Voters supposedly never get it wrong – even when you have a trillionaire like Elon Musk blowing close to $US500,000,000 trying to tilt the US electoral scales.
US voters on Tuesday (US time) emphatically rejected the chaos and corruption of the second Trump administration, delivering the Democrats a large majority in the House of Representatives and also control of the Senate.
The tone of television commentary gradually shifted from “blue mirage,” to “blue wave,” to a “blue tsunami” that inevitably got shortened to “blunami” as the vote count confirmed results that even the most “nauseously optimistic” Democrats dared not dream.
“We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas,” said James Talarico, the first Democratic senator to be elected in Texas since 1988, without naming recent Texan replant, Musk.
Hopes, though, that the Democrats’ resurgence to take control of Congress will usher in a revival of Obama or Biden era climate policies, including renewed support for renewable energy, ought to be tempered.
For one thing, Republican Donald Trump has two more years of his presidency to run, unless he acts on a promise to “move to Israel [and] become prime minister” if Americans “ever got tired of me.” (Mind you, Israel is struggling to pick its own PM after last month’s indecisive election and may go back to the polls next year.)
Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate agreement for a second time, and relied heavily on executive orders even with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress. It took him less than the first year of his second term to exceed the 220 executive orders signed in the four years of his first term, the Washington Post reported.
A Democrat-controlled Congress will also struggle to reinstate the signature Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of the Biden administration that contained $US500 billion ($A716 billion) in new spending and tax breaks, much of it to propel America’s clean technology sector.
An IRA tracker, set up by Columbia University and the Environmental Defense Fund, reckons the administration has taken 714 “actions,” such as partially repealing carbon pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired electricity generation plants.
Trump’s erratic behaviour in office and questionable choice of nominees to important posts, from department heads to judges and ambassadors, will no doubt provide a “target-rich” environment for a Democratic-controlled Senate, in particular. Where to start the weeding in the rotten United States, will be one dilemma.
The general hurdle for the Democrats to clear is Trump’s threat to veto any legislation he doesn’t like – and there might be a lot.
As S&P Global noted in its assessment of the energy policy outlook ahead of the mid-term election results, “Democrats could challenge or investigate agency actions that impede renewable energy resources or weaken [greenhouse gas] regulations.”
For now, though, fossil gas dominates electricity supplies in the continental US states, although wind and solar supplies are predicted by S&P Global to continue to advance even with Trump’s opposition.
The renewable sector in the US that might get a boost from this week’s election results could be offshore wind, an industry that has faced strong Trump opposition.
“An investigation into the US Department of the Interior’s multibillion-dollar buyout of offshore wind leases is a near certainty,” S&P Global notes. “Democrats assert the refunded lease payments are illegal and violate congressional intent.”
Similarly, Trump’s undermining of electric vehicles could potentially be reversed, such as his actions to freeze support for charging infrastructure. Undoing his easing on vehicle pollution might not be so easy. The 6.1% share of new car sales in the September quarter that are electric vehicles is among the lowest in the world – despite American voters complaining about soaring “gas” prices.
To spur EV sales, US automakers would need to do a U-turn and accelerate their plans to produce EVs, rather than what they have been doing.
The imposition of a 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs offered the makers of gas-guzzlers a chance to retool and prepare for electrification – and a change in Congressional power doesn’t look like altering America’s course towards an auto-industrial abyss.
As foreign commentators such as Deutsche Welle and the BBC have noted, voters vented about energy prices, but mostly from a cost-of-living vantage point.
The best way to connect fossil fuels and climate action, in other words, is to emphasise affordability. After all, it’s something the Democrats campaigned on, and an approach some leading climate scientists privately recognise too.
Another aspect to watch is the progress of the US Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 US states that remain committed to action on reducing emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement goals. This group claimed to represent 59% of the US economy and 54% of the US population prior to Tuesday’s results – and the election of Democratic governors in big states such as Texas and Ohio, could see those ratios grow substantially.
Having to cloak climate action as a mere “pocket book” matter during the mid-terms is, of course, galling to many scientists in the US. (Australia is not so different. As Renew Economy noted last month, CSIRO scientists have been wondering how to have an “open” conversation about how the country was wandering towards a climate dystopia.)
As voters went to the polls, for instance, many residents were mopping up severe flooding as king tides combined with rising sea levels on both US coasts. Florida, meanwhile, endured Biblical levels of rainfall, as noted by Jeff Berardelli, a prominent meteorologist, on the X social media site.
And, it’s not like there aren’t many other climate alarms that should be going off in the Congress and beyond.
Last month, after all, was the world’s hottest ever October, and 2027 is almost certainly going to be the hottest ever year, as a giant El Nino reaches record intensity in the Pacific.
The US, too, just posted its hottest ever September, and the first nine months of this year were the warmest such period in the 132-year history of reliable records, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted recently. It is a significant 0.42°F above the previous record set in 2012.
Rainfall, by the way, was running at America’s lowest for the first nine months of any year since 2012, too. As of September 29, about 59% of the contiguous US – the lower 48 states – was in drought.
Nature is keeping stock, in other words, even if voters don’t give climate the priority it deserves.
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