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This is Science Friday.

I'm Flora Lickman.

Almost four months into the Trump administration,

officials have aggressively canceled climate change efforts,

from layoffs at large science

agencies to leaving the Paris climate agreement and rescinding federal funding for green research

and infrastructure. What do these federal policy changes mean for clean tech development and

adoption? Here to break it down is Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter at MIT

Technology Review. Welcome back to Science Friday, Casey. Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

Okay. So how is clean tech being affected by these priority shifts that we're seeing in Washington?

Yeah, you really kind of laid it out there at the top. But we have seen, you know, since the first days of

the Trump administration that they would be kind of taking, let's call it a different approach to

climate than what we've seen in the past few years, you know, pulling out of that Paris climate

agreement, the global treaty that aims to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees C,

canceling a lot of climate research, firing scientists at agencies like NOAA. And I think we're

starting to see very early effects from it. A new report that came out last week from Group E2

found that about $8 billion worth of clean tech projects have been canceled, downsized,

or shut down just in the first three months of this year. Give me a sense of the trajectory of green tech, have been canceled, downsized, or shut down just in the first three months of this year.

Give me a sense of the trajectory of green tech like solar panels and wind turbines

before the new Trump administration.

I would say that the kind of atmosphere was very positive.

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