Robinson Meyer

By Robinson Meyer

Mr. Meyer is a contributing Opinion writer and the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on clean energy and climate change.

The American economy seems to be slowing. Although the unemployment rate remains low, the jobs report released this month showed that the U.S. labor market has essentially been stalled since President Trump foisted “Liberation Day” on us in April. Yes, it’s true, the artificial intelligence sector remains white-hot, but once you look beyond it, the weather is chillier — the manufacturing sector may be shrinking, home building is slowing and most employment growth is happening in just one industry: health care.

Perhaps this slowdown will soon reverse. But nearly seven months into his presidency, it’s now clear that Mr. Trump and his officials’ tax and trade policy — and their hatred for next-generation energy technologies — is distorting and, increasingly, robbing the economy of its complexity. And if he keeps at it, Mr. Trump will demote America into a deindustrialized power that relies on technology developed elsewhere and doesn’t know how to sell much more than crypto, soybeans and petroleum products.

You can see this, first, because Mr. Trump and his officials are waging a war on electricity infrastructure. This campaign is primarily driven by their opposition to the solar and wind farms that they associate with their foils, the Democrats. Even as electricity has clearly become more important to the economy — and even as the country’s biggest technology firms strive to secure any spare electron for their new metropolis-size data centers — Mr. Trump and his team have begun a regulatory coup to smother new power development.

That war began, of course, with Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy law, which pinched off long-running tax credits for wind and solar energy. But it does not stop there. In the past few weeks, the Trump administration has started an all-out war on renewable energy. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has weaponized his department’s permitting process to slow down wind, solar and battery projects nationwide — every step of every federal permit for renewable energy must now pass under the eye of some political appointee. Another recent order has suggested that the federal government may essentially ban wind and solar farms from public land. A separate Transportation Department policy could even restrict companies’ ability to build private wind farms on private land.

At the same time, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, has killed federal financing for the Grain Belt Express transmission project, an electricity megaproject that was set to zip 5,000 megawatts of power across the Great Plains. Although the power line was fully permitted and approved, it had grown unpopular with some Missouri farmers, and thus with the Republican senator Josh Hawley.

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In other moods and moments, Mr. Wright has said that the country must build more power lines, not fewer. But in stranding the project, Mr. Wright has endangered a cheap new power supply and damaged the government’s credibility. As long as he governs, executives cannot trust the Energy Department to keep its promises.

Mr. Trump’s maelstrom of tariffs is further eroding our economic complexity. As more and more businesses are realizing, his trade levies are more likely to weaken domestic manufacturers than strengthen them. That’s because Mr. Trump is unpredictably imposing tariffs on everything — raw materials, factory equipment and even some Canadian and Mexican products — and then constantly changing these levies.

That makes it impossible for domestic manufacturers to plan how and where to expand capacity to avoid the new taxes. By comparison, Mr. Trump’s handshake agreements with foreign countries offer something closer to certainty for foreign manufacturers. If companies must choose between paying a flat 15 percent import tariff or navigating America’s ever-shifting stack of steel, aluminum and equipment taxes, they’ll often choose to manufacture abroad.

But the clearest example of the atrophy is in the bill’s demolition of electric vehicle tax credits. E.V.s are to the 21st century what gasoline-burning cars were to the 20th century: an important “apex” industry that builds on and incorporates the work of other sectors, like steel, mining and chemicals.

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In their tax law, congressional Republicans kept some subsidies in place for companies that produce E.V.s, which will manage to keep American factories just barely cost-competitive on a per-unit basis. But they stripped out incentives to help consumers buy or lease electric vehicles. Mr. Trump’s lobotomizing of the Environmental Protection Agency means that soon there will be essentially no mechanism for the government to encourage Americans to buy E.V.s, which will leave the infant industry without a reliable source of new demand. Companies are responding as you might expect: Since Mr. Trump took office, more than two dozen E.V. or clean energy manufacturing projects across the country — totaling more than $27 billion in investment — have been paused, canceled or closed.

Smothering the E.V. industry might have been merely a regrettable mistake for a Republican to make 10 years ago. Today, it is economic idiocy. Over the past decade, China has built a new kind of industrial economy that combines a specific stack of technologies — batteries, motors, semiconductors, sensors and software — into high-end manufactured goods like cars and drones. It is better at producing these high-end goods than just about anyone else in the world. Its electric cars, in particular, are “far superior” to what’s available in the West, according to Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive.

Some observers even believe that China will become the world’s first “electrostate” — a country that runs on electricity, not oil. What it has already accomplished is, in some ways, more impressive: With its solar panels and batteries, China is on its way to turning energy production into something closer to a manufactured good. It is now able to sell solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles to the rest of the world as a low-cost, low-pollution alternative to fossil fuels or internal combustion vehicles.

China did not pursue these technologies simply for the environment’s sake: Its national security needs have long led it to seek alternatives to petroleum. (It still builds a lot of coal-burning power plants for the same reason.) But Americans should not miss the significance of what seems to be happening: China’s low-cost electronic technologies once augmented gasoline and internal-combustion cars; now, they are replacing them. And as Chinese companies transform the global energy market with cheap solar panels, batteries and E.V.s, America is acting like a doddering industrial giant — too hooked on oil and gas revenues, and the political power that results from them, to exercise the economic muscles it will need in the future.

The United States is good at growing food, drilling for oil and gas, making chemicals, producing software and building internal combustion vehicles of various types. We are not as good at making cost-competitive batteries, electronics, solar panels, wind turbines or E.V.s. Without a concerted effort to make us more skilled at the latter, the United States will surrender its technological edge in the very industries that have long contributed to its economic (and military) strength.

You can understand the energy transition as just the newest stage of the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century, coal and steam represented industrial society’s technological frontier; in the early 20th century, oil, gas, chemicals and electricity were where innovation happened. Since the 1980s, the American economy has seen — and led — a global transition of information technologies from carbon-based products to silicon; we’ve seen hardware and software eat the world of newspapers, radio, the law and business.

Now silicon and lithium are devouring the transportation sector — cars, trains, flight and military technology. Mr. Trump is actively trying to keep American companies from participating in the consumer side of that revolution — probably because admitting that it’s happening might hurt oil companies. So instead, he’s undercutting the new and nascent sectors of the American economy — making us less innovative, prosperous and free.

In the very short term, we will probably be fine. We will keep buying gas-guzzling S.U.V.s, building suburban homes and training A.I. models. Technology executives will keep giving glass and gold plaques to the president. In the long term, I worry that we are ill-prepared for what’s coming.

More on Trump’s war on renewable energy

Suddenly, the Trump Administration Tightens the Vise on Wind Farms

Aug. 7, 2025

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In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant.

May 19, 2025

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Poof! There Goes America’s Competitive Advantage in a Warming World

April 14, 2025

Robinson Meyer is a contributing Opinion writer and the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on clean energy and climate change.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5760675&forum_id=2)#49171306)

https://muckrack.com/yayitsrob

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5760675&forum_id=2)#49171311)

Thats also a furking subsidy for car buyers u faggot benchod, its just not as direct as a furking EV credit. Why r u ppl so furking stupid

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5760675&forum_id=2)#49171338)

Me: wearing slippers, drinking coffee at the breakfast table on a Sunday morning, reading the morning paper but every page just says "FUCK LIBS"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5760675&forum_id=2)#49171330)

Shocker that housing is slowing when they won’t lower rates

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5760675&forum_id=2)#49171627)