Of all the epithets hurled at Donald Trump since he became US president, perhaps the most unusual was delivered last week – that he is, in fact, some sort of environmentalist.
Trump is the “greatest gift” to the environmental movement, argued Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, due to the fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran.
“He’s woken the world up to how vulnerable we are to petro-dictatorships, how vulnerable we are to disruptions in the Middle East,” Newsom told the Guardian during Climate Week in New York. “This war has completely gutted any sort of romantic notions of energy security and it’s compelled folks to think differently. It’s accelerating investments and clean energy and renewables.”
If Trump has been an accidental environmentalist, it’s been in the international sphere. The strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil and gas exports usually flow, is now starting to open up but has been routinely snarled since the Iran war began in February, causing the cost of these fossil fuels to soar around the world.
Countries reacted by scrambling to cut their oil and gas use while turning to cleaner forms of energy such as solar and wind (although there’s also been a small uptick in coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels).
The overall consequence has been a positive one for our shared climate, with global fossil fuel emissions set to drop by 0.5% this year due to the crisis, Carbon Brief has estimated. The peak in oil consumption may have been sped up enough to arrive this year, rather than the previous estimate of 2029, according to the International Energy Agency.
By launching the war, Trump is set to achieve something only dreamed about by climate advocates and not seen outside global economic crashes or the Covid-19 pandemic – an annual reduction in the emissions that are overheating our planet. The president’s imposition of tariffs and importation of foreign ground beef, meanwhile, may also end up hurting the US cattle industry, another major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s a curious thing to say, but I believe it,” Newsom, a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, said of Trump as a sort of unintentional biophile. “This moment will mark how we can’t go back to our original form.”
Yet the idea of Trump as an environmentalist, even an accidental one, can still appear faintly absurd. His administration has eviscerated pollution limits on cars, trucks and power plants, funnelled taxpayer cash and favors to the fossil fuel industry and set about unilaterally cancelling renewable energy projects.
Trump, who has never by available evidence ever set a Florsheimed foot in any of the US’s national parks, has called environmentalists “terrorists”, the climate crisis “a hoax” and has slashed conservation rules to the extent you can now kill a protected species as long as it wasn’t provably intentional.
Perhaps tellingly, when asked during the 2024 election campaign about his environmental credentials, Trump cited his Florida golf course getting awards for “the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water.”
Critics say this record overshadows any embrace of clean energy by other countries spooked by an oil price that has hovered about $100 a barrel for months but should, at some point in the interminable Iran conflict, drop well below this. The impetus for quitting fossil fuels could wither when it does so.
“Trump’s illegal attack on Iran may hasten clean energy in some countries, but he has gutted green tech in the United States and set us back decades,” said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University who said Newsom was guilty of “tunnel vision” in his framing of Trump. “The notion that he is an accidental environmentalist is wishful thinking.”
The conflict may have rocked the oil and gas industry but it has also enriched it, netting eight of the largest companies more than $90bn in just the first three months of the war, with even pro-oil Trump complaining that the major fossil fuel firms are “making too much money”.
There is little sign big oil fears a looming obsolescence when this bonanza ends. Last month, Exxon forecast that while the world will reduce its emissions, it will still use 105m barrels of oil a day in 2050, up from 100m barrels last year. Two-thirds of the global energy mix will stubbornly remain comprised of oil, gas and coal at the midpoint of the century, the oil company estimated.
“All of the oil that is produced will be burned – if they produce more, more will be used,” said Juan Carlos Navarro, environment minister of Panama. “The people who predict that there will be a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases are simply lying or blind.”
The only hope is that the world “can cap consumption and production at levels similar to the ones we have right now”, Navarro added, citing the enormous energy demand of artificial intelligence datacenters, which are largely being run on gas-fired power.
However, climate advocates maintain the Iran conflict will accelerate trends that are already swinging behind clean energy. Investment in renewables globally is now double that of fossil fuels, almost all new power being added to grids comes from clean sources and last year one in four cars sold was electric.
Unlike previous oil shocks, the world now has a viable alternative to fossil fuels, even if it’s unclear how lasting an impact Trump’s military and trade actions will have in pushing countries towards them. “There is one thing that all these events are making clear,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission said in April. “We are paying a very high price for our over-dependency on fossil fuels.”
Countries from the UK to India to Thailand have sought to speed up the transition to renewables as the price of fossil fuel dependency has spiraled, saving billions. Electric vehicle sales have surged, although not in the US. Trump has urged other countries to reject the “scam” of clean energy but the market is increasingly favoring cheap wind, solar and batteries that have plummeted in cost in recent years, including in the US.
“Demand has massively spiked for solar and for battery storage,” said Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council. “We’re seeing that all over the world – the Philippines, across Europe, across Southeast Asia, Australia and beyond.”
“This Iran crisis, which was, in effect, started by president Trump, has led to a massive surge in demand for our technology … but actually it’s just building on a trend that was already there,” she added.
Political and business leaders can mull the fact that the wind does not funnel through the strait of Hormuz and the sun doesn’t only shine on a foreign autocrat’s lands. The Iran war may not prove a fatal blow to fossil fuels, but it has starkly highlighted their inherent volatility.
The case for renewables has become obvious at a grassroots level in developing countries, too, where rooftops increasingly glitter with cheap Chinese-made solar panels that are helping negate soaring power bills.
“The price of solar has come down so quickly that there are now 100,000 solar panels installed every day in Africa,” Al Gore, the former US vice-president, said last week. “In parts of Pakistan, a common bride’s dowry is now three panels and an inverter, instead of 10 or 12 goats. It’s beginning to kick into gear.”
This momentum won’t stop once the conflict around the Persian Gulf end, Dunlop insisted. “I don’t think the world is just going to go back to business-as-usual demand of fossil fuels once this crisis ends,” she said. “Once someone decides to step off the fossil fuel rollercoaster, they’re off it.”
So does all this, then, make Trump an environmentalist? “I wouldn’t say that,” Dunlop demurred. “He certainly has his own ideas.”
