What a Second Trump Presidency Will Mean for Energy and Climate

he 2024 election has put a new administration in the White House, but the nation remains deeply divided on a large number of issues, including many policy proposals that implicate energy and climate change.

“Trump’s presidency will have huge reverberations for international policy,” David Victor, professor of innovation and public policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy,” recently wrote in a Nature commentary.

The impact of Donald Trump’s second presidency, dubbed by some as “Trump 2.0,” on climate and energy was the center of discussion at a recent roundtable event with Victor, who was joined by Thad Kousser, professor in the UC San Diego Department of Political Science and Varun Sivaram, who served in the Biden-Harris administration as senior advisor to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry.

The event was moderated by Jade Hindmon, journalist and host of KPBS’ Midday Edition.

The group at the Nov. 18 event discussed the top takeaways from the 2024 election results and what the implications could be over the next four years. The topics included:

Withdrawing from the Paris Accords

Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement in his first term. While Biden rejoined, Trump is expected to withdraw again, perhaps even on Trump’s first day in office.

“I actually think it's good for them to leave the Paris Agreement,” Victor explained. “All of these agreements work through consensus, and so if you have one country whose diplomats have a political brief to cause trouble, you're better off not having them have a formal vote.”

He continued, “It’s not good news for the United States to be AWOL, but if the United States is going to be obnoxious to everyone else it’s better just to get out of the way.  The key though is, what does the rest of the world do?”

Victor described how other countries in the agreement should respond.

Regardless of who is in the White House, markets will continue to push decarobonization

“There is bipartisan consensus on supporting the next generation of energy technology innovation,” Sivaram said, who is a senior fellow for energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In addition, market forces will continue to push for technological change that decouples energy production from emissions.

Victor added, “That revolution is underway, and it isn't really affected by who's in the White House. The President is not some Wizard of Oz who's pulling all these levers and changing everything outside in the economy.”

There are areas of bipartisan support that can move climate change mitigation forward

Sivaram said he does have hope for some policy continuity from the current administration to the second Trump presidency.

“My hope is to still see research and development for the next generation batteries and geothermal energy,” he said. “I think nuclear power is a potential source of bipartisan compromise…With the rise of AI and the surge of energy demand from artificial intelligence, we're looking for every energy source we can get.”

Victor added that while Trump has threatened to take away funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed under the Biden administration solely with votes from Democratic lawmakers, Republican leaders mostly will stay on board because most of the funds are flowing to red states.

Historical trends point to roadblocks for the White House

The 2024 election returned Republicans to the White House, and it also resulted in the party attaining a majority in the House and Senate.

“I think we're going to see a test over the next two years on whether history repeats itself,” Kousser said. “Having control, especially by narrow majorities, as Donald Trump has in the House and Senate doesn't mean that you're going to get everything you want.”

Kousser continued, “Bill Clinton came in saying he had a mandate to get universal health care. Barack Obama, in his first term, had to abandon climate change and decided instead to pursue the Affordable Care Act. And just like Bill Clinton, he lost. He took a shellacking in his own terms in the 2010 midterms.”

Kousser added this same trend occurred under Trump’s first presidency, when Trump tried to deliver on his promise of repeal the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” which was unsuccessful.

“Obamacare is stronger, more popular and has been more embraced by red state policymakers than ever since then,” Kousser said.

Victor added that some fiscally conservative Republicans may also fight Trump on tax cuts.

“People are going to start paying attention to costs and the deficit,” he said. “We're going to see these moderate Republican senators end up playing an outsized role. Those like Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME), they're going to be in the news all the time the way Joe Manchin (D-WV) has been in the news all the time on some topics and was more influential than the President, in some cases.”

Even in an age of recurring climate disasters, the economy remains top of mind for voters

“Let's look for where climate is among the top 10 issues that Americans said drove them to the polls,” Kousser said. “It is nowhere. If you look at the Gallup poll on the biggest issues, you have to go to number 16 before you get energy and you have to go to number 21 before you get climate change.”

Hindmon followed up with Kousser asking to explain the disconnect between people increasingly experiencing extreme weather events and the exit polling data.

“The simplest explanations are always the best,” Kousser said. “We saw voters' views of the economy drive where this election went. And if you went to the political science models that just used how voters viewed the economy and whether they wanted change or not, a month before the election, they were all predicting a Trump win, just as they predicted a Trump win in 2016 and just as they predicted a Biden win in 2020.”

However, he added that there still has been a shift in consensus among the voting public in regards to climate.

“If you look at this question of the percentage of U.S. adults who say climate change is a major threat to the country, there's been a strong majority in favor of that ever since 2016,” he said. “Compare that to where it was during the Obama administration, when it was in the low 40s the whole time.”

Isolationism and lack of civil servants may be some of the biggest threats to climate change mitigation efforts

“I completely disagree with the bipartisan consensus to beat up on China, and the bipartisan consensus to try and undo international trade rules,” Victor said, referencing tariffs on China that were implemented under Trump 1.0, extended by Biden, and likely to be expanded further under Trump 2.0. “I get why we're trying to bring more industry back here and invest in more industry, but we need to be super careful, because if we do that in a way that undermines the global system of rules and trade agreements and investment agreements, and so on.”

He continued, “If we don't have access to global markets, and everyone's turning inward and costs go up, that would be just horrible for the clean energy revolution.”

Victor added his other major concern that can slow progress on climate change is loss of skills in the federal workforce and loss of confidence in the ability of the federal government to get things done.

“Decarbonization is complicated, and you need the talent of a lot of people to tackle this difficult problem,” he said.

He explained that central to Trump’s agenda has been targeting the federal bureaucracy, which he and his allies have criticized as a "deep state" obstructing his prior administration. His plans involved measures such as increasing the ease of firing federal employees and replacing civil servants with political appointees.

“We are talking about civil servants, many of them scientists,” Victor said. “They are non-partisan and work in the administration from president to president. Many of them will be deeply demoralized, they are going to be wondering whether they have a role in policymaking, whether they're going to be able to still do their jobs.”

This event was part of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative seminar series. The initiative was founded in partnership by UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering and School of Global Policy and Strategy. For more information, go to the Deep Decarbonization Initiative website.