The emissions impact of the Trump administration is becoming clear. According to new research out this week from the Rhodium Group, emissions reductions are expected to slow significantly between now and 2035, relative to 2005 levels.
Last year’s “Taking Stock” report found that greenhouse gas emissions would fall between 38% and 56% by 2035; this year, the report’s 11th installment found that range has dropped to 26-35%. (For context, under the Paris Agreement — which President Trump pulled out of for the second time on his first day in office — the country committed to achieving a 50-52% reduction by 2030.)
Those emissions reductions parallel an anticipated increase in power demand especially from data centers, nudged along by the Trump administration’s artificial intelligence-friendly policies. At the same time, though, the power sector is expected to emit less in the coming years, given how substantially renewables are expected to grow.
The ranges of these reductions are because the organization analyzed high-, medium-, and low-emissions scenarios. The high, for instance, anticipates the pace of decarbonization will slow through 2040 due to a combination of low oil and gas prices and high clean energy prices, reducing emissions by just 0.4% per year. (This is compared with the country’s average of 1.1% yearly reductions from 2005 to 2024.) The other scenarios instead track what accelerating reductions would look like, with the low-emissions option essentially inverting the assumptions of the high.
The Rhodium Group bases these reports on a “current policy scenario” that assumes the policies — both present and planned — of the day will endure. In this way, this year’s report is a potent illustration of how dramatically things have changed since the previous installment. It reflects the passage of the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” in early July, which walked back many of the tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also assumes that the Environmental Protection Agency will finalize its plans to overturn regulations like the greenhouse gas standards for power plants.
(For comparison’s sake, the Rhodium Group modeled the unlikely scenario of no regulatory rollbacks, which unsurprisingly found that emissions would be far lower, with reductions ranging from 32-44% by 2035.)
Meeting Paris Agreement goals would have been challenging even if the Biden administration’s policies had endured. But keeping emissions down — with the ultimate goal of mitigating the potentially devastating consequences of human-caused global warming — is now getting even harder. The Trump administration will leave office in January 2029, just one year before 2030 climate commitments come due.
Power demand keeps growing
Electricity demand is expected to keep growing in the coming decades, prompted by factors both expected and unexpected, such as the electrification of buildings and transportation, onshoring of manufacturing, and new data centers to power artificial intelligence.
It’s the last of these that has already taken the energy sector by surprise — and data center energy demand is projected to surge even further. The Rhodium Group expects the sector to amount to 47%-65% of demand growth in 2030, and 44%-59% in 2040. This means that data center power demand is expected to nearly double by 2030, and more than triple by 2040, as compared with 2024 levels.
In the scenarios mapped, Rhodium Group found that “data centers make up 14% of total US electricity demand in 2040.”
Much of this demand from both data centers and other sources of load is already being met with clean energy. “Generationally high demand for electricity, largely from adding new data centers to the grid, necessitates adding any available capacity to the grid,” the report found, even with the policy headwinds for renewables. “Renewable resources remain economically competitive with natural gas, even without subsidies, on an unsubsidized basis in many parts of the country.”
The report found that wind, solar, and storage together have made up 87% of all capacity added to the grid since 2023; they also make up 95% of the capacity waiting in interconnection queues.
That said, under the Trump-led policy landscape, the expected deployment of clean energy on the grid in the coming decades is still expected to be far less than in previous “Taking Stock” reports.
