This president’s views on climate change and energy have been clear since before he took office. In a Mar-a-Lago meeting in April 2024, Trump asked oil companies to donate $1 billion to his campaign to retake the White House as he promised to slash Biden administration’s tax credits for electric vehicles and to spend less government money developing wind power and other renewables.

The meeting included executives from oil companies ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Continental Resources, as well as natural gas producer EQT, gas exporter Cheniere Energy and the trade association American Petroleum Institute. While Trump said the $1 billion contribution would fuel his presidential campaign, some of the executives present believed the money would also be used to pay the lawyers defending him in various court cases. Trump said the donations would be a deal for oil executives because of the tax cuts and relaxed regulations he would implement, increasing their profits.

Major oil companies continue to rake in historic windfall profits, with the six largest firms — including ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell earning nearly $3,000 per second. Driven by increasing crude oil prices, these companies are funneling record earnings into large stock buybacks and shareholder payouts, while the rest of us face high gasoline costs.

Trump’s extremely blunt and transactional pitch reveals clearly how he targeted the petroleum industry to finance his reelection campaign. Simultaneously, he turned to the industry to assist him in shaping his agenda, including terminating some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles. Trump let the oil executives know he would start auctioning off more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a priority that some of the executives raised. He also spoke loudly against offshore wind power, stating it causes cancer, is prohibitively expensive and makes whales “go a little bit loco” — none of which are true.

In the subsequent months since he took over the White House, he has terminated several major fully permitted offshore wind leases, which had brought nearly $2 billion to the government. Trump required that the companies who had leased the offshore areas pledge not to develop any U.S. offshore wind projects and invest that money in fossil fuels instead. He effectively cancelled the offshore wind industry in the U.S. for the immediate future. We now have a grand total of seven operating offshore wind turbines that were built before Trump became president, while northern Europe presently has nearly 7,000 grid-connected offshore wind turbines producing clean renewable energy.

We are all now painfully aware of the continuing consequences of this president’s many irresponsible actions, including a very large increase in gasoline and fertilizer prices that will soon be reflected in food costs. At a time when it makes more long-term, logical, sustainable and environmental sense than ever before to move quickly to renewables (wind and solar), Trump is propping up the dirty coal industry and pushing to open more offshore areas for oil drilling.

Nonetheless, last year, 26% of all power in the U.S. came from renewables, enough to power 108 million homes for a year. Although support of the fossil fuel industry is typically part of the Republican agenda, the Solar Energy Industry Association reported that typically Republican states, including Texas, Florida and Ohio, accounted for 73% of all new solar energy added in 2025.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that 93% of new electrical generating capacity this year will come from wind, solar and batteries. Another positive sign — coal production fell by 53% between 2000 and 2024 and now generates just 16% of utility-scale electricity. Coal-fired plants have been closing over the past 15 years due to cheaper and cleaner natural gas and renewables. Total employment in the coal industry continues dropping and now has just 38,700 workers, which compares to nearly 150,000 people in the wind industry across 50 states, about 370,550 workers in the solar industry. For some additional perspective, the coal industry has about half as many workers as are employed in bowling alleys.

Tax credits and federal funding for clean energy projects have been slashed or revoked, and dozens of construction projects have been halted. However, many of these policies have faced legal challenges. In December of last year, a Massachusetts district court struck down a ban on new wind energy permits, ruling it “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law.” That same month, after stop-work orders were issued for five offshore wind farm projects off the East Coast, all of these have now been successfully challenged in court. And in January, a federal judge ruled that the cancellation of $7.5 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants was unlawful, as they predominantly targeted Democratic states.

By the end of 2025, renewable energy provided nearly half of all global power capacity. Renewables also accounted for 86.5% of all new generating capacity added last year.

Moving to the U.S., which states do you think derive the highest portion of their power from wind and solar? No. 1 may surprise you: Iowa generated 61% of their electricity from wind and solar. South Dakota was second, producing 59% of their power, nearly all of this from wind. New Mexico is No. 3, with about 50% of electricity from renewables, 36% was from wind and 17% from the sun. California is moving forward fast with renewables last year providing 44% of the state’s power. Thirteen individual states produced over 30% of their energy from wind and solar.

Despite the strong opposition from the Trump administration by taking away tax credits and slowing or withholding permits for new projects, onshore wind and solar continue to grow in the United States. Reasons for this increase in renewables is clear: As electricity demand and utility bills increase, solar, wind and batteries, are now cheaper and quicker ways to get more electricity flowing. This cannot be said for old coal-fired power plants, which are expensive to run and produce greenhouse gases and other pollutants, or natural gas plants, which take a long time to build because of equipment shortages, and the challenges and costs of transporting natural gas.

Given current forecasts and economics, the question is not whether renewable energy will grow in the U.S., but rather how quickly — and how much that growth will be affected by domestic politics and policy choices.

Gary Griggs is a distinguished professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. He can be reached at griggs@ucsc.edu. For past Ocean Backyard columns, visit seymourcenter.ucsc.edu/ouroceanbackyard.