‘The world is watching’: Why US election result could dictate global progress on climate action

BANGKOK: As Ms Kamala Harris gears up to face judgement from American voters at the polls on Nov 5, Dr Vinod Thomas remembers his “most striking climate picture” of the US vice-president. 
It was August 2022 and Ms Harris had a broad grin on her face as she took the microphone on the floor of the Senate and cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
“The yeas are 50. The nays are 50. The Senate being equally divided, the vice-president votes in the affirmative and the Bill as amended is passed,” Ms Harris declared to healthy applause and some enthusiastic whooping.
“That legislation unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars into building clean energy and electric car capacity. Building on that with support for clean energy could be her biggest contribution if elected,” said Dr Thomas, a visiting senior fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute and former senior vice-president at the World Bank.
The act, aimed at investing in domestic energy production while promoting clean energy, was one of the largest investments in the American economy, energy security, and climate that Congress has made in the nation’s history. 
The steep divide that existed in the Senate that day to pass a landmark piece of legislation aimed at powering up the green technology sector in the US was emblematic of the fractious political landscape that still exists today on climate issues.
Among Democrats, 82 per cent see climate change as a critical threat, based on a 2023 Chicago Council Survey, compared to just 16 per cent of Republicans.
The election result will be revealed just days before key United Nations-led climate change negotiations at COP29 in Azerbaijan, which begins on Nov 11.
The outcome could have profound impacts on both the direction and success of those talks, and for the general direction of global action in the years to come, experts told CNA. The world is watching the US, one of the world’s major oil and gas producers, and its policy decisions, closely.
“The Harris campaign offers action on the climate front in sharp contrast to (Donald) Trump’s climate denial. Choosing one over the other would have existential consequences,” Dr Thomas said.
“But it is fair to say that responding to global warming is not a priority in the elections. The clean growth agenda is not catching on fast enough as a winning political formula. This needs to change, most importantly in the US.”
Yet, the impacts of climate change have been on full display in the US, with twin disasters providing a stark warning about the ongoing dangers of a heating planet at the eleventh hour ahead of the vote.
Powerful hurricanes Helene and Milton made landfall in Florida within days of each other, killing over 256 people and causing tens of billions of dollars of damage across multiple states.
Scientists confirmed in the aftermath that climate change had supercharged these storms. 
“All aspects of this event were amplified by climate change to different degrees. We’ll see more of the same as the world continues to warm,” said Dr Ben Clarke, a researcher at Imperial College London.
Dr Clarke co-authored a report that found Helene’s winds were 11 per cent stronger, and rainfall 10 per cent heavier, because of the warming climate.
Despite those findings, Mr Trump continued to express his ongoing scepticism of climate change, calling it “one of the greatest frauds in history”, during a speech in Manhattan after the disaster.
“Storms are getting stronger and stronger,” President Joe Biden said at a briefing in North Carolina, while surveying damage from Helene.
“Nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. They must be brain dead if they do,” he said.
Still, for observers, Ms Harris has failed to re-capture the image of being a strong advocate on climate issues throughout her period of campaigning to be president.
She made only a passing reference to her party’s green agenda while being nominated as the Democratic presidential nominee in August.
In fact, debate or discourse about climate change, even as part of the IRA, has barely featured in either candidate’s election campaign. 
The IRA directs some US$400 billion toward clean energy initiatives, as part of the country’s goal to achieve a net-zero carbon economy by 2050. This includes tax incentives, infrastructure funding and community support and projects to create up to 1 million new jobs by 2030.
Yet despite the vast sums of public funding already being allocated towards industries installing wind turbines and solar panels, building electric vehicles and assembling batteries, Ms Harris has appeared reluctant to lean into a pro-planet stance on the hustings.
That is in part due to fears of a public backlash against an overly green agenda perceived to threaten certain communities reliant on the fossil-fuel industry in key battleground states, and the powerful lobbyists behind the industries themselves, according to Dr Carolyn Kissane, the founding director of the SPS Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab and associate dean at the NYU Center for Global Affairs.
“It’s a very fine line in the United States for a politician when it comes to energy and climate,” she said. 
“Harris is viewed more climate-forward and has historically been harder on big oil. However, as the nominee, it would be a mistake for her to come out as an ardent opponent of big oil and gas, because one, they are a very large lobby, and two, it’s very scary for most Americans to imagine that their energy prices will be higher. 
“I think her campaign has to balance being an advocate for addressing climate change while not coming across as being very anti-hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon production in the United States,” Dr Kissane said.
According to analysis by Open Secrets, an independent group tracking money in US politics, in 2022, the oil and gas industry spent approximately US$124.4 million on federal lobbying.
The industry’s combined lobbying, political contributions and advertising efforts to oppose climate change legislation outspent climate advocacy groups by 27 to 1 between 2008 and 2018, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star news site has found.
Mr Trump meanwhile has continued to promote US dominance in fossil fuel production, namely oil and gas, even pledging to revive the limping coal industry. He has positioned himself as a strong opponent of current climate policies, threatening to repeal the IRA, which he described as a “green new scam” if he is elected.
Dr Kissane said that would be unlikely, given that much funding has been directed to “red states” typically controlled by the Republican party.
“These are states that generally have a lot of land and then they are very ripe for energy production. So there’s actually been general political support for the IRA. However, like many large pieces of legislation in the United States, it’s also been politicised,” she said.
“He uses the very strong rhetoric of being hard on renewables and soft on oil, gas and coal … and we’re going to make it harder for China to get its renewable energy technologies – solar panels, wind technology, batteries, electric vehicles – into the United States.”
Following the devastation of the hurricanes, Mr Trump appeared at fundraising events in Texas organised by fossil-fuel industry leaders. 
As president from 2017 to 2021, he pulled out of the Paris Agreement. During his campaigning for this year’s presidential race, he has repeatedly said he plans to withdraw again, recently on Oct 20, when he described the agreement as a “ridiculous one-sided deal”, as quoted by NBC news. 
The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change that came out of 2015’s COP21. The US officially rejoined the accord under Mr Biden.
However, analysis from Rystad Energy, an independent energy research and business intelligence firm, found that both the domestic renewable energy and cleantech sectors “will continue to thrive, even in the event of a Republican victory”.
Cleantech refers to companies and technologies that aim to improve environmental sustainability.
It noted a surge in job creation in key conservative states such as Florida, Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma, on the back of substantial investments in manufacturing and other infrastructure.
By 2030, these states will account for 57 per cent of all US battery cell manufacturing capacity, 59 per cent of solar PV cell and module production, 95 per cent of all hydrogen production capacity and 83 per cent of carbon capture capacity, the analysis found, cementing these parts of the country as powerhouse regions for clean energy.
“Cleantech is increasingly becoming a bipartisan success story in the US,” Mr Lars Nitter Havro, head of Energy Macro Research at Rystad Energy said in a statement.
The analysis found that investments in clean technologies were consistent and healthy throughout Mr Trump’s previous presidency, suggesting that prevailing economic conditions could have more influence than White House policy.
“These sectors are poised to continue expanding, whether we see a red or blue outcome in November,” Mr Nitter said.
But the Trump administration could look to reduce environmental regulations and streamline permissions for new fossil fuel projects, Rystad Energy reported, which could hamper the country’s overall climate and decarbonisation goals.
If investments were repealed under a Trump presidency, it would be a “disaster for good projects just getting off the ground”, said Ms Allie Rosenbluth, the US campaign manager for Oil Change, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to addressing the environmental and social impacts of fossil fuels.
But she was also critical of some parts of the IRA itself, including subsidies for “false solutions” including carbon capture and storage and fossil-based hydrogen that are built into the legislation and “concerned by the backtracking we’ve seen on the campaign trail, especially Harris’s support of fracking”.
Ms Harris, who had previously urged a fracking ban, has confirmed she will not ban the extraction technique if she wins the White House.
Even with the IRA in place, the US has continued to expand its oil and gas production, which has reached record highs under President Joe Biden. It means the country will fall short of its climate goals without even more drastic emission reduction measures.
Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific project that tracks government action on reducing greenhouse emissions, rates the US climate targets, action and climate finance as “insufficient” to a pathway where global temperatures are kept within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The country has achieved about one-third of its 2030 emissions reduction target, but prolonged reliance on fossil fuels is comprising its green transition, the tracker states.
“The US has a long way to go to become the climate leader the world needs. It’s the largest producer of oil and gas in human history and it plans to expand fossil fuels far beyond what’s compatible with a liveable climate,” Ms Rosenbluth said.
“The world is watching.”
The election being held so close to COP29 in Baku puts more focus on American leadership on the global stage at a critical moment, experts agreed. 
Ms Harris represented the Biden administration in the president’s absence at last year’s summit in Dubai and would be expected to maintain policy continuity if elected.
Mr Trump has not attended such talks.
The Baku summit has been dubbed a “finance COP” where momentum could be gathered to mobilise the enormous amounts of climate-linked public and private funds needed around the world.
The US is central to designing and controlling multiple financial mechanisms. For example, the American-led World Bank is the holder and trustee of the Loss and Damage Fund, which was set up last year to assist developing countries impacted by climate change.
If it was to largely step away from the multilateral process, as Mr Trump has been wont to do in the past, it could ease the pressure on others to act and contribute.
The US typically holds great influence over the multilateral climate negotiating process, and its economic might is a powerful driver of investments in clean energy infrastructure and innovation.
US-China relations are an important bellwether for global progress and will again be tested under new leadership in Washington.
“Cooperation between the two countries plays an important role in spurring other countries to step up their climate action,” said Ms Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
She added that US policy has been increasingly directed to even the playing field related to key decarbonisation technologies and reel in China’s dominance in producing them, including electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels, noting that happened under both Democrat president Joe Biden and Mr Trump.
“I expect that a Harris administration would continue the efforts of the Biden Administration to look for ways the US and China can work together bilaterally and multilaterally to address climate change,” Ms Downs said.
She added that the main barriers to better climate cooperation are the “geopolitical tensions” that have resulted from competition in those clean energy supply chains.
“The US wants to provide some protection to US clean energy industries while they are being developed via tariffs. Allowing Chinese companies in these industries to wipe out their US competitors is not an option,” she said.
But she says she sees China working towards its 2030 carbon peaking and 2060 carbon neutrality goals regardless of US policy shifts in key areas.
“Intense work and financing need to be deployed now. There is no time to waste. It is this reality where a Harris administration stands in stark contrast to Trump. This is where the US would give global leadership,” Dr Thomas said.
“Put simply, the climate stance of America’s leadership this decade will shape the chances for a liveable planet.”