Global climate pollution is already starting to reshape the United States. In Phoenix, temperatures this year spent 70 days over 110 degrees. Hurricanes lashed the Southeast, with back-to-back storms killing more than 200 people. And cities across the continent choked on sickening smoke sent into the air by West Coast forest fires.
Kamala Harris’ climate change approach had been far better. Still, Trump, who has long disparaged climate change as a “hoax,” has promised to supercharge the approach he took during his first term in office: unleashing oil and gas development, rolling back pollution rules, and degrading federal support for renewable energy.
“The ocean will rise,” Trump said at a rally in Milwaukee on Friday. “Who the hell cares?”
Here is some pre-election analysis on how the results of the Trump election can reshape U.S. climate policy
Ben King from Rhodium Group suggested that if Trump were to win the presidency, the U.S. might step back from its Paris Agreement commitments and reconsider its involvement in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change framework, which would mark a significant policy shift.
Regarding more specific actions, King said a good predictor might be to look at what Trump did when he became president after being elected in 2016.
Early in his presidency, Trump signed an executive order mandating the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) review the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era policy that never went into effect but aimed to reduce emissions from power plants, specifically coal-fired plants. The plan would later be repealed by Trump-appointed EPA leadership.
King anticipated that a new Trump administration could similarly target Biden EPA rules, like the one that requires coal and new natural gas-fired plants to capture their carbon or retire by varying compliance deadlines in the 2030s.
Opponents of the EPA rule, which include trade groups like the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), have argued that its implementation would jeopardize grid reliability and that the emission reduction technologies proposed by the agency aren’t ready for prime time.
Of course, the million dollar, or rather the multi-hundred-billion dollar question is, what would happen with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the most substantial U.S. investment in climate action to date. The IRA provides tax credits and incentives for renewable energy, storage, nuclear, carbon capture, electric vehicles and more.
In one sense, the impact of the IRA is just starting to be felt. But King said through a joint project, Rhodium Group tracked a record $76 billion clean energy investment in the second quarter of 2024, a 25% increase over the same period in 2023. Not to mention the jobs created.
“We’ve seen a flourishing of investment in clean energy manufacturing across the U.S., particularly concentrated in red states and in red congressional districts,” said King, who is Associate Director with Rhodium Group’s Energy & Climate practice.
Because of the IRA’s diffuse and widespread benefits, even a Republican congressional majority might not have the appetite to repeal the entire legislation, but rather do it piecemeal.
https://5eabae92ce7f7ba44b7729982c186a14.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html “Even Speaker Johnson has walked away from the notion of a full-out repeal,” said King. “With a [Republican] congressional majority, you could go through and surgically remove whatever pieces you wanted. Or you might see changes to requirements.”
The ‘Trump effect’ on US emissions, as per world resource institute
US greenhouse gas emissions have been falling steadily since 2005, due to a combination of economic shifts, greater efficiency, the growth of renewables and a shift from coal to gas power.
Since taking office in early 2021, Biden has pledged under the Paris Agreement to accelerate that trend by cutting US emissions to 50-52% below 2005 levels in 2030 and to net-zero in 2050.
He has implemented a long list of policies – most notably the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – to keep those targets within reach. (See: How the Biden administration is tackling warming.)
The “Trump” scenario (red line) assumes the IRA and other key Biden administration climate policies are rolled back. It does not include further measures that Trump could take to boost fossil fuels or undermine the progress of clean energy. (See: What a second-term Trump might do.)
For both projections, the shaded area shows the range of results from six different models, with varying assumptions on economic growth, fuel costs and the price of low-carbon technologies.
In total, the analysis suggests that US greenhouse gas emissions would fall to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030 if Trump secures a second term and rolls back Biden’s policies – far short of the 50-52% target. If Biden is reelected, emissions would fall to around 43% below 2005 levels.
In the Trump scenario, annual US greenhouse gas emissions would be around 1GtCO2e higher in 2030 than under Biden, resulting in a cumulative addition of around 4GtCO2e by that year.
Based on the recently updated central estimate of the social cost of carbon from the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) – which stands at some $230 per tonne of CO2 in 2030 – those 4GtCO2e of extra emissions would cause global climate damages worth more $900bn.
To put the additional emissions in context, EU greenhouse gas emissions currently stand at around 3GtCO2e per year, while Japan’s are another 1GtCO2e. If the EU meets its climate goals, then its emissions would fall to 2GtCO2e in 2030 and to below 1GtCO2e in 2040.
Only eight of the world’s nearly 200 countries have emissions that exceed 1GtCO2e per year – and 4GtCO2e is more than the combined yearly total from the 140 lowest-emitting nations.
Expressed another way, the extra 4GtCO2e would be equivalent to double all of the emissions savings secured globally, over the past five years, by deploying wind, solar, electric vehicles, nuclear and heat pumps.
