Also, bringing solar power to Navajo homes
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 | | President Trump on Capitol Hill on Tuesday evening.Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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President Trump, in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, talked about a new global effort to plant a trillion trees, although he didn’t mention the problem it was created to address: climate change. |
Earlier in the speech, though, he lauded American production of oil and gas, both fossil fuels that generate emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide. |
Republican climate advocates said they weren’t surprised that Mr. Trump sidestepped direct mention of global warming. They said the president was trying to thread a needle by both promoting fossil fuels and declaring himself environmentally friendly ahead of the elections. |
“No surprise at all,” said Jerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center, a conservative think tank that supports a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions. Republicans, he said, are “trying to solve a political problem, the perception that the party just doesn’t care one bit about climate change.” |
Ted Halstead, the chief executive of the Climate Leadership Council, a policy group backed by two former Republican secretaries of state, James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz, said he also believed electoral math was driving Mr. Trump’s softening on the environment. He said he was hopeful the rhetorical shift would drive a substantive one. |
“There’s a major Republican climate pivot, which is encouraging,” Mr. Halstead said. “The president is talking about a trillion trees, the House is talking about innovation. These are all encouraging steppingstones, but none of them are nearly enough.” |
Mr. Taylor said he believed the shift was driven by “cold-eyed Republican realists in Trump’s re-election campaign” and that he wasn’t certain it would translate into progress in the battle against climate change. Solving the problem, he said, “would require a lot more than policies to promote ever greater use of oil, gas and coal — leavened by some trees.” |
 | | Wahleah Johns, one of the founders of Native Renewables. Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times |
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Wahleah Johns is on a mission to provide solar power to 15,000 families in the Navajo Nation. |
Ms. Johns is the co-founder and executive director of Native Renewables, a company that is installing off-grid solar panels for families on the reservation, which covers parts of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. Native Renewables started with three homes in 2019 and plans to install the systems for 100 homes this year. |
“These families are going to be the model of how we should be living in a more just and sustainable way,” she said. |
Ms. Johns, 44, who describes herself as a community organizer, grew up without electricity about a mile from one of the largest coal mines in the United States, Peabody Energy’s Kayenta Mine, which, together with the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant on the reservation, shut down last year. Both closed, at least in part, because of a broad shift in the United States away from coal for power generation. |
She said her vision had been influenced by the “beautiful narratives about the sun” that were passed down by her ancestors, and her belief that off-grid solar is the most sustainable form of power generation. |
 | | A coloring book about the sun written and illustrated by Wahleah Johns’s parents.Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times |
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Tribal lands have the highest rates of homes without electricity in the United States, and about three-quarters of those homes are in the Navajo Nation. There are various reasons for that, including the high costs of extending power lines into sparsely populated areas. |
At the same time, many of those lands have great capacity to generate renewable energy. |
“It’s astounding that no one has addressed this,” Ms. Johns said. “I realized that if nobody was going to provide power for these families, we had to figure out how to power ourselves using the sun.” |
In her home, where she lives with her husband and two daughters, Tohaana, 11, and Alowaan, 9, Ms. Johns now has an off-grid solar system that provides enough power for a handful of appliances — including a coffee maker, a refrigerator and a slow cooker — though not enough for more energy-hungry devices like a space heater or an electric dryer. |
There have been other efforts to bring power to tribal lands. The federal government, through the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, has invested nearly $85 million in more than 180 tribal energy projects from 2010 to 2019. Last year, with the help of volunteers, the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority built power lines to provide electricity to 233 families. And another group, called Navajo Power, aims to build 10,000 megawatts of solar capacity in the Navajo Nation. |
The small, off-grid solar systems proposed by Native Renewables cost around $15,000 per home. But according to the Clean Energy States Alliance, in the long term, families that currently use fossil-fuel-burning generators to produce power could save around 70 percent on their energy bills. |
To overcome the burden of upfront costs, Native Renewables is teaming up with PosiGen, a New Orleans lender that provides solar financing to cash-strapped families. But Ms. Johns also needs to raise about $1.5 million to scale up operations, and that has been challenging. |
Native Renewables is led by Navajo and Hopi women, which resonates with locals, because the Navajo are traditionally matriarchal. |
Having access to power would be a game-changer for these communities, said Manley Begay Jr., a professor of applied Indigenous studies at Northern Arizona University. |
“When you don’t have electricity, it’s very difficult to maintain a standard of living that’s enjoyed by the rest of the country.” |
Ms. Johns’s emphasis is on the future. She wants to build the foundations of a system that will benefit “seven generations,” a Native tradition that urges people to live and work for the benefit of their descendants. |
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