Why Donald Trump is going after Europe’s Green Deal

“A 180-degree pivot.” This is how US energy secretary Chris Wright described, to a group of oil-industry bosses in March, the new direction the Trump administration intends to impose on America’s climate and energy policies.

During the meeting, Wright argued that climate change “is a side effect of building the modern world.” In other words: to power the planet there is no alternative to fossil fuels.

The Inflation Reduction Act, approved by President Joe Biden in 2022, was the biggest federal investment in United States history. It was designed to combat climate change. The law's reversal will mean budget cuts that affect the entire scientific sector and could lead to the cancellation of whole research programmes, from climate to space.

Indeed, the Trump administration is seeking to shut down virtually all research conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that leads the world in climate modelling. Across the USA, NOAA operates dozens of research labs that study the atmosphere, oceans, rivers and lakes. They monitor many of the natural and artificial processes that occur on Earth, including greenhouse-gas emissions and phenomena such as heat waves and droughts.

As in other policy areas, President Trump has been forcing major changes in climate and environmental policy by means of executive order.

On the first day of his term, he withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, launched plans to open up parts of Alaska to mining, blocked federal permits for new wind farms, ordered federal agencies to halt subsidies for electric vehicles, and suspended authorizations for renewable-energy projects on public lands.

Trump also set his sights on the Environmental Protection Agency. Its new director, Lee Zeldin, began dismantling regulations and investments in clean energy the moment he took office. The axed projects were related to climate, scientific research and emissions data collection by private companies.

The White House has decided to cut funding for the US Global Change Research Program, which issues the government's main climate report and assesses the effects of global warming on the USA every four years. A similar fate has befallen the National Weather Service. Meanwhile, subsidies are being ramped up for the fossil-fuel industry, starting with coal.

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Europe, the tariff war and the Green Deal

Tariffs, which have been repeatedly announced, withdrawn and reintroduced, are part of the Trump administration's new approach to industrial and energy policy. It amounts to a form of trade warfare.

And this is where Europe comes in, with its Green Deal.

In late February, Trump announced that he wanted to impose 25% tariffs on cars and other goods, including steel and aluminium, imported from the EU. Brussels initially considered countermeasures but then proposed to Washington a mutual elimination of tariffs on such goods. This proposal was rejected by Trump. He instead raised the stakes, arguing that the only way to achieve a trade truce would be for the EU to purchase $350 billion worth of US energy, particularly liquefied natural gas (LNG).

What was Trump's motive for this demand and for the 25% tariff on EU industrial goods and cars? After all, 50% of European LNG already comes from the US: Europe turned to it to replace Russian supplies. And there is no major EU-USA trade imbalance (3%) that could justify a trade war.

Trump’s real goal is something else: it is to undermine the EU's Green Deal. As highlighted in an analysis by the think tank ECCO, more than 50% of US exports to Europe are fossil-fuel products. The EU and countries around the world are supposed to be phasing these out following the 2015 Paris climate agreements (from which the US is once again pulling out).

Through the Green Deal, the EU is freeing itself from fossil fuels and building its own independence, energy security, and competitiveness.

In the electricity sector alone, since the launch of the Green Deal in 2019, renewable energies have made it possible to avoid hydrocarbon imports worth €59 billion. The United States is already the world's leading exporter of LNG. Europe's Green Deal poses a serious threat to Donald Trump's industrial and energy policy of “drill, baby drill”.

Trump's goal, says ECCO, is to keep Europe buying gas for the long term, thus undermining its independence from fossil fuels. This would prevent Europe from turning to other partners, primarily China. Unlike the USA, China is pushing forward its energy transition and is becoming dominant in the whole clean-tech sector.

So what will Europe do? And what role will Italy play? Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government has repeatedly said that it wants to focus on LNG and make Italy a gas hub.

At EU level, Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen has expressed interest in purchasing American LNG, but his words suggest that this must not undermine the Green Deal. For ECCO, the Green Deal “represents a strategic lever to enhance European and Italian competitiveness, promoting innovation in production processes, products and energy efficiency.” Abandoning it would mean being anchored to outdated economic models tied to fossil fuels and “aligning with Trump's policies, which transparently seek to protect only partisan interests.”

“The great climate disconnect”

“Trump's return to power must be a strong push for the EU and its members to overcome political divisions and unite around the objective of pursuing decarbonisation”, say Simone Tagliapietra and Cecilia Trasi of Bruegel, a think tank.

The signals coming from various European capitals are not encouraging. Pilitia Clark, of the Financial Times, believes we are witnessing an ever-deepening disconnect between the climate crisis and climate policy. Just as extreme weather events continue to escalate and each successive year becomes the hottest on record, it seems that the whole planet has agreed to put the fight against global warming on hold.

In Europe's largest economy, Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has enjoyed huge electoral success by promising to tear down wind farms, which it calls “windmills of shame”.

In Austria, the far-right ÖVP focused its election campaign on a complete rethink of climate policy. The party is part of Patriots for Europe, the third-largest group in the European Parliament. Its leaders attacked the “ideology” of the Green Deal during a recent rally in Madrid.

The narrative pushed by these groups, that green policies are a burden on ordinary people, is gaining traction. Last year's massive farmers' protests in Central Europe provided some evidence of that.

Meanwhile, the list of companies scaling back their environmental efforts continues to grow. Even Norwegian energy giant Equinor (which changed its name from Statoil seven years ago in a green pivot) now plans to ramp up its hydrocarbons business and halve its spending on renewables.

This is the backdrop as we approach the tenth anniversary of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the global pact that should be driving action to slow global warming. “Why is all this happening now?”, asks Clark. ”What has changed since 2020, when companies and countries alike were scrambling to support net zero policies? There is no single answer, but it is no coincidence that the green backlash has emerged as countries stop merely setting net zero goals and start launching policies to meet them.”

And the window of opportunity for the fossil-fuel industry just keeps getting larger.

Original article on Valigia Blu