The founder of a startup focused on modeling climate impacts writes that the next president will have the ability to ensure or prevent the United States reaches climate goals.
Donald Trump recently offered a deal to top oil industry CEOs: If they raised a billion dollars for his campaign and helped return him to the White House, he would scrap the Biden administration’s climate policies and stop new ones. He would increase oil drilling and reverse the new tailpipe emissions rules designed to speed up the transition to electric vehicles. He has also promised a return to the practice of impounding, under which the executive branch can refuse to spend already appropriated money on programs the president doesn’t like.
Critical parts of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and follow-on climate regulations could be at risk of reversal — or simply non-implementation — depending on this year’s election.
While the Biden administration has used an “all of government” approach to push climate policy as far as possible, we are still in a precarious place as far as stabilizing the climate. The average human-induced warming stood at 1.31 degrees Celsius as of 2023. At this level of warming, we have already seen a sharp increase in billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. A two-degress Celsius warming is considered the threshold above which there would be a dramatic escalation of risk to life and property.
Staying within this temperature limit would require reaching net zero emissions globally by 2050. Any disruption to U.S. climate policy in the next four years could not only shut out the narrow path to this target in this country but also make it impossible to influence other countries to stay on their own paths to net zero.
The IRA goes directly after the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion that account for 74% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. It incentivizes clean power generation and electrification of transportation, buildings and industrial energy use. The Environmental Protection Agency projects a 26% reduction in economy-wide CO2 emissions by 2030 as a result of the IRA.
This impressive rate of emissions reduction slows down after 2030. By 2035, the emissions trajectory based on the just the IRA is no longer on a viable path to net zero by 2050. This just means that additional climate policies must be incorporated into the net zero plan on a regular basis to keep us on track for that two-degree Celsius limit. The next election will greatly influence these policies as we enter the 2030s.
While the power, buildings and industrial sectors appear to be on track for significant emission reductions by 2030, transportation — the largest contributor to U.S. national emissions — shows only a modest improvement compared to a no-IRA scenario. This is because of the long turnover times of the transportation fleet and the relatively mild impact of the IRA incentives for electric vehicles. A small but significant share of vehicles in 2050 will likely still run on fossil fuels.
The power sector, the second largest emissions contributor, is on track for a 65% reduction in emissions by 2035. But fossil energy will still persist well beyond that. Natural gas is projected to have a 14% share of power generation in 2050 when our net emissions need to be zero.
Additional regulations are needed to close these gaps and some are already in place. The new fuel economy standards are expected to indirectly push new passenger vehicle sales to 50% electric by the early 2030s, while the EPA’s GHG emissions standards for light and heavy-duty vehicles will directly limit tailpipe emissions.
The EPA recently required all coal power plants and new natural gas powered plants to reduce 90% of their emissions by 2039, which essentially mandates carbon capture and sequestration as a condition to continue operating. The Energy Department finalized a new rule to speed up federal permits for major transmission lines so that new renewable power can get onto the grid more easily.
These regulations will need to be updated every few years. The next president could easily reverse these rules or delay their implementation instead of building on them to accelerate the transition.
As difficult as it has been to get to a national net zero plan, we actually have one now. It is not a single plan articulated in a single document, but a patchwork of evolving legislation and administrative rules that are intended to work together and provide scaffolding for the economy to decarbonize rapidly. Disabling some of the key cogs in this machine can slow it down when in fact we need to be increasingly more aggressive.
Our climate future literally rests in the hands of the next American president.
Kumar Venkat is the founder of Model Paths, a startup focused on modeling climate impacts such as wildfires. He was previously at the forefront of corporate carbon emissions accounting and decarbonization as the CTO of Planet FWD and CEO of CleanMetrics. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
