WASHINGTON — The United States has seen a significant increase in the use of clean energy over the last few years; however, Chris Wright, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of energy, has claimed otherwise.
Wright, chief executive of Liberty Energy -- the world's second-largest fracking services company -- has made several comments chastising efforts to fight climate change. One example is a video he posted to LinkedIn last year in which he denies the existence of a climate crisis and disputes a global transition to green energy.
But the IPCC, the world's most authoritative body on climate change, has stated that human-amplified climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe, and this has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.
The Department of Energy's website even states, "A clean energy revolution is taking place across America, underscored by the steady expansion of the U.S. renewable energy sector."
And the world now invests almost twice as much in clean energy as it does in fossil fuels. Investment in solar panels now surpasses all other generation technologies combined, according to the International Energy Agency.
Coal plants are seeing an average of 10,000 megawatts of capacity closures per year, according to the Institute for the Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Installed U.S. coal-fired generation capacity peaked in 2011 at 317,600 megawatts and has experienced a consistent downward trend ever since, the analysis found. In 2020, during the pandemic, coal's share of power generation in the U.S. fell below 20% for the first time. In 2024 so far, coal's share of power generation barely topped 16%.
A record 31 gigawatts of solar energy capacity was installed in the U.S. in 2023 -- roughly a 55% increase from 2022, according to a report by the World Resource Institute that found that clean energy continues to be the dominant form of new electricity generation in the U.S.
In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act stimulated an "unprecedented" slate for the creation of domestic clean energy manufacturing facilities, the report found. Since August 2022, 113 manufacturing facilities or expansions, totaling $421 billion in investments, have been announced, according to American Clean Power.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that came before it includes tax credits for both the home and commercial installation of charging stations for electric vehicles, evidence in the growing market share for EVs, which reached 10% in U.S. automotive sales in the third quarter of 2024, Bird said.
At the beginning of 2023, Minnesota adopted a 100% clean energy standard, while Michigan did the same later that year, joining states like California and New York in passing permitting reforms intended to make it easier to build clean energy and transmission.
Another critical piece of the energy transition is tech companies, which are very large users of energy. committing to using sustainable energy to power their data centers, Bird said. One example is Microsoft paying to restart one of the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania to power the company's AI data center.
Throughout the 2024 election, Republicans stuck to party lines when it comes to rhetoric about the fossil fuel industry, which invests heavily into GOP politicians and candidates, David Konisky, a professor of environmental politics at Indiana University's O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, told ABC News in August. The rhetoric often includes misrepresentations on clean energy solutions rather than all-out climate denial, experts told ABC News.
ABC News' Peter Charalambous, Matthew Glasser, Calvin Milliner and Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.