December is not the best month in the Polish city of Katowice. Unless you are a fan of coal-driven heavy industry, the town’s appeal is not obvious. In December 2018, the smell of coal that hung in the air was a bleak reminder to delegates of the Cop24 climate conference, hosted that year in the city, of the scale of the task. There was a bright spot, however: a large delegation from the United States who styled themselves the “We Are Still In” coalition.
Around a year and a half earlier, the newly elected President Trump had announced he would pull the US out of the hard-won Paris Agreement, which his predecessor Barack Obama had done much to bring about. It was not the first time the US had reneged on its climate commitments. In 1997, the US delegation had lobbied to shape the Kyoto Protocol to its liking, only to have the US congress refuse to ratify it. Some negotiators suspected that the US stayed in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) primarily to cripple it.
We Are Still In offered action, however. Launched on 5th June 2017, its campaign to keep America’s climate pledges on track despite the president attracted support from states and cities, civil society and industry leaders. The coalition spoke for, its members claimed, $6.2 trillion-worth of the US economy. They launched a multi-sector effort to drive climate action by non-federal players. By the time the Katowice conference opened, their delegation represented 10 US state governors, 2,000 businesses, a host of city mayors, heads of cultural institutions, and corporate and faith leaders. Collectively they represented more than half the US population and an economic value second in size only to China and the US. In part thanks to this initiative, US emissions continued to fall throughout Trump’s four-year administration, despite the president’s best efforts.
Now Donald Trump is expected to pull out of the Paris Agreement, and the We Are Still In coalition has been reborn as America is All In. The climate resistance is braced for another battle. Trump is threatening to reduce the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), cut emissions standards for motor vehicles and methane standards for oil and gas production. He is expected to encourage new drilling for oil and gas, and will try to dismantle Joe Biden’s signature climate achievements—the multi-billion dollar 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the related legislation, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and the CHIPS and Science Act. In his last term Trump removed around 100 environmental regulations and destroyed evidence of climate change. He may find that undoing Biden’s legacy is more complicated.
“You can’t just wave a magic wand,” says Robbie Orvis, senior director, modelling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a non-partisan climate and energy thinktank in the US. “On the IRA it depends where congress lands, and under the first administration the attempt to water down or eliminate standards for cutting emissions led to lengthy court battles. A lot of the rules stayed in place.”
Despite the devastating impacts of climate change on many US citizens—the Los Angeles fires are only the latest, and possibly most expensive, climate events—Trump likes to claim that climate change is a hoax. But damaging though Trump’s presidency could be to US emissions pledges, the landscape of domestic climate action is profoundly different from 2016.
On the negative side, the science is more alarming and urgent today. Aspects of climate change have outrun expectations, bringing complex planetary systems closer to tipping into a climate catastrophe that is beyond human intervention. On the positive side, the means to implement the energy transition are cheaper and more readily available than ever, and it is widely, if belatedly, understood in the US that the energy transition is the key to technological progress and economic prosperity.
Thanks to Biden, after many years of being outrun by China, the US now has a growing stake in the industrial opportunity that the energy transition presents. Biden’s comprehensive climate programme, with its ambitious targets, huge investments and a strong international position, set the course for an industrial strategy supported by $370bn in federal incentives to develop clean energy, with 40 per cent of the funds targeted at disadvantaged communities.
Not a single Republican voted for the IRA, but two years on, Republican districts have benefitted overwhelmingly from the investment and the jobs it has created and will continue to create. After the IRA was signed into law, on 16th August 2022, 334 new clean energy and EV projects were announced. Of these, 85 per cent of the investments and 68 per cent of jobs went to Republican districts. And of the top 20 congressional districts for clean energy investments, 19 are Republican and stand to benefit from nearly 110,000 new jobs and a further $126bn of direct private investment that the IRA is expected to bring.
The Biden administration created a National Climate Task Force to ensure a whole of government approach, and climate change became a key pillar of national security and trade policy. The IRA created an economic momentum that promised to rescue the US from the industrial stagnation that would result from clinging to fossil fuels. “It worked,” said Carl Pope, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, the American environmental organisation, and an adviser to Michael Bloomberg. “It didn’t have enough time, but the factories are doing well".
Orvis agrees: “Look at the power of tax credits in onshoring the battery industry. This is a last-ditch effort to save the US economy’s chance to lead. Some of it has gone—the solar panel industry in the US is unlikely to be revived. But batteries are a core future industry.”
For Pope, there are lessons to learn from Trump’s last presidency on engaging the public on the climate. “The last time round, the Democrats made the mistake of talking about the Paris Agreement when what voters cared about was the economy. We had the right policies; we just didn’t sell them properly.”
Aspects of Trump’s policy, he argues, may not survive contact with economic realities. Trump has pledged to halve energy and electricity prices within 18 months, by ramping up fossil fuel production on federal lands and removing utility regulations. Neither is likely to lower bills.
“Frankly,” said Pope, "there are not that many places left with enough oil to make it worth drilling… They are not rehiring oil engineers in Alberta and we and the Canadians are looking at losing money on anything below $50 a barrel. There might be some drilling, but mainly they are trying not to get stuck with the bill.”
Dismantling Biden’s climate policies would require congressional approval and could send a real shock through the economy. In an analysis of the potential economic and employment effects of fully repealing the IRA, Energy Innovation concluded it would decrease GDP by $250bn by 2035, result in 1.3m fewer jobs, and burden households with $35bn in increased spending on energy, or $240 per household. It would also reverse the economic benefit of over $520bn in new clean investment and the more than 334,000 new jobs created.
Shutting down successful industries in Republican states is not a policy with obvious voter appeal—and there is already disquiet in Congress. Last August, 18 members of the House Republican Conference sent a letter to the House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana urging caution.
“Energy tax credits have spurred innovation, incentivised investment and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference,” they wrote. Their constituents “worried that cancelling tax credits on projects that had already broken ground, would undermine private investments and stop development…A full repeal would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.”
It’s a concern also highlighted by the business and environment lobby E2’s CEO, Robert Keefe, who predicted that rolling back the IRA would hurt “working class people in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina, Ohio...because that’s where these projects are going.”
The impact on the wider electorate was also highlighted by the Rhodium Group, a research provider, which found that rolling back executive action on climate and repealing the energy and tax policies that were enhanced and expanded through the IRA “could raise average household energy costs by as much as $489 a year in 2035, increase dependence on imported oil and gas, drive GHG emissions levels 24-36 per cent higher compared to current policy in 2035, and risk substantial levels of private investment.”
Nor is it clear that Trump’s stated policies even have the support of the oil and gas industry. As Orvis points out, “Some of the major gas producers have said there is little room to increase gas production: we are at 100% and expanding LNG exports will just drive up domestic prices. Exxon came out in December saying, don’t revise the IRA and the US Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce are on record saying don’t eliminate the tax credits.”
Despite Trump’s election victory and his embrace of climate denial, there is broad public support for climate action in the US. Orviz and his team have modelled the climate and environmental impacts of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the 900-page policy document that many believe is a blueprint for the Trump presidency. Were the climate policies to be enacted, they would put the current US emission pledges out of reach. But if undoing the Biden industrial legacy is likely to cost jobs, raise prices and damage US competition with China, Carl Pope believes the momentum of the transition is now strong enough that Trump will be unable to reverse it.
“How much damage will he do?” he said. “He will achieve less than he wants. The version of Trump on display now appears to have forgotten that you shouldn’t give more than half the public reason to hate you for sending your kid to hospital, doubling your utility bill and shutting your factory.”
Orvis agrees. “If we undo this now,” he said, “we will shut the door on the US as a clean energy manufacturer for the 21st Century.”
