Three weeks after the Nov. 5, 2024, election that ushered President Donald Trump back into power, Sanya Carley, the faculty director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-author of the book Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition, penned an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer with a series of predictions that proved to be prophetic.
On his campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill,” she forecasted, “President Trump will prioritize executive orders — likely in his first few days in office — that open more federal lands to oil and gas leasing and reduce the permitting and other regulatory requirements associated with drilling and extraction operations.”
In a matter of months, that came true, as did her premonition that Trump would “introduce an executive order early in his term seeking to slow or delay the permitting process for offshore wind projects,” and eliminate the Biden-era Justice40 initiative that sought to ensure 40% of federal climate investments go to communities overburdened by pollution.
The months that followed have been marked by a slew of attacks on renewable energy from all angles and across multiple agencies and branches of government. A year into Trump’s second presidency, Capital & Main caught up with Carley to discuss what’s happened, her predictions and how they’ve played out. A scholar of energy justice and the energy transition, Carley said the whiplash of the last year has undoubtedly hurt consumers and decarbonization efforts alike. But, she said, she’s certain “the energy transition is still underway.”