The next Trump presidency could alter global climate policy. Here's how

U.S. carbon emissions could jump and the energy transition could take a major hit if a second Trump administration rolls back President Joe Biden's climate policies, a new analysis shows.

It would also have global reverberations at a time when the world teeters on the edge of a key warming threshold.

Research by Energy Innovation, a climate policy think-tank based in San Francisco, said emissions in the U.S. could be 1.7 gigatonnes higher in 2030 under Trump. Meanwhile, stopping the investments made under Biden could result in 1.7 million fewer jobs in 2030.

"I think what is important now is for any administration coming in ... to realize that we've reached a point where lots of clean energy is just good for lots of bottom lines," said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy research at Energy Innovation. "Abandoning it or walking away from it for ideological reasons is not necessarily the best thing to do."

But that's what Trump has indicated he will do. He has called Biden's climate policies a "green new scam," promised to "drill, baby, drill" for oil, called international climate negotiations a "rip-off of the United States" and repeatedly questioned the scientific consensus behind human-caused climate change.

During his previous administration, Trump withdrew rules to regulate emissions from automobiles, oil and gas facilities and power plants. He also withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Accord, which aimed to keep warming below 2 C from pre-industrial levels, and ideally below 1.5 C. 

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"It's a discouraging day to be a climate scientist," said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University in California, referring to the incoming U.S. administration, and news that 2024 is almost certain to be the hottest year on record and the first year to be 1.5 C warmer than pre-industrial averages.

"It's an amazingly fast increase in global temperatures if we breach 1.5 C or even 1.55 C," he said. "It's not the same as being above 1.5 degrees long-term, but it's the start."

How effective have Biden's climate policies been?

According to Energy Innovation's analysis, the Inflation Reduction Act and other Biden policies have generated $500 billion US in private investments in just two years. The landmark 2022 law has also created more than 330,000 new jobs in the U.S.

Gopal says it's because the legislation was designed to spur private investment and nudge companies to invest in clean technology over fossil fuels. He said that in just two years, 180 new clean energy projects have been started in the U.S. as a result, indicating how effective the investments have been.

"The biggest drivers have been in batteries and electric vehicles, but also lots of investments have gone into solar module manufacturing, and that's still growing," Gopal said.

"Most of the provisions in the IRA are preferentially giving tax credits if you decide to manufacture clean technology in the U.S. and if you decide to deploy that clean technology in the U.S."

If the Biden plan had continued to scale up over the next few years, there could've been 2.2 million additional jobs in 2030, according to Gopal's analysis.

What was Trump's environmental impact during his 1st administration?

Trump's 2024 campaign promises mirror what he tried to do during his first presidency, when he withdrew the U.S. from international climate negotiations and cancelled many environmental rules brought in by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

"The Trump administration the first time around reversed dozens of rules that made our air and water cleaner. They rolled back safeguards that restricted mercury pollution from our power plants, and they pulled out of the Paris Accord," Jackson said. 

Trump used the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the rollbacks, weakening Obama-era limits on various forms of pollution, such as regulations to reduce emissions from vehicles, cut down on pollution from power plants and switch to cleaner forms of electricity generation, as well as reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas sites.

An analysis from the Columbia University law school in 2019 found that many of the most important regulations had survived, due to legal and procedural challenges in removing them so quickly.

Why is U.S. climate action important for the world?

As the world's second-largest emitter, the U.S. has a major role in driving global warming.

Countries chose the 1.5 C threshold as a way to stave off the worst impacts of climate change: extreme weather disasters like floods and storms, and sea-level rise that threatens island nations and coastal cities.

In 2015, when the Paris agreement was signed, the scientific group Climate Action Tracker estimated the world was headed to 3.7 C of warming, based on countries' climate policies at the time. In an update released on Thursday, the group estimates the world is headed to 2.7 C, a significant improvement, but still far from the goal of 1.5 C.

The CAT report warned that a Trump presidency could set back the world "if other countries now slow and/or stop action because the U.S. may leave the Paris agreement and climate finance from it is not available."

Because of its size and economic clout, any action the U.S. takes on climate has a huge impact all over the world. A U.S. Treasury Department report in March estimated that if kept in place, the Inflation Reduction Act would lead to more than $5 trillion US in economic benefits globally until 2050. That's because if the U.S. reduces emissions, it leads to benefits felt all over the planet in terms of fewer climate disasters.

What about Trump's plan to boost oil drilling?

Trump used the slogan "drill, baby, drill" to express support for increased oil and gas production during the campaign. In his previous term, he tried to open up more public lands to fossil fuel exploration and speed up drilling approvals.

It's unclear what he could do that would build on Biden's record on oil and gas. Despite his sweeping climate agenda, Biden's term saw huge boosts in U.S. oil production, due in part to the COVID-19 recovery and Russia's invasion of Ukraine sending oil prices soaring. U.S. oil companies have also made higher profits during Biden's administration.

Even so, Gopal says there's a serious shift toward electric vehicles in Europe and China, which will drive down demand for oil on global markets over the coming years.

"So even if there's additional drilling in any particular region, whether it's the U.S. or Saudi Arabia, that oil needs to find a market and actually be burned before the emissions can get counted," he said.

As oil demand falls, countries will turn to cheaper producers of the fuel, which are mostly countries in the OPEC group of oil exporters rather than the U.S, Gopal says.

"Regardless of where policy stands, oil is simply just not a very good business to get into if you have a long-term view at this point."

Can climate action be detached from the election cycle?

Li Shuo, who studies the energy transition in China and internationally as a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, says the recent U.S. election shows why climate action needs to separate itself from political cycles.

Shuo said the costs of renewable energy, like wind and solar, have dropped so dramatically that they are now very competitive with fossil fuels. They're joined by a shift to clean technologies like electric vehicles, which are booming in China and elsewhere.

"The essential driving force [of global climate action] will no longer be politics or international politics," Shuo said. "The essential driving force will become the real economy."