Photograph Source: ENERGY.GOV – Public Domain

In his 2016 book, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America, Donald J. Trump argued for a “massive rebuilding of our infrastructure.” As he wrote,

Too many bridges have become dangerous, our roads are decaying and full of potholes, while traffic jams are costing millions in lost income for drivers who have jobs in congested cities. Public transit is overcrowded and unreliable and our airports must be rebuilt. You go to countries like China and many others and you look at their train systems and their public transport. It’s so much better. We’re like a third-world country.

Trump was accurate in his assessment. The infrastructure in the United States is abysmal for such a rich country. But in his first administration, Trump did nothing to address the country’s infrastructure needs. US infrastructure earned a C- grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) at the end of the first Trump administration.

The Biden administration passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which the ASCE called “the most comprehensive federal investment in the nation’s infrastructure in US history.” ASCE releases an infrastructure report card every four years with an overall grade as well as grades in several infrastructure subcategories (e.g., drinking water, bridges, energy, public parks.) The Society attributes the increased grades on seven infrastructure subcategories, as well as the increase in the overall grade from a C- to a C, to investments from IIJA.

In addition to the IIJA, the Biden administration also passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included significant investments in clean energy, which are desperately needed. For example, Figure 1 shows an upward trend in major power outages.

Without large investments in electric energy production, we can expect major power outages to increase. Four-fifths of major power outages are due to weather, and climate change means that there will be more extreme weather events. The demands on our electric grid are also rapidly increasing. Artificial intelligence and the cryptocurrency industry require massive amounts of electricity, and both are expanding. To illustrate, Bitcoin consumes more energy than the country of Argentina. If Google’s search engine were to become fully AI-oriented, it would require as much energy as Ireland. The Energy Information Administration is forecasting stronger growth in power demand, with much of the growth attributable to these industrial sources. Our electric grid will fail even more often under these energy challenges without major sustained investments.

For no good reason, the Trump administration wants to sabotage and undo the Biden clean energy investments. The administration has been fighting to cancel Biden-era clean energy grants. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will undo Inflation Reduction Act clean-energy initiatives and reduce the country’s capacity to produce energy from wind and solar.

The first Trump administration did nothing on infrastructure. The second Trump administration is worse. It is working to kill infrastructure projects that help the American people.

This first appeared on CEPR.

The post Trump Sabotages Clean Energy as Power Demand and Outages Increase appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.