Boise has promised carbon neutrality by 2050. Can the city meet its goals under Trump?
In his first days in office, President Donald Trump signed a wave of executive orders to reverse the Biden administration’s climate agenda.
He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which had committed the country to curb carbon emissions. He signed an order to stop new offshore wind lease sales and end existing leases. He revoked former President Joe Biden’s nonbinding goal for electric vehicles to make up half of new cars sold by 2030. He signed an order to stop building a wind farm near Minidoka.
All told, his orders put the country on a path to increasing its production of coal, oil and gas, The New York Times reported.
“We know there’s not going to be federal support for alternative energies,” said Jared Talley, a professor at Boise State University who studies rural environmental collaboration and public land permitting in the Intermountain West.
But it’s not yet clear what exactly this will mean for the clean energy sector, according to EnergySage, an online marketplace for clean energy products.
Through its Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, the Biden administration offered billions of dollars’ worth of tax credits and incentives to invest in alternative energy. These credits “are likely to be renegotiated” under the new administration, Talley said.
What will all this mean for Boise?
Mayor Lauren McLean has promised that the city government’s operations will be carbon-neutral by 2035, and the city as a whole will be carbon-neutral by 2050. (The latter goal is reflected on a banner on the front of Boise City Hall.) But will the city still be able to meet these goals, given the proposed policies of the new administration?
McLean thinks so.
“I am confident that through innovation, ingenuity and just plain old Boise-style hard work, we’re going to stay on track to meet our goals,” she told the Idaho Statesman on Thursday.
The city’s been ahead of schedule on carbon emissions-reduction goals it set in 2021, she said.
Federal incentives and grants “accelerated” some of the city’s work toward carbon neutrality, but “none of our goals or programs have changed” under the new administration, Maria Weeg, a spokesperson for the city, told the Statesman by email. She did not provide specifics about which city programs or plans relied on federal funding.
What will carbon neutrality mean?
As of 2021, per capita emissions in Boise had dropped since 2015 — but overall emissions had risen by 3% amid the city’s rapid growth, the Statesman previously reported. Boise’s Climate Action Roadmap, published in 2021, anticipated the city’s carbon emissions would grow by 34% by 2050.
To reduce those emissions, the city’s roadmap laid out plans to change how houses are heated and cooled; increase housing density to reduce vehicle trips; increase the use of geothermal and solar energy to heat and power downtown buildings; electrify the city’s vehicle fleet; and improve bike lanes and bus routes.
The city’s goal builds on a goal set by Idaho Power: The company has committed to providing customers with 100% clean energy by 2045, which would help Boise cut its emissions by 23%, the Statesman previously reported. In 2018, heating and cooling buildings produced about 50% of the city’s emissions, according to Boise’s roadmap.
Idaho Power anticipates that it will still be able to meet its clean-energy goal, said Sven Berg, a spokesperson for the company. As of Monday, the company was “evaluating President Trump’s executive orders and agency directives,” some of which “have led to a pause on funding for several projects in which Idaho Power is participating,” including the rebuild of a transmission line between Oxbow Dam and Lewiston, he told the Statesman by email.
“We will continue to monitor these projects, their funding status, and other potential impacts to determine the best path forward for our customers,” he said.
All-electric furnaces, hot-water heaters
Efforts to reduce emissions produced in heating and cooling will require that “virtually every housing unit and business will need to undergo some form of energy efficiency retrofit in the coming decades,” the city’s roadmap said. This may include removing gas-fired furnaces and hot water heaters.
“Eliminating heating emissions would require local policy changes and market transformations that support all-electric new construction and retrofitting existing building stock to electric heating systems and appliances,” the roadmap said.
In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act provided tax credits to incentivize consumers and businesses to invest in alternative energy sources — giving homeowners who installed a solar panel system a tax credit equal to 30% of the cost, or a tax credit of up to $7,500 if they purchased a new electric vehicle, among other incentives.
As of August, over 3.4 million families nationwide had claimed over $8 billion in residential clean-energy and home energy-efficiency credits, according to the Department of Energy. Over $215 billion in private-sector clean energy manufacturing investments were announced under the Biden administration, “spurred in large part by the tax credits” offered through the law, according to a news release from the department.
What if clean-energy incentives disappear?
President Trump’s executive orders froze Inflation Reduction Act funds that offer clean-energy incentives for 90 days, but presidents can’t refuse to spend funds that Congress already approved, according to EnergySage. Consumers who installed solar panels or bought an electric vehicle in 2024 will still receive their tax credits, the company said.
But “if you’re making clean energy upgrades this year, it’s unclear what the executive order may mean for you,” the company said. Trump’s initial executive orders targeted wind energy and electric vehicles but made little mention of solar power.
Talley, the Boise State professor, told the Statesman that it’s too soon to say how individuals and the private sector might adjust their behavior, even if clean-energy incentives disappear. In Trump’s first term, “a lot of this work kept going and actually expanded, because it was being done between private and nonprofit industry,” he said.
“It was like, ‘OK, we don’t need federal policy. We’re just going to do it,” he added. “Because either we see this as the way of the future, or we see this as a money-making enterprise … If they’re not getting support from the federal government, that’s fine. They’ll figure out other ways that sometimes actually push it further than it would (have gone) had it been subsidized.”
This story was originally published January 28, 2025 at 2:38 PM.
