07/21/2026
The Trump administration is scouring every nook and cranny to find clean energy funds, incentives and rules it can overrule or destroy,
In Maryland, under pressure from the administration, Gov. Moore is forced to play along. The governor transferred $292 million from the Strategic Energy Investment Fund (SEIF) to the state's general fund. Additional efforts from Moore's administration have called for redirecting well over $700 million from the fund to plug budget holes. Moore does this to keep costs down for residents, and Republicans look at him and gleefully say, "See? Told you so."
Environmentalists in the state, who take a longer-term view, see what's happening: a governor who stepped out and said he would make his state the national leader in clean energy wavering under economic pressure, most of it caused by withering assaults on the state by the Trump administration. Republicans and easily swayed others can be found all over the internet mercilessly pounding Moore on costs, when they're not putting him on the throne as king of illegal immigrants. But let's be clear, even though nobody likes the pain of certain types of clarity: Sacrificing the environment in the short term to keep costs down isn't a sustainable strategy for a viable future.
Moore says he's still committed to the Advanced Clean Cars II rule, which will require all new vehicles sold in Maryland to be zero-emission by 2035. By law, Maryland's Climate Solutions Now Act mandates a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2006 levels by 2031 and net-zero emissions by 2045. We're not confident Maryland is going to pull net zero off, let alone the 2031 mandate.
The pain of change literally hands a campaign platform to Republicans, and few Democrats - Maryland and nationally - have the stones to commit to tackling the myriad environmental crises unfolding, locally and globally. We would be over the moon thrilled if Governor Moore proved our cynicism unfounded and delivered instead of going before the people with an explanation for why we failed.
This is where we signal and drive off the highway for a look around in the town of Democratic Socialists. They identify the problem clearly - capitalism - and aim to implement eco-socialist programs. We support them, but believe the mainstream Democratic efforts - the Inflation Reduction Act, a Green New Deal - had a far better chance to gain traction and instigate a massive transition to a clean energy economy. The DSA strongly and wrongly criticized mainstream Democrats for the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act, a vast package that included the furthest reaching climate effort in the history of the world, because it was grounded in capitalism and didn't go far enough. But the Trump administration never gave the IRA's environmental components - electric vehicles and charging stations, grants, wind and solar, building efficiency, etc. - even a chance to work, and now has moved past killing it to actively and aggressively finding ways to destroy the natural world, including the giveaway of federal lands by the Bureau of Land Management, to exponentially expanded drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, to eviscerating the Endangered Species Act. This list could go on and on.
Still, we think the DSA is the only political party showing the courage to face the reality of the climate crises. Their solutions, based in socialist reforms for things like public ownership of utilities and worker guarantees for a just transition are so revolutionary - of course labeled radical - that they are easy targets for political attack, but if humanity can't see itself out of paradigms that worked for a while and now have shown themselves to be corrosive failures, we're all in trouble. And we are all in trouble.
The Green New Deal (Trump: "Green New Scam") didn't explicitly target the overthrowing of the capitalist order and neither did the IRA. The IRA amazingly passed with bipartisan support, but the Trump administration gutted it (along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the rest of the entire federal government). Any climate efforts right now are going to have to be enacted on state and local levels, and the Trump administration knows this.
So, you can see how they sabotage this and other lefty priorities by looking at what they have done in Maryland:
Federal government employment and agencies have been lifeblood to the Maryland economy, and Trump's people went right at it with a gleaming blade. According to Brookings, the Trump administration killed 29,200 federal government jobs in the state between January 2025 and April 2026. That's 18% of the entire Maryland work force! That then ripples out and disrupts the work of more than 3,000 federal private contractors.
Brookings: "Prior to 2025, the federal government spent about $150 billion in Maryland on wage and retirement income, contracts for work performed in Maryland, grants to local governments and nonprofits, and direct payments to residents and businesses. To put this amount in perspective, Maryland’s GDP [gross domestic product - the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within the state's borders during a specific period] during the analysis time frame was just over $500 billion, making the $150 billion in federal spending about 30% of the state’s GDP."
These devastating job cuts - not even considering the personal suffering of families - led to a billion-dollar loss of income tax revenue. Now, take the cuts and pile them onto the expenditures for priority programs. Start with the requirements of the massive costs for the educational Blueprint for Maryland's Future, which costs the state government billions of dollars each year; then add rising health care costs, inflation, tariff impacts on state work projects, etc., and Maryland is in trouble, and when the search begins for money, the Democrats head for funding pledged to clean energy, as if that's optional.
Republicans love it. Maryland's environmental goals, in the short term, drive up energy costs, so it's easy to attack Democrats. Moore capitulates and Republicans say, again, "Told you so." Fees, like for auto registration, go up and everyone goes bananas - tax and spend Moore! It becomes an unwinnable, unsolvable death spiral, with the Republican wolves salivating at the door. They will run roughshod over the environment to favor business and development. Democrats in Maryland love or at least rely on their corporate money, too.
The Democratic Socialists are right - capitalism is the problem - but they, and mainstream Democrats, should be vigorously going after the Trump administration for mimicking aspects of communist control, and they - as far as we can tell - never frame their pitch with those words.
The Trump administration and Project 2025 are absolutely terrifying on so many levels, but people still will fall for the old far-left red boogeyman line when it should be flipped on its head. One of the core principles of communism is the replacement of market competition, prices, and profits with government-directed production. The state - here, the Trump administration - decides what goods to make, how many to produce, and what they should cost. OK, technically, it's not communism, because the administration is not actually taking over private businesses or sectors, but there is no question, in its attacks on clean energy like wind and solar and EVs, the administration has completely upended free-market principals of supply and demand.
Trump has literally halted the closure of up to 45 coal-fired power plants, which no longer make any economic sense in the face of cheaper natural gas and renewables. Last month, as Engineering News-Record reported, the president ordered the government to "direct up to $850 million to upgrade or restart 15 U.S. coal-fired power plants, build new ones in two states and support construction of a controversial California coal export terminal."
As an aside, our little climate campaign, Coal Kills Baltimore, has been working for 5 1/2 years to close the coal export terminal in Baltimore.
The One Big Beautiful Bill wiped out nearly $83 billion in private sector clean energy projects that did not align with the Trump administration's agenda.
We asked AI if the Trump administration is acting as communists: "Economists from the Yale School of Management note that while these actions mimic a Marxist or "command economy" framework by injecting the federal government into private capital flows, the administration's goal is mercantilist and protectionist. Communism seeks to eliminate corporate profit entirely; the Trump administration’s energy interventions seek to use state power to maximize corporate profit for politically favored domestic industries (like coal and oil) while suppressing competitors (like wind and solar)."
