By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
President Trump’s hostility to any action that would slow climate change is so all-consuming that it even infects his economic policy.
The effect may be accidental, but his “Liberation Day” tariffs threaten to hurt clean energy just as much as his direct attacks on green finance and environmental protections. The result will be damage to the same economy Trump purports to be restoring to greatness.
The first effect of Trump’s tariff-palooza is obvious: High duties on imports from China, Vietnam and elsewhere will raise prices on solar panels, batteries and other vital components of the clean-energy transition, making it less profitable to buy and deploy them. Fewer wind farms, electric-vehicle charging stations and the like will get built as a result. “A less productive U.S. economy, which must pay higher prices for key inputs, is one that can spare fewer resources to address climate change,” Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit think tank, told Climate Brief.
Still, if the U.S. were dedicated to boosting domestic capacity to make this stuff, then things might eventually work out just fine; though we’d have years of higher greenhouse-gas emissions heating up the planet while we waited for workers to be trained and factories to open their doors.
The trouble is, Trump has been hacking away at the rationale for building this capacity with his whole-of-government approach to reversing as much climate progress as he can in as little time as possible. His administration wants to kill the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for clean energy. It’s trying to ditch environmental rules that push companies to cut their carbon footprints. It’s frozen the rollout of EV chargers. And on and on.
This creates a prime opportunity for China, Europe and others to gain a competitive advantage over the U.S. in these growing technologies. Protectionism has a history of turning domestic industries into pampered zoo babies unfit to survive in the wild. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague David Fickling notes, China’s Ming dynasty Trumpily shut its entire economy off to foreign trade for centuries, gaining nothing but repeated drubbings in the Opium Wars.
More recently, the Jones Act of 1920 was designed to protect U.S. shipbuilders by walling them off from the world. Instead the world simply found other places to make ships — hello, China — and the U.S. industry never recovered. Similarly, Trump’s plan to make America “energy dominant” by prioritizing fossil fuels is more likely to make it energy dormant.
But this isn’t just an American problem. Barriers to free trade are rising around the world, and many target solar panels, EVs and other green imports. Members of the Group of 20 nations imposed 16 new duties on clean-tech goods last year alone, according to BloombergNEF.
In a world where countries are firing tariffs back and forth at each other like guns in the last act of a Quentin Tarantino movie, everybody suffers, including the energy transition. United Nations climate scientists have long worried about such a world, even giving it a label: SSP3 (“SSP” being short for “Shared Socioeconomic Pathway”) or, more aptly, “Regional Rivalry: A Rocky Road.”
This grim world is one of “high challenges to mitigation and adaptation” and features “resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security and regional conflicts.” Check, check, and check. In this world, countries invest less in science and clean technology. Economic development slows and inequalities rise. Air, water and land become more polluted, and carbon emissions keep expanding. This world misses its already fleeting shot at limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages, the stretch goal of the Paris accords.
The short-term effects of runaway protectionism are potentially just as risky for clean energy. Trump’s tariffs are by some measures bigger than the Smoot-Hawley tariffs infamous for their association with the Great Depression and, more recently, Ferris Bueller. They may eventually be negotiated down to something less economically catastrophic, but a global recession is still very much on the table. JPMorgan Chase & Co. Inc. last week put the odds of one happening this year at 60 percent.
Global recessions can be poison for green investments. Businesses in survival mode are less inclined to take a flier on new technologies. Governments trying to revive their economies subsidize the cheapest forms of energy, which sometimes are the dirtiest. A recession accompanied by tariff-driven inflation might keep the Federal Reserve from cutting rates much, depriving clean tech of the monetary pixie dust that helped it soar during the zero-interest-rate era of 1,000 years ago (2022).
At the same time, downturns can create opportunities. Governments can stimulate economies by boosting clean-tech jobs and production, as President Biden and Congress repeatedly did. But Biden’s successor has displayed only animosity to such spending. His preference for fossil fuels is presented as an effort to lift the economy. But an increasingly chaotic climate is another headwind for growth. Trump’s schemes will backfire just as badly as his misguided tariffs.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. ©2025 Bloomberg L.P., bloomberg.com/opinion.
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