U.S. election: Harris and Trump on climate and the energy transition
The 2024 election is a toss up. The two candidates offer starkly different paths forward on the energy transition.
American voters face a stark choice for president in November, which could take U.S. climate and energy transition policy down two very different paths.
The exit of President Biden from the election has resulted in a dramatic shakeup of the race, shifting what appeared to be a likely victory for former President Donald Trump to something more of a 50-50 contest between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
While other issues may figure more prominently into the calculus for voters, on climate and energy policy, the implications could be significant — and the platforms of the two candidates could not be more different.
If Harris were to win, her four-year term would largely consist of consolidating the climate wins of the Biden administration, and advancing progress even further, where possible.
“Above all, Harris (like any Democrat) would be positioned to offer continuity by defending and hardening Biden’s first-term regulatory agenda,” ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based consulting firm, wrote in a note to clients.
That would include continuing to implement the Inflation Reduction Act, ensuring that the hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in clean energy continues to flow. There are also an extensive set of regulatory actions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior, including rules aimed at cutting emissions at power plants, heavy industrial facilities, cars, and drilling sites.
ClearView added a list of other areas of potential climate progress: “We would also expect a Harris Administration to continue Biden-era efforts to electrify transportation and green the grid; incorporate climate policy considerations into trade; elevate environmental justice considerations; intensify enforcement actions against greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters; collaborate with like-minded overseas partners on methane emissions reductions; and look for ways to align labor union priorities with clean transition targets.”
Harris’ approach would likely be similar to Biden’s — subsidise clean energy without doing too much to restrain fossil fuel supply, with the aim of making renewable technologies so cheap that they beat out fossil fuels over time. That shift is expected to occur, but at a pace that is too gradual, with emissions falling too slowly.
A recent analysis from the Rhodium Group, a research firm, projects that the U.S. is on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 38 percent to 56 percent below 2005 levels by 2035. That is notable progress, but short of the Biden administration’s pledge to cut emissions in half by 2030.
The bulk of the gains are concentrated in the electricity sector, with the rapid scaling up of renewable energy and the steep drop in coal-fired power. Beyond electricity, modest cuts will come from the transportation sector, while very little progress is made in buildings, industry, and agriculture.
Still, Harris is unlikely to attempt to impose substantial barriers to fossil fuel production, and climate action will continue to be incremental.
“We would suggest that re-election pressures could potentially constrain the green ambitions of Harris’ first term the same way they did Biden’s,” ClearView said.
When Harris ran for president in 2020, she backed a carbon tax and expressed support for a ban on hydraulic fracturing. She also supported the Green New Deal in 2020, consisting of a $10 trillion investment into climate and energy programmes, but long ago stopped referencing it.
While the Green New Deal never came close to passing into law, and the Biden-Harris administration has distanced itself from it, the concept’s fingerprints are visible in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, albeit on a vastly smaller scale. The law funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy development, electric vehicles, and new clean energy manufacturing facilities.
A Harris administration would continue to push those investments forward, which will continue to bear fruit in the years ahead.
It is unclear how a Harris administration would act on President Biden’s “pause” on new LNG permitting. Current Biden officials signalled that its review would conclude in early 2025. Harris has not indicated how she would handle the issue.
Meanwhile, it remains unclear to what extent a President Harris would support climate litigation or otherwise investigate the oil industry. In 2016, as California Attorney General, Harris launched an investigation into ExxonMobil’s history of misleading the public about climate change.
Climate groups celebrated her soon-to-be-official nomination as candidate for President.
“Vice President Harris has been integral to the Biden administration’s most important climate accomplishments and has a long track record as an impactful climate champion,” Evergreen Action Executive Director Lena Moffitt said in a statement. “Vice President Harris has fought to hold polluters accountable and deliver for the hardest-hit communities her entire career.”
Trump’s deregulation agenda
A second Trump term would take the country in an entirely different direction. His first term included a withdrawal from the Paris Climate agreement, sweeping environmental deregulation, and more drilling on public lands. A second term would go even farther.
Trump has vowed to withdraw from the Paris Agreement again. He would lift the “pause” on new LNG export terminals immediately. He wants to scrap the IRA. And he would once again use the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Interior (which regulates vast swathes of land in the American West) to eliminate environmental regulations and expand drilling opportunities for oil and gas.
Earlier this year, Trump asked the CEOs of America’s largest oil and gas companies for as much as $1 billion in political donations, offering them a long list of environmental regulatory rollbacks if he won, according to the Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal reported that he has already raised tens of millions of dollars in donations from a group of oil executives.
While Trump has said very little in the way of specifics, some clues into his future actions can be found in a policy “playbook” published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative and Trump-aligned Washington think-tank. Called Project 2025, the 900-page document includes plans for sweeping actions at federal agencies, and it has received a lot of scrutiny in recent weeks. It calls for the mass deportation of millions of immigrants and overhauling the federal workforce to make government employees easier to fire.
Project 2025 also has radical plans for climate and energy policy, including calling for the elimination of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency that conducts marine conservation and extensive research on climate change. Project 2025 calls the agency “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” The document says it should be broken up. That would also lead to weather forecasting to be effectively privatised.
The axe to the EPA would be just as draconian. Trump’s EPA would curtail its own ability to regulate air and water quality, eliminate environmental justice programmes, sack much of its own workforce, and defund the agency.
A recent decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, which severely limits the ability of federal agencies to regulate on energy and climate, could make it much easier to overturn federal regulation (and make it more difficult for a potential Harris administration to tighten up regulations on the oil and gas industry).
When it comes to the Department of Interior, which manages federal lands, Project 2025 calls for more auctioning off of land for drilling, including in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic.
More sweeping is the call by Project 2025 to staff much of the upper echelons of the federal bureaucracy with political appointees, effectively politicising technical work that many experts believe will gut environmental regulation at many agencies.
At the same time, there are some caveats to the aggressive promises from the Trump campaign. He has promised to roll back federal regulations that require steadily more ambitious fuel economy standards on cars and trucks, which ratchet up each year. The rules effectively push automakers into producing more electric vehicles, which could reach 56 percent of new sales by 2032. The auto industry has more or less accepted these regulations, as they see the writing on the wall as the transition to EVs continues apace. Against that backdrop, the auto industry itself may warn Trump not to undo those rules.
Another specific policy Trump has signalled he would scrap is the $7,500 tax credit for consumers when they purchase an electric vehicle. Trump has more recently softened his anti-EV rhetoric, which has coincided with his new alliance with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Trump wants to eliminate the IRA, the law has resulted in billion-dollar investments in new manufacturing facilities around the country, many of which are located in Republican-friendly states. For instance, the state of Georgia has several new and expanded battery and electric vehicle factories. Trump and the U.S. Congress will face resistance from local officials if they push to eliminate tax breaks favourable to those clean energy industries.
“Trump could roll back environmental policies, though broadly overturning the (Inflation Reduction Act) looks unlikely due to its positive impacts in red states,” Citi said in a research note on July 25th.
Despite these forces that could potentially temper Trump’s impulses, a second Trump would undoubtedly slow, although not derail, the energy transition in the U.S.