment of truth for clean manufacturing and energy generation projects is coming up in Congress, which is working on a “big, beautiful” budget bill to enact Trump’s tax cut agenda. If Republicans decide to kill the tax credits that are crucial to these factories and power plants, there’ll be no question about what happens next — or what’s to blame.
GMC
