This article was published by The Energy Mix on Nov. 8, 2024.
By Mitchell Beer
As leaders, citizens, and climate and energy practitioners around the world absorb the prospect of a second Donald Trump term in the White House, two overlapping realities are beginning to emerge.
• The next U.S. government will be determined to reverse and defeat efforts to get climate change under control and speed up the shift to a clean energy economy.
• And the response is already taking shape—from industries and technologies that are far more advanced and entrenched than they were eight years ago, and from an international community that is determined to keep the transition going, with or without the next Trump administration at the table.
How those two forces collide will largely determine how badly the U.S. falls short of its 2030 emission reduction target under the Paris climate agreement, and how much is left of the already-diminished prospect of meeting the global goal of holding average global warming to 1.5°C.
In a detailed analysis produced months before the U.S. election, Carbon Brief calculated that a second Trump presidency would lead to an extra four billion tonnes of climate pollution by 2030, producing global climate damages worth more than US$900 billion. That estimate “is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries,” and “would negate—twice over—all of the savings from deploying wind, solar, and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years,” the UK-based climate newsletter stated.
“The analysis might overstate the impact Trump could have on U.S. emissions, if some of Biden’s policies prove hard to unpick—or if subnational climate action accelerates,” Carbon Brief added. “Equally, it might understate Trump’s impact. For example, his pledge to “drill, baby, drill” is not included within the analysis and would likely raise U.S. and global emissions further through the increased extraction and burning of oil, gas, and coal.”
Nor do the numbers factor in the road not taken—the new climate programs that another Democratic administration would have enacted.
“Regardless of the precise impact, a second Trump term that successfully dismantles [U.S. President Joe] Biden’s climate legacy would likely end any global hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5°C,” Carbon Brief declared.
‘Promises Made, Promises Kept’
“The election results rattled climate policy experts and environmental advocates,” Grist reported the morning after. “The president-elect has called climate change ‘a hoax’ and during his most recent campaign vowed to expand fossil fuel production, roll back environmental regulations, and eliminate federal support for clean energy. He has also said he would scuttle the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which is the largest investment in climate action in U.S. history and a landmark legislative win for the Biden administration.”
In his victory speech in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Trump made clear that’s precisely where he plans to go, vowing to “govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept.” Climate and energy policy is just one of many areas where the new administration is pledging massive, radical restructuring of the way the United States government operates and Americans live their lives. Trump spent much of the fall election campaign disavowing Project 2025, a nearly 900-page blueprint for his second presidency whose authors included at least 140 of his past administration officials. But that veil of denial dropped as soon as the votes had been counted.
“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” right wing podcast host Matt Walsh said on social media Wednesday.
“It is my honour to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time,” agreed right wing influencer Benny Johnson.
“So can we admit now that we are going to implement Project 2025?” wrote Texas Republican official Bo French.
A ‘Breathtakingly Corrupt Proposal’
Among all the other areas where Project 2025 threatens to transform everyday life in America, energy and climate figure prominently. It calls for Trump to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, casting its climate research and analysis as a threat to “future U.S. prosperity” and privatize the weather forecasting Americans rely on to stay safe in a climate emergency, Axios reports.
“Within the Department of Energy, offices dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for household appliances would be scrapped.” Grist wrote in July. “The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research.”
Project 2025 also “advocates for getting rid of smaller and lesser-known federal programs and statutes that safeguard public health and environmental justice,” the news story stated. “It recommends eliminating the Endangerment Finding—the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants, among other industries, under the Clean Air Act. It also recommends axing government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon, or the damage each additional ton of carbon emitted causes. And it seeks to prevent agencies from assessing the ‘co-benefits’, or the knock-on positive health impacts, of their policies, such as better air quality.”
In an effort separate from Project 2025, the American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) is pushing a proposal to eliminate Biden-era methane regulations on behalf of its 30 member companies. “The plan, coming as scientists warn that methane emissions are rising at a rate that imperils a livable climate, is being spearheaded by an AXPC board that includes the chief executive of Hilcorp, a Texas-based firm whose founder Jeff Hildebrand has, along with his wife, Melinda, been a leading donor to Trump’s election campaign, holding multiple fundraisers for the former president,” the Guardian reports.
In April, in what independent journalist Jonathan Mingle described as a “breathtakingly corrupt proposal”, Trump summoned some 20 oil and gas executives to his Mar-a-Lago estate with a promise to “roll back any policy they didn’t like when he took office”—as long as they raised a cool US$1 billion for his campaign.
Now, “it’s real bad,” David Willett, senior vice president of communications for the League of Environmental Voters, told Grist. Project 2025 “is a real plan, by people who have been in the government, for how to systematically take over, take away rights and freedoms, and dismantle the government in service of private industry.”
“When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of colour,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.”
Trump’s victory speech didn’t allay those fears, Grist writes. “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world,” he declared, referring to domestic oil and gas potential, and American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers reinforced the point. “Energy was on the ballot, and voters sent a clear signal that they want choices, not mandates, and an all-of-the-above approach that harnesses our nation’s resources and builds on the successes of his first term,” he said in a statement.
That position contrasted with a pre-election warning from TotalÉnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné, who urged Trump to consider how a return to a “wild west” for oil and gas would provoke a backlash against the industry and soil its reputation, the Financial Times reported.
“My view is that this will not help the industry, but on the contrary it will demonize, and then the dialogue will be even more antagonized,” he said, adding that he preferred to see the EPA enact “stringent” limits on methane pollution.
Elsewhere, TotalÉnergies strategic director Aurelien Hamelle said the company wouldn’t expect a Trump administration to dismantle the IRA, and its early November trend analysis didn’t even call for the U.S. to lift Biden’s moratorium on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, Reuters reports.
‘Momentum Is (Still) On Our Side’
During Trump’s first term, the impetus for action on emission reductions and the energy transition shifted to state and local governments, the private sector, front-line communities, and community sector organizations—some of which filed hundreds of lawsuits each to try to slow the administration down and limit the damage. The 2016 U.S. election took place in the early days of the COP22 climate summit in Marrakech, Morocco, and by the time COP23 convened a year later in Bonn, Germany, the America’s Pledge coalition was a powerful presence onsite with a simple pledge to the rest of the world: “We Are Still In.”
“The world is not standing still waiting for [Trump] to come to his senses on responding to the threats posed by climate change,” Alden Meyer, then-UCS director of strategy and policy, told media in Bonn. “Fortunately, they don’t have to. Local and state leaders, businesses, union members, environmentalists, and others in the U.S. are working together to address climate change in smart ways that will create and sustain good jobs in their communities. Their message to the world is clear: ‘we are still in,’ no matter what Donald Trump says or does.”
But while all of that effort paid off, with participating jurisdictions representing nearly 70% of U.S. GDP and population and accounting for more than 50% of national emissions, even the biggest wins couldn’t make up for the lack of national leadership. By 2019, Inside Climate News wrote at the time, it “became apparent how difficult it is for state and local players to fight the climate battle without support from the federal government.”
But now, all the members of those various coalitions know what to do because they’ve been here before. And eight years later, they’re arguing that both the climate emergency and the energy transition technologies that are a central part of the solution are more advanced now than they were then.
“This is a dark day, but despite this election result, momentum is on our side,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the U.S. Sierra Club. “The transition away from dirty fossil fuels to affordable clean energy is already under way.”
“Clean energy is already cheaper in most cases than dirty fossil fuels, and wind and solar now generate more power in the U.S. than coal,” he added. “Trump can’t change the reality that an overwhelming majority of Americans want more clean energy, not more fossil fuels,” and “through investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, we are creating millions of new clean energy jobs.”
“There is no denying that another Trump presidency will stall national efforts to tackle the climate crisis and protect the environment, but most U.S. state, local, and private sector leaders are committed to charging ahead,” agreed Dan Lashof, U.S. director of the World Resources Institute (WRI).
“Donald Trump heading back to the White House won’t be a death knell to the clean energy transition that has rapidly picked up pace these last four years,” Lashof added. “Both Republican-led and Democratic-led states are seeing the benefits of wind, solar, and battery manufacturing and deployment thanks to the billions of dollars of investments unleashed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Governors and representatives in Congress on both sides of the aisle have come to recognize that clean energy is a huge money-maker and a job creator.”
Which means Trump “will face a bipartisan wall of opposition if he attempts to rip away clean energy incentives now.”
Restructuring the Battle Lines
Politico says the U.S. election result will produce “an immediate restructuring of climate battle lines”, with sub-national jurisdictions and countries around the world stepping up to fill as much of the void as they can.
“Once again, progressive states—likely piloted by California—will be pushed to lead the charge to combat climate collapse, racing against not only the clock, but also Trump’s promised unraveling of federal energy and pollution policies,” the news story states. Other news outlets say California Governor Gavin Newsom has been preparing for a possible second Trump term for months—so the state will be ready to move right away, rather than patching together a plan on the fly.
Newsom “called lawmakers on Thursday into a legislative special session next month ‘to safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration’,” the New York Times reports, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker vowed the same. “You come for my people,” he told media, “you come through me.”
Resistance to Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda “could be bolstered by a few factors: the general operational dysfunction that plagued his first administration; growing determination from GOP-led states to preserve green tax credits in President Joe Biden’s climate law; aggressive legal action from Democratic attorneys general; and the usual slow pace of government when it comes to unwinding or rewriting environmental regulations,” Politico writes. “Still, Trump—armed with experience now about wielding the levers of government—will have the power to unravel considerable portions of the last four years of climate policy gains. And he has until January 2029 to do it.”
(As long as he can sustain congressional support in mid-term elections in 2026.)
Newsom isn’t the only one who’s better prepared this time around. In advance of the U.S. vote, environmentalists, government officials, and former diplomats around the world were “already bracing for the possibility and plotting ways to Trump-proof global cooperation on climate change,” Bloomberg writes. “A series of conversations, crisis simulations, and political wargaming have spanned the globe, described by people familiar with the sessions as galvanized by a desire to maximize climate progress—even with an adversarial U.S. president.”
“These discussions are an example of global leaders having learned a lesson from their first experience with Trump,” said Jake Schmidt, senior adviser to the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund. “Other countries that are working hard on climate will not be burned again by an administration acting on behalf of fossil fuels interests.”
Through a U.S.-centric lens, that shift “would put China even more at the centre,” David Waskow, director of WRI’s International Climate Initiative, told Bloomberg, with the U.S. effectively “leaving other countries space to do more.”
Now, China may already be preparing to take on the mantle of global climate leadership, as it quite happily did during Trump’s first term, while the European Union sees calls for greater autonomy and competitiveness on climate, energy, and the industrial transformation that is already under way.
“Once again, China finds itself at a pivotal moment,” said Yao Zhe, global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia. “Expectations are high that China will join key nations in reassuring the world that climate action will continue,” beginning with a new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement that “outlines clear actions to transition away from fossil fuels.”
World Bank President Ajay Banga told the New York Times that climate action “was never an America-only game. It was always a developed world and middle-income-country game.” So the focus will remain on countries like India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam, all of which need rapid emission reductions as part of the effort to get climate change under control.
[You’ve just read about 2,500 words of post-U.S. election reporting—congratulations and thanks for hanging in—and there’s so much more to this developing story. We’ll continue following, updating, and synthesize news and analysis on Trump’s return as it unfolds—Ed.]
Be the first to comment