Comment: Harris, Trump on nation’s clean energy future

By Daniel Cohan / For The Conversation

Although Vice President Kamala Harris touts clean energy and Donald Trump makes misleading assertions and false claims about it, neither candidate has set forth a comprehensive energy plan. Even if they do, a gridlocked Congress would be unlikely to pass it.

Instead, the next president’s greatest influence on clean energy will come through their handling of legislation and regulations put in place since 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration. As an environmental engineer who studies energy and climate change, I expect that Harris, who has strongly supported these policies, would follow through on them, while Trump’s record as president suggests that he would try to roll them back. Trade policies toward China, the leading producer of clean energy technologies, will also be key.

Legislation and regulations: Three bills passed by Congress under Biden and Harris — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act — have transformed U.S. energy policy. The three bills allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for building infrastructure, providing incentives for clean energy manufacturing and purchases, and funding clean energy research.

None of these measures is likely to be completely overturned, since each funds numerous projects in red states. But implementation by the next administration will determine how effectively they stimulate clean energy growth.

For example, the Treasury and Energy departments will decide which projects can receive incentives and loans. Other agencies, such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, known as ARPA-E, will allocate clean energy research funding.

The Environmental Protection Agency will also play a crucial role. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the EPA issued its most stringent regulations ever for controlling emissions from fossil fuel power plants and motor vehicles. Those rules could accelerate the transition to clean electricity and electric cars.

However, a Trump-led EPA could reverse course, much as it overturned Obama-era regulations designed to reduce carbon emissions from power plants in 2019 and weakened vehicle emissions rules in 2020. Trump also appointed three Supreme Court justices who voted to constrain EPA’s power to reduce emissions.

The role of market forces: Whatever policies the next president sets, domestic energy trends will depend largely on market forces. Both Trump and Biden oversaw a boom in domestic oil and gas production. At the same time, as the costs of wind turbines, solar panels and utility-scale batteries have plummeted, these technologies have dominated new electricity generating capacity.

Currently, the U.S. has a backlog of nearly 2,600 gigawatts of projects waiting to be added to the nation’s electricity grids. That’s roughly eight times the amount of wind and solar generating capacity on U.S. grids today.

However, Congress is deadlocked over competing proposals for streamlining permitting rules. State and local governments and regional grid operators also play key roles and are not easily swayed by federal action.

Still, the next president can influence policy through his or her selection of commissioners to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates interstate transmission of oil, gas and electricity. Presidents also can push Congress to pass permitting reforms.

Trade policy: As fast as U.S. clean energy manufacturing and deployments have grown under the Biden-Harris administration, that increase is dwarfed by China’s output. Chinese companies manufacture over three-quarters of the world’s solar cells and modules, more the half of the world’s wind turbines and three-quarters of the advanced batteries needed for electricity storage and electric cars. China also sells more electric cars than the rest of the world combined.

Like it or not, America’s ability to rapidly deploy clean energy and electric cars will require importing at least some materials from China. After falling behind for decades, there’s simply no way to scale up U.S. manufacturing fast enough to meet national climate goals. Even if solar panels, batteries or electric cars are assembled here, they’ll depend upon critical minerals that are mostly refined in China.

As president, Trump waged a trade war with China. He has vowed to extend existing tariffs to other products from China if he is elected to a second term.

Biden and Harris have also tried to tilt the playing field to favor U.S. companies. The administration is offering loans and incentives for domestic manufacturing, and has also imposed a 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles and a 50 percent tariff on solar cells from China.

Such policies may shelter domestic manufacturers for a while, but are unlikely to make them competitive on global markets that are pivoting to electric cars and solar energy.

U.S. standing under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a legally binding treaty that sets targets for curbing climate change, will also be key. Countries around the world have pledged to shift to clean energy to reduce emissions. The European Union is enacting carbon border tariffs that will penalize imports from high-emitting producers.

If Trump were to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement again, as he did in 2017, and roll back emissions rules, U.S. manufacturers could face new hurdles in exporting their products overseas. For her part, Harris has supported the Paris accord and criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from it.

No reversing the revolution: Markets worldwide are rapidly transitioning to renewable energy and electric cars, which are becoming cheaper, cleaner and more appealing than their fossil-fueled alternatives. Popular subsidies for clean energy would be difficult to claw back. China’s dominance in clean energy technologies will not soon be shaken, whatever trade policies the next administration adopts.

Based on their records, Harris could be expected to build on the legislation and regulations passed under the current administration, while Trump would be likely to roll back some but not all of its advances. Neither candidate is proposing policies as transformative as the ones enacted in the past several years. Whoever is elected will govern within a clean energy landscape that has been reshaped by those policies, and by market forces that are beyond the control of any president.

Daniel Cohan is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.