As Donald Trump is to become the next US president, the US government will yet again depart from climate action – A greener life, a greener world

By Anders Lorenzen

The climate impact of a second Trump presidency has given climate activists, advocates, scientists, and a host of organisations anxiety and concerns over the past months.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, those firms were confirmed as Kamala Harris no longer had a path to be given the keys to The White House. 

Instead, Donald Trump, a prolific climate denier, will become the 47th US President on January 20th, 2025, for the next four years and will lead the US until 2029, just a year before critical UN, EU, and current climate energy goals—plans that are almost certain to be shelved by the next Trump Administration. 

Like he did in his first presidential term, he will exit the Paris Agreement, but this time around he will be able to execute it much faster. The US only exited the Paris Agreement days after Joe Biden won the 2020 US Presidential Election and swiftly joined it again once Biden was inaugurated in January 2021.

In his first term, Trump waged a war on climate science and banned government agencies from using the word “climate change,” which was also removed from government websites. This can be expected to unfold again in his second term to a much greater extent, and it is pretty much a certainty that not only will the US disappear as a global leader in climate action, but all of Biden’s climate policies will be reverted as soon as possible. 

We can expect a renewed energy strategy that ramps up and scales up fossil fuels, removes any fee on fossil fuel producers, removes the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) powers to regulate emissions, and revokes Biden’s ban on oil and gas production in environmentally sensitive areas.

On clean energy, there’s little Trump can do to stop projects on private land—even the ones that require planning approval, as this will be done on a state level. However, he can make several technologies, such as solar, less economically viable by putting in place import tariffs and cancelling government incentives and programmes. But for all the clean energy projects Biden has announced on government land could be revoked by Trump and he could also choose not to approve any new offshore wind projects which could be a death stab to the still relatively young industry in the US.

The silver lining

There is one small silver lining, and that is to be found in Biden’s groundbreaking Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which supports clean energy products. More funding has been deployed to Republican states than Democratic ones, which is more funding than many Republican states now rely on. Were Trump to axe this programme, he could get a lot of pushback from his own party, which prompts some analysts to suggest he may keep it.

The other element is that many climate and clean energy policies are set at the state level, and a Trump presidency can’t touch this. For instance, progressive states have policies on emission reductions and clean energy production.

However, the biggest concern is what will happen on the global stage. With all the tumult in the EU, are they in a position to assume leadership, or would it come down to China?