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This article appears in the October 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The Biden administration undoubtedly has the best climate policy record of any president in history. Even granting that almost no other presidents even tried, President Biden and the Democratic Congress in 2021-2022 got a shocking amount done, especially given their razor-thin margin in the Senate.
The three principal laws Biden signed are the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), by far the largest climate policy package in history, at roughly between $800 billion and $1.2 trillion in size (depending on who you ask); the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), a more traditional bill with about $500 billion for transit, passenger and freight rail, EV chargers, and upgrades to the electric grid (as well as more for highways and such); and the CHIPS and Science Act, which authorizes about $280 billion to stand up a domestic advanced manufacturing industry for semiconductors and other high-tech industries, as well as funding more scientific research and much else. In addition, the administration has put through a blizzard of new regulations and standards to reduce carbon pollution, some independently and some as part of these new laws.
The basic goal here is to decarbonize electricity generation and electrify everything. Simultaneously, policymakers would replace all the fossil fuel–powered power plants—already in progress with the explosion in wind and solar power—while replacing all the fossil fuel–powered transportation, cement and steel production, manufacturing, agriculture, and so forth with electric versions. Technologies to do this are either already in wide use (EVs), being rolled out (green steel), in the prototype stage (industrial heat), or on the drawing board (carbon capture).
Overall, the 2024 edition of Princeton’s REPEAT Project report estimates that these laws got us about halfway to America’s stated climate goal of a 50 percent reduction in emissions (from the peak in 2005) by 2030 and thence to net zero by 2050.
Yet all those accomplishments are under threat. Should Donald Trump win another term, he would likely do serious damage to this climate policy framework, and potentially engender so much economic chaos that the entire planet’s climate efforts would be greatly set back. On the other hand, if Kamala Harris wins, she at least will have another four years to cement her predecessor’s legacy—and should the Democrats win control of Congress at some point during her presidency, she would get a chance to build on Biden’s foundation.
LET ME START WITH THE BAD.
Trump has at various points promised to repeal the IRA; re-withdraw from the Paris climate accords that Biden rejoined; revoke Biden’s regulations on power plant pollution, vehicle emissions, and fuel efficiency; revoke his limitations on oil and gas drilling; and much else. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, overwhelmingly written by former Trump staffers and associates, is much more specific and extreme, essentially arguing for a wholesale gutting of the government’s capacity to protect the environment in any way.
As usual with Trump, it’s anybody’s guess what he would actually do in office. In April, he openly attempted to shake down a group of oil executives for a $1 billion campaign contribution, promising just about everything on the Big Oil wish list in return. Trump has long nurtured a bizarre prejudice against renewable energy, especially windmills, which he has claimed produce “tremendous fumes” and kill whales, without evidence. (Apparently, this goes back to a wind farm built near Trump’s golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland; he thought it ruined the view.)
On the other hand, Trump recently made an abrupt about-face on electric cars “because Elon endorsed me,” and many Republican districts have benefited disproportionately from IRA spending. Several House Republican lawmakers have warned against eliminating IRA tax credits because of the impact on jobs in their districts. We all remember the last time Republicans had a trifecta in 2017-2018; they failed to repeal their previous bugbear—Obamacare—though only by one vote in the Senate.
Should Donald Trump win another term, he would likely do serious damage to Joe Biden’s climate policy framework.
On balance, I judge that it is highly likely that under a GOP trifecta, Trump would sign at least a partial repeal of the IRA. The pressure to inflict pain on liberals by ripping out Biden’s biggest legislative achievement would be overwhelming. And unlike repealing Obamacare, which would have thrown something like 24 million people off their health insurance, the damage from tearing up the IRA would be somewhat contained initially. It would only be later, when the American economy fell into backwardness and stagnation, that the true damage would be felt. America’s climate progress as well as its toehold on the industries of the future would be set back, possibly permanently.
Whatever happens in Congress, the threat to Biden’s regulatory agenda on climate is clear. Despite Trump’s duplicitous disavowals of Project 2025, if his first term is any indication his laziness and incuriosity will give the lunatic rank and file in the conservative movement great latitude to do whatever they want.
But perhaps the greatest danger is Trump’s personality itself. In his first term, he started innumerable deranged trade fights with China, Europe, and anyone else who drew his random ire. In his second term, not only would he be even more erratic as his obvious mental decline gathers pace, he would also have few or no institutional restraints. Virtually all Republicans who challenged or tried to contain Trump’s spiteful outbursts in his first term (with modest success) have been driven out of the party. The court system is full of his own appointees ready to rule in his favor—most importantly the Supreme Court, which has already assured him that he would be for all practical purposes immune from prosecution for any crime committed in office.
It’s impossible to say with any certainty what would happen if Trump carries out his plan to get rid of the income tax and replace it with tariffs—which if you do the math would have to be something like 133 percent—or his promise to put a 60 percent tariff on every Chinese import and a 10 percent one on everything else. At a minimum, it would start the biggest trade war in world history, with America against every country in the world.
The United States, as the global hegemon, is the keystone of the world economic system. It controls the pipelines of international finance (in part through its alliances), its dollar is the global reserve currency, its central bank serves as the lender of last resort for half the planet, and most importantly for our purposes, it has long been the global consumer of last resort through its enormous trade deficit.
There are many critics of the American economic order, including lots of Americans. But simply dropping a cluster bomb in the middle of the global economic system, without so much as a napkin sketch for what might replace it, would be unimaginable. Potentially most of the vast network of global supply chains—which as the pandemic revealed, are quite delicate—would be damaged or shattered. A tidal wave of bankruptcies, unemployment, and a deep global recession would be likely. And that would come at the worst possible time, amid the ongoing process of restructuring the global economy around green energy. This would be thrown into utter chaos, sending global temperatures soaring.
Trump might blink at this prospect, but the man was a loose cannon even before his brain started falling apart. Eliminating that risk would be worth paying almost any price.
The Inflation Reduction Act offers a decade of policy certainty for clean-energy installation and production.
IF WE LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, we can do much better than continuing the status quo. A Harris administration could improve on her predecessor’s record, especially if her party manages to regain total control of Congress.
Even without Congress, Harris would be able to preserve the structure of Biden’s climate policy. One central goal of the IRA was to provide a full decade of policy certainty around subsidies for clean-energy installation and production, which had been previously yanked up and down willy-nilly, causing repeated chaos in the industry. Just having a Democrat in the White House (absent some debt ceiling showdown at least) would keep the current exponential growth of green energy and industry going.
Second, Harris could continue moving implementation forward. Despite heroic efforts from the federal bureaucracy, a tremendous pile of paperwork remains before these laws can be developed to their full potential. Requirements, standards, rules, and much else must be written and put through the grinding administrative process before subsidies can flow. Under Biden, only about 17 percent of the $1.6 trillion authorized in his climate bills and the American Rescue Plan had gotten out the door as of this April. More has been done since then, but much more remains.
Third and most promisingly, if the Democrats maintain control of Congress, a Harris administration would have an opportunity to pass new legislation. The nonprofit Evergreen Action, founded by a group of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s former presidential campaign staffers and an influential player in the design of the IRA, has identified several policy arenas that need legislative attention, including the electric grid, industry, transportation, building efficiency, and international diplomacy. “With the Harris administration, we have a fighting chance to achieve our climate goals and usher in the future she is running on: growing the middle class through clean-energy jobs, decreasing pollution and creating healthier communities, and a growing economy based on clean-energy technology,” Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen, told the Prospect in an interview.
Again, much progress has been made. But for all the components of Biden’s incipient strategy to reach the required scale in time, the transition to renewable energy must be greatly accelerated. More subsidies are needed for green industrial technology and agriculture, as well as more research into zero-carbon aviation and carbon capture.
Probably the biggest general goal should be to speed up the pace of government. From the local up to the federal level, climate projects of all kinds have been caught up in America’s Kafkaesque and glacially slow bureaucratic process—especially by how long things can be tied up in the courts. At the national level, a high-voltage transmission line between what will be the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere and Phoenix, Arizona, has been stuck in legal limbo for more than 18 years, with no end in sight. About 1,400 gigawatts of renewable-energy proposals—or more than five times as much as exists at present—are stuck in the “interconnection queue” waiting for approval to connect to the grid. At the household level, a major reason why American rooftop solar installations cost roughly three times as much as they do in Australia is the elaborate permitting process here, which often varies dramatically between locations.
A recent analysis from the Energy Innovation think tank put some numbers on the possibilities here. They examined a best-case scenario for Harris versus the Project 2025 plan for Trump. For Harris, they estimated that by 2030, she would actually beat the 50 percent emissions reduction target slightly (and hit net zero by 2050), add 2.2 million jobs, save $7.7 billion in yearly household energy costs, increase GDP by $450 billion per year, and prevent 3,900 early deaths from air pollution.
For Trump, they estimated that by 2030, he would stall out emission cuts (meaning an increase relative to Harris by 1.75 billion metric tons per year), destroy 1.7 million jobs, increase household energy spending by $32 billion, decrease GDP by $320 billion per year, and increase early deaths caused by air pollution by 2,100.
In sum, a second Trump administration would mean major job losses, reduced growth, a loss of the 21st century’s cutting-edge industries, great harm to the climate, and possibly a global economic crisis. A Harris administration would mean more jobs, more growth, and advances in America’s technological edge. And should the Democrats win control of Congress during her term, America may just possibly do our entire part to fight climate change for the first time. Let’s call it lose-lose-lose-lose versus win-win-win-win.
