Trump 2.0 vs The Planet: The Thousand-Year Election
The 2024 U.S. election will have profound global consequences for the next four years, and indeed for the next several thousand years. A Trump presidency will derail current U.S. progress on the clean energy transition – progress that is crucial to slowing and stopping global warming. And that will bake in the consequences of a hotter planet for hundreds of human generations to come.
The opposition to climate action is not just a Trump phenomenon. At this point in history, almost the entire Republican Party is committed to a “drill-baby-drill” climate destabilizing energy future. How did we get here? And what can the Trump 1.0 Presidency tell us about how far a Trump 2.0 term could go on climate-wrecking policy?
To start to answer these questions, here are several posts based on excerpts from the forthcoming tenth edition of my college textbook, Economics and the Environment. The series begins with a puzzling question. How did climate change become a polarizing political issue in the first place? In the first post we examine how U.S. environmentalism grew up as a bi-partisan movement, with most of the major U.S. pollution laws coming into force under Republican Presidents. So how have electric vehicles and solar panels now become flash points in the culture wars? And what is the potential for a revival of the long-standing U.S. tradition of bipartisan support for environmental stewardship?
The second post looks back at Trump 1.0’s wholesale rollback of U.S. environmental regulations, with an eye towards a second Trump term. The first term rollbacks were largely reversed by President Biden. However, with the power of hindsight, and the support of a large number of Trump-appointed judges, the Trump 2.0 team is now poised with a much sharper axe to finish the job.
How Much Would Trump 2.0 Heat up the Planet?
In 1992, Republican President George H Bush (the first Bush) negotiated an international treaty on global warming called “The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change” (UNFCCC), which was then ratified by the U.S. Senate 95-0. Today it is hard to imagine any Republican Senator supporting such a treaty and surviving his or her next primary election. The UNFCCC was the only major piece of environmental legislation—more than 30 years ago now—passed by the U.S. Congress until the passage of the (oddly named) Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022. The IRA has unleashed massive investments in electric vehicles, batteries, heat pumps, solar and wind electricity through tax incentives.
The third post explores how the IRA represents a new approach to tackling environmental challenges—one grounded in industrial policy and job creation rather than in regulation. It also discusses why the design of the policy makes it harder to dismantle than the EPA regulatory path. That said, IRA implementation can be dramatically slowed, while the Trump 2.0 team takes a blow torch to the complementary climate regulations proposed by Biden’s EPA, and possibly, to the EPA itself. A second Trump administration would also encourage other major emitters like India and China to slow-walk their global warming pollution reduction efforts. And of course, another Trump term may lead to the subversion of democracy in the U.S. with an eye to ensuring, through undemocratic means, a continuation of Trump policies.
The fourth and final post puts an actual number on this: How much would a successful Trump presidency heat up the planet? Read here for the answer.
The 1,000 Year Election
The clean energy revolution is now fundamentally grounded in economics. Solar fields and wind turbines with access to transmission are now, in most parts of the world, cheaper than fossil fuels, with costs continuing to fall. As battery prices also plummet, renewables are becoming more and more a 24-7 power option. EVs are technologically superior to gas cars, and China is now producing high quality vehicles for $12,000. The world will transition to a clean energy future—in ten years, or twenty years, or thirty years. But time is not on our side.
The years 2023 and 2024—the hottest in human history—are bringing home what climate disruption means: heat deaths, extreme hurricanes and extreme fires, megadroughts and rising seas. It will take hundreds of years for the planet to cool off after we stabilize climate pollution, and many of the impacts will haunt humanity, effectively, forever. Four (or eight) years of delay and fossil fuel lock-in in a leading world economy means a planet that will be measurably hotter with impacts felt across thousands of years, by our children, their children and all of our descendants.
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