2024 Annual Report

The following is a letter from Breakthrough Institute's Executive Director, Ted Nordhaus, reflecting on 2024. At the bottom of this page you can find a link to Breakthrough's 2024 Annual Report.

Policy Built to Last

For much of the last two decades, we at the Breakthrough Institute have advocated for climate and energy policies that are robust to the election cycle and to the inevitable shifts in party control of the presidency and Congress. The carbon intensity of any economy is determined by the energy technology and infrastructure through which it meets its energy needs. Technological change takes time even when it happens quickly. Energy infrastructure is built to last decades, not years, and is slow to turn over. Any effort to deeply decarbonize the U.S. economy, for these reasons, unavoidably requires climate and energy policies that can be sustained over multiple decades.

The recent election should remind us that, absent one-party control of the executive branch and Congress over those decades, climate policy cannot succeed unless it can be sustained on a bipartisan basis. As Alex Trembath and I wrote in the aftermath of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), “what executive action and budget reconciliation giveth, it just as easily takes away… Bold executive action and massive reconciliation spending win cheers from progressives and environmentalists, but virtually assure that Republicans will attempt to dismantle them the first chance they get, deeply polarizing technologies and policies that were, until relatively recently, broadly popular across the political spectrum.”

While much of the climate and clean energy advocacy community braces for the fallout from an election in which voter concern about energy prices and reliability, not the risks of climate change, played a significant role in the outcome, and Donald Trump ran explicitly against the Biden administration’s green industrial policy and efforts to rapidly transition the nation to wind, solar, and electric vehicles, Breakthrough is uniquely positioned to advance critical climate policies in the coming years.

Why? Because we have long advocated for action on climate change that rejects an apocalyptic view of climate risk, is not tethered to arbitrary and unrealistic emissions targets, and is centered around “quiet climate policies” that prioritize technological innovation over regulation. More recently, as several decades of investment and innovation have improved the cost and performance of clean technologies, we have focused on regulatory reform—clearing away the obstacles, often unintended consequences of the last generation’s environmental policies, that now hinder efforts to deploy clean technology and build infrastructure. Most recently, we have helped launch a growing Abundance movement, to build factions in both parties committed to technological progress, public and private sector innovation, regulatory reform, and building again.

There is substantial uncertainty about how the incoming administration and Congress will proceed on all of these fronts, particularly in the face of looming budget deficits and campaign commitments to deeply cut taxes and raise tariffs. However those uncertainties play out, what is clear is that the U.S. is unlikely to come close to hitting the ambitious climate targets the Biden administration committed to over the last several years. That would have been the case no matter the outcome of the election. Faced with rising costs, permitting roadblocks, and local opposition, wind and solar deployment was already substantially lagging post-IRA projections. Electric vehicle sales have likewise flagged in the face of consumer indifference, high costs, and limited charging infrastructure. And while the AI boom has changed the economic picture for nuclear energy, slow progress on regulatory reform and efforts to develop domestic fuel enrichment capacity means that the first next generation reactors are unlikely to be available before the early 2030s.

All of these challenges are useful reminders that the national and global emissions knobs are really hard to turn. Politicians, electoral majorities, and the policies they campaign on and sometimes enact come and go. But long-term progress to mitigate climate change will ultimately be determined by the pace of technological change.

From this perspective, culture war contestations around climate policy from election to election matter a lot less than most people think. The long-term trajectory of decarbonization has not changed much over the last 50 years. The emissions intensity of the U.S. economy has fallen at a consistent rate across Republican and Democratic administrations and economic booms and busts. That trajectory is, in significant part, the long-term signal of energy policies past. Nuclear, the shale gas revolution, wind and solar, and improvements in agricultural productivity all required substantial public investment in research, demonstration, and commercialization over many decades.

In the coming years, there will be substantial opportunities to advance energy innovation policies and regulatory reform despite the new administration’s ostensible hostility toward climate policy. Those efforts are unlikely to seem like major climate victories, nor are they likely to be apparent in short-term emissions trends over the next four or eight years. But climate change is not a short-term problem solvable by discreet policy actions by a single administration. Sustaining innovation and technological change over the long term is the name of the game. That will remain our priority.