U.S. president-elect Donald Trump is no fan of renewable energy. He has said solar power is too expensive to work at scale, threatened to impose steep taxes on solar panels arriving from abroad, and advanced seemingly unfounded claims that many rabbits “get caught in” solar installations and die. On wind energy, Trump is even more voluble: He has made sweeping claims that wind turbines kill whales and “thousands” of bald eagles, that they break down in saltwater, and that they “ruin the atmosphere.” It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s Republican Party is expected to repeal many of President Biden’s landmark measures promoting renewable energy.
That puts the Biden administration’s delegation at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, in an awkward position. At COP29, as this year’s conference is known, governments are expected to tout major new policies to fight climate change. But anything the outgoing administration announces now could be dead on arrival when Trump is inaugurated in January.
Nevertheless, the Biden team appears to be hoping that a push for one of the world’s most controversial forms of zero-emissions power will be more palatable to the president’s successor. On the conference’s third day on Wednesday, the administration announced that it would set a goal to triple U.S. nuclear power capacity by 2050. That would involve adding around 200 gigawatts of new nuclear generation by supporting both the kinds of large reactors familiar to many Americans as well as new “small modular” facilities that are easier to construct and permit. The administrati