With attacks on clean energy, Trump is gambling with the future of Appalachia | Opinion

When the Trump administration 2.0 began there was a belief that its approach to climate and clean energy would largely follow that of the first Trump administration: withdraw from the Paris Agreement; roll back various pollution-reducing regulations; and reflexively oppose any policy intended to advance clean energy.

There was hope that some of the clean energy and manufacturing investments made by the previous administration would survive. A large majority were benefiting red states in regions like Appalachia. It seemed logical that members of Congress from those regions would fight for investments creating jobs in their communities.

That hope was misguided. As the end of 2025 nears, and after Trump and a Republican-led Congress repealed more than half a trillion dollars to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy in their not-so-beautiful budget bill, the administration is pursuing a whole-of-government strategy to sabotage the deployment of the fastest growing energy sectors in the United States — solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles. They are eviscerating the government’s capacity to understand and act on climate change.

Why is this happening? It’s tempting to rely on well-worn explanations, like Trump’s embrace of the fossil fuel industry and their cash. But that doesn’t explain it all. His assault on clean energy is in some cases so extreme it is opposed by the oil and gas majors — such as tearing up permits and leases for offshore wind.

A better explanation is that Trump and his advisors are waging a culture war, and clean energy and climate change are a new front. It is a war built on dividing our country between “real Americans” and “the other,” portrayed as aggressive and dangerous. “The others” are threatening to take away “our” freedom, liberty, guns, and—now—cars.

This is a familiar strategy for folks in Appalachia, particularly those who experienced the economic brunt of the coal industry’s long decline, which accelerated roughly 15 years ago when the price of natural gas dropped below the price of coal. This represented a fundamental change in how we power our country, but the coal industry and the Republican Party effectively transformed it into a culture war. In their telling, the fall of coal was not an economic shift but an attempt by cosmopolitan elites on the coasts and the Democratic Party to destroy a way of life in coal communities — “real America.”

What Trump has done is to nationalize — and supercharge — this strategy. He pursued some of this in his first administration — recall “Trump Digs Coal” — but this time his war is fueled by the progress made in the deployment of clean technologies since 2020.

It’s a maddening irony that much of that progress was made in “energy communities” based on incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act to drive investment into communities that historically relied on fossil fuel production, and recently closed coal mines or plants. Community-level analysis of clean energy investment following passage of IRA showed that energy communities attracted an outsized share of national clean investment.

Much of that investment has been put at risk by the Trump-led repeal of IRA’s clean energy incentives and the outright cancellation of federal funding for already awarded projects. Trump is making a bet that the culture war benefits of this scorched earth campaign will blind Americans to facts and their economic-self interest.

Trump is gambling with the future of Appalachia, and it is up to people in the region to step up and reject this culture war. That is not going to be done with 30-second political ads or quippy soundbites. It will be done by workers and neighbors talking to each other and finding common ground about our shared energy future among people from all walks of life. That is how we stop Trump from dividing Americans between “us” and “them” on climate and clean energy. That is how we protect our jobs and environment at the same time.

Jason Walsh is executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, and the former director of the Office of Strategic Programs in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.