Say what you will about incoming President Trump, but some bothersome facts are self-evident. He is an old man stuck in old thinking at a time when the world is changing with unprecedented speed. Many changes won't wait another four years until voters have another chance to elect a modern president.
The liabilities of old age were evident in President Biden as the 2024 election approached. Many voters considered it a reason to choose Trump. However, Trump has his own problems with age, including 20th-century views incompatible with 21st-century realities.
Take science, technology and energy policy as examples. Trump wants the U.S. to achieve global "energy dominance" by increasing its oil and gas production. However, America is already the world's biggest oil and gas producer, a dubious distinction in this time of global warming.
Trump's stated views on energy reflect his bad investments as a businessman. The American people and the economy have suffered repeatedly from their dependence on fossil fuels. The U.S. controls neither the supply nor price of oil; the world's petroleum market does. The result has been energy supply and price shocks, often followed by economic recessions.
Fossil fuels still provide 84 percent of U.S. energy, but they are running on fumes from an economic and environmental standpoint. Plenty of oil, coal and gas is still in the ground, but it is enormously expensive when we count its social, environmental and national security costs. Unfortunately, the marketplace hides most of those costs, and policymakers let it by "externalizing" the fuels' actual liabilities, so they don't show at the pump or meter.
On the other hand, renewable energy is ready for prime time — it’s free, inexhaustible, indigenous and clean. Objectively and wholistically, fossil fuels are a dead industry walking. They are kept on life support by artificial means.
A younger businessperson than Trump might be eager to have the United States dominate the rapidly growing global market for clean energy. Projections vary, but one is that the market, which was $1.2 trillion in 2023, will grow at a compound annual rate of more than 17 percent between now and 2030. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that by 2035, the global renewable energy will be as big as the global crude oil market is today, and 50 percent larger than the world's current trade in natural gas.
Instead, China is capturing those opportunities. It produces twice as much solar and wind power as the rest of the world combined. The IEA says clean energy accounted for 50 percent of China's investment growth in 2023, compared to 20 percent in the U.S. In 2023, clean energy contributed about 20 percent of China's GDP growth, a third of the European Union's, but only 6 percent of GDP growth in the U.S.
A 21st-century leader would appreciate that America's competitiveness depends on science and technology. In 1999, computer scientist Ray Kurzweil estimated we would see 20,000 years of technical advancement in this century because of exponential change. The rate of change already poses enormous challenges for governments.
New technologies are more powerful as well as more numerous. Max Roser at the University of Oxford points out, "Which technologies are controlled by whom is one of the most important political questions of our time because of the enormous power that these technologies convey to those who control them."
We are not talking about better mousetraps but about machine intelligence exceeding biological intelligence, the ability to explore and learn from the universe, manipulation of the planet's cycles and life-giving systems, advances in medicine, the further decoupling of economic development from resource consumption and environmental degradation, and technology's role in achieving the world's sustainable development goals.
Here, too, the United States has taken a back seat to other countries. The latest issue of the journal Nature highlights how Asian nations, particularly China, are leading the world in materials research to improve life in a carbon-constrained world. Scientists are developing materials that cool buildings without consuming energy, counter the urban heat-island effect, convert carbon dioxide into consumer products and green fuels, produce recyclable polymers, encourage community-scale power production, and produce hydrogen efficiently from seawater.
The journal ranks the world's top 100 research institutions in materials science. Chinese universities hold the top 21 spots and 59 of the 100. Only 18 U.S. universities made the list.
However, Trump seems disinterested in, if not incapable of, guiding the federal government's vital role in science. In August 2020, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented 150 examples of how the first Trump presidency attacked science with an "egregious pattern of ignoring, sidelining, and censuring the voices of scientists and their research."
In each of his four budget proposals to Congress during his first term, Trump proposed substantial reductions in research funding for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Département of Energy and NASA. The research community fears that Trump will put science on the chopping block again.
On a more mundane but still significant level, Trump's appointments seem to equate wealth in business with competence in government. He is assembling the wealthiest Cabinet in presidential history, so far appointing 13 billionaires and an undetermined number of multi-millionaires to top jobs in his administration.
Trump might argue that wealth is proof of talent, but success in capitalism is different than success in governance. Most of what government does is not about monetary profit. It provides vital services to the American people. Successful governance requires a heart as well as a brain. By the standards of many business leaders today, successful capitalism does not. We will soon see what the world's richest man suggests that Trump cut out.
Trump has many shortcomings, but the most serious may be this: He's a 20th-century curmudgeon in a 21st-century world. He appears ready to make America as unfit for these times as he is.
William S. Becker is a former regional director at the U.S. Department of Energy and author of several books on climate change and national disaster policies, including the “100-Day Action Plan to Save the Planet” and “The Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods.”
