What were the big energy and climate surprises of the Trump era? Four years ago, I described the most plausible arc for US climate policy under Trump (it was a boring, safe bet) but expected there'd be unexpected developments too. So how about a look back? https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/6/15178092/climate-policy-surprises-trump

1) The pandemic was a huge surprise, obviously, though maybe it's too early to say how that will affect the energy/climate landscape. So far, it’s put a brake on U.S. fracking and induced Europe to pledge staggering sums on hydrogen. Maybe global CO2 emissions have peaked, idk.

2) The growth of battery storage on the US grid has, I think, been a surprise. This interview with @jburwen does a nice job of laying out the truly staggering changes in the storage landscape since 2015, driven by falling costs and some key policy changes. https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-134-storage-grows-up/

3) The impact of the IPCC report on 1.5°C was surprising to me. I often wondered what'd happen once it became clear that the world was unlikely to stay below 2°C. Instead, the climate community and world leaders rallied around an even more aggressive, harder to hit target!

4) It was not obvious that Trump's retreat from climate action would spur states, cities, companies, other nations to make even more aggressive net zero pledges of their own. But that’s what happened—those pledges have really proliferated at a scale that’s been surprising to me.

5) How about the recent energy bill? I’d written a fair bit about how things like carbon capture and HFC cuts had big bipartisan support (e.g. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/12/15269628/carbon-capture-trump) , but I wouldn't have predicted Congress to increase energy R&D as massively over the last 4 years as they did.

This thread was inspired by a nice @mattyglesias post on predictions — few people ever make specific predictions and then go back to see if they were right/wrong. More people probably should! (I didn’t, so my retrospective is obviously pretty squishy.) https://www.slowboring.com/p/predictions 

Anyway, what were your big climate/energy surprises from the last four years?