With less than a week to go before the US election, presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are polling within two points of one another, and the race remains on a knife-edge.
And while Harris is expected to continue the climate policies spearheaded by incumber president Joe Biden, Trump will likely take steps to unpick green legislation introduced by his predecessor and increase investment in fossil fuels.
At a time where the climate crisis is escalating at a rapid-fire pace, here’s what you need to know about Trump’s environmental policies.
The anti-climate party
Dr Jared Finnegan, the Director for University College London’s climate change policy and politics MSc, told Yahoo News that the Republican party has been sceptical about climate change since the early 1990s.
“Since then, it’s just become more intense,” he said. “They’ve always been a kind of anti-climate party.”
Discourse around the climate is considered to be an “extremely divisive issue” in the US. “It’s very polarising,” he added.
The Republican manifesto doesn’t mention anything to do with the environment – apart from increasing domestic US energy.
“Increasing domestic energy means increasing fossil fuels. That means finding ways, subsidies and cutting regulations to increase oil and gas production in the US,” Finnegan said.
Katie Pruszynski, a Trump specialist and PhD Candidate at the department of politics and international relations at the University of Sheffield, echoes this.
“The Republican party advocates for increasing domestic oil, gas and coal production – all of those things that we’ve been trying for many decades now to wean ourselves off,” she told Yahoo News.
One of the driving factors behind this decision, Finnegan thinks, it’s down to Republican party donors.
“The Republican party takes a huge amount of contributions from oil and gas and from polluting industries. Trump? I don’t know if he has an ideology,” he said.
Unpicking Biden’s legacy
Unveiling a series of ambitious climate packages has been a point of pride for incumbent president Joe Biden.
Part of this climate and energy legacy was a landmark $391 billion bill named the Inflation Reduction Act, part of which invested in clean domestic energy production, creating the likes of battery factories for electric vehicle manufacturers in industrial towns.
However, Trump has warned that these measures would be the first to go.
“The party’s platform is cutting and getting rid of the climate change policies that Biden has put in place. Trump himself goes even further,” Finnegan said.
“If Trump decides to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act in its entirety, that’s getting rid of basically almost everything the US does when it comes to climate change.”
But repealing the bill would be quite the challenge. It’s more likely that the bill will be weakened and chipped away over time.
Even among Trump’s usual voter base, according to Andy Garraway, former UK cabinet office advisor to former energy secretary Alok Sharma and head of climate policy at sustainability intelligence company Risilience, the bill is proving to be very popular.
“One of the really intelligent things that Biden managed to do as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, was really focus climate job growth in industrial districts – districts who are most likely to see jobs being lost from a green transition,” Garraway told Yahoo News.
Because of this, revoking the bill could mean that Trump has a fight on his hands.
“The reason behind why those jobs have been created is ignored. They don’t really care that it’s a climate bill that’s provided this funding,” Garraway said.
The Paris Agreement
Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement during his first term in office sent shockwaves around the world.
The international treaty, signed by 196 nations, aims to keep the global temperature rise this century well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, ideally at 1.5C.
Above this temperature rise, experts warn the world could descend into economic, environmental and societal collapse, resulting in extreme weather becoming the norm, widespread crop failure bringing about famine, and rising sea levels eroding the coast.
On January 20 2021 – his first day in office – Biden brought the US back into the Paris Agreement.
But in November, a Trump campaign spokesperson told POLITICO that if he returned to power, he would withdraw from the agreement once again.
“If Trump wants to pull out of the Paris Agreement, again, and tries to blow up the negotiation process, they can do this in a variety of ways and create a headache for other developed countries,” Finnegan said. “The high income countries tend to negotiate as a block.
The results could spell consequences for other major powers that are under pressure to reduce their emissions.
“If America doesn’t stick to its climate goals, you’ll have countries like China, potentially India, saying, ‘well if they’re not sticking to the climate goals, we’re not sticking to the climate goals now’,” Pruszynski said.
“If Trump doesn’t reduce emissions, climate change will be worse as a result for all of us,” Finnegan added.
Without the presence of the US at COP30 – the first climate conference where every country is supposed to come back and submit an updated national determined contribution and increase its level of emissions reduction ambition – a lack of US presence could be extremely detrimental.
As the US now represents around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is a key player in limiting the damage of the climate crisis.
“The US still plays just such a critical role in any sort of international negotiation. It is also a good opportunity, I think, for the US to hear the voices that typically aren’t heard in this sort of conversation,” said Garraway.
“Small island states, those who are being directly impacted, are given, at least on paper, an equal weighting in terms of opportunities to speak.
“To have someone telling you that their home will be underwater in 20 years, it’s a very powerful and impactful thing to hear.”
Ramping up emissions
While Trump may want to invest in fossil fuels, and turn away from the global climate agenda, Garraway warns that the realities of climate change are already being felt – and that the public mandate could have some sway.
“Only the other day did the US encounter Hurricane Helene, the impacts of which were made worse by climate change,” he said.
“Climate disasters like this are affecting states like Florida that predominantly vote Republican. They’re seeing the impacts on their doorstep. Whether they fundamentally accept the science or not, their homes are being flooded.”
Finnegan believes that if Trump wins, progress on the climate will be beset “with more delays and more obstruction”.
“The progress that we made over the past few years, the clock just rolls back again,” he said. “US emissions likely will not increase further, they just won’t decrease as fast.
While Trump isn’t likely to double US emissions in four years, Finnegan warns that it’s paramount that he actively reduces them.
“I think it’s more gumming up the policy process, so it takes another decade to get things going again. And we don’t have that time.”
That being said, there are other market forces at play.
“We’re not going to be building new coal-fired power plants in the US. It’s just not economically feasible. Solar and wind are also becoming cheaper. So even without policy, you get this drip, drip, drip of change,” he said.
“But that is not fast enough.”.