How Trump’s Energy Agenda Could Double Power Sector Carbon Emissions by 2035

According to analysis from the Natural Resources Defence Council, President Donald Trump's fossil fuel agenda will erase roughly US$700 billion in clean energy investment from the US economy over the next decade while pushing power sector carbon emissions to twice their projected 2035 baseline. The report, titled "An Affordability Crisis of Trump's Making," frames the administration's rollback of tax credits, permitting freezes, and tariff disruptions as a structural rewiring of American electricity markets — one that locks in higher bills, older coal and gas plants, and a generation mix that runs directly against the grain of rapid AI-driven demand growth.

The Policy Stack

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July 2025, gutted the tax credit architecture underwriting wind, solar, and storage build-out. Layered on top: federal permitting freezes targeting wind development, regulatory pressure forcing utilities to extend the operational life of aging fossil plants beyond planned retirement, and a tariff regime that has raised costs across the electricity generation technology supply chain. The NRDC energy model compares this stack against the counterfactual of pre-Trump policy trajectories. Both scenarios incorporate the steep demand curve created by data center expansion — but only one of them systematically dismantles the supply-side response. As Amanda Levin, NRDC's director of policy analysis, put it: "From day one of this term, the Trump administration has waged war on clean energy, destroying new investments, while owners of old, polluting coal plants get handouts and free passes to pollute."

The Structural Cost

By 2035, the model projects power sector CO₂ emissions above one billion metric tons, against roughly 500 million in the counterfactual case. Between 390 and 540 gigawatts of new wind, solar, and storage capacity — a range comparable to India's entire installed electricity base of approximately 520 GW — fails to materialize. US consumers absorb up to US$30 billion in additional annual electricity costs, with household bills climbing as much as 25 percent in parts of the country, even as Trump's campaign pledge to halve utility bills within 18 months has inverted into a 16 percent rise as of May 2026, per Energy Information Administration data. The health ledger mirrors the financial one: up to 69,000 additional premature deaths and 85,000 extra emergency room visits and hospital admissions over the coming decade, attributed by the report to elevated air pollution from older coal and gas plants running at higher utilization rates.

The Demand Collision

The data center buildout compounds the problem rather than offering a clean offset. Berkeley Lab's June assessment projects US data centers could absorb between 11.8 and 15 percent of total US electricity by 2030 — a range that places them in direct competition with residential cooling loads on hot-grid days. Per reporting in The Globe and Mail this week, AI operators are choosing the path of least resistance: a new gas plant can be commissioned in roughly three years, while restarting a decommissioned facility takes months. Nuclear, solar, and wind alternatives operate on decade-plus timelines that don't match hyperscaler procurement cycles. The Financial Times figures cited in that analysis suggest 60 of the largest planned facilities from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta could collectively emit more than 100 million tonnes of CO₂ annually once operational — the equivalent of 27 coal plants running in parallel.

What to Track

State-level clean energy mandates and independent power producer contracts are the first line of structural resistance against the federal rollback. The second-order signal is permitting throughput for new gas plants versus interconnection queues for renewables. And the critical third variable: whether AI hyperscalers begin internalizing their externality through direct behind-the-meter generation investments, long-duration storage procurement, or restarted nuclear partnerships — moves that would either relieve or reinforce the grid's fossil dependence over the rest of the decade.