Democrats have embraced a surprising “America First!” approach on climate

As the name suggests, global warming is a global issue that effectively requires every country to act to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Any ton of carbon dioxide produced anywhere adds to warming globally, while any ton reduced anywhere has the same effect in reverse. That’s why the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions broadly is through policies that encourage the cheapest clean technology, wherever it comes from.

But the leading presidential candidates of both major American political parties are increasingly pushing for the US to develop all forms of energy — oil and natural gas included — and shield its own clean tech sector, even at the expense of its allies and its own climate goals. 

It’s little surprise that former President Donald Trump, a skeptic at best about climate change, has repeatedly boasted about his track records in boosting domestic energy production, including fossil fuels, and has pledged to impose more tariffs on Chinese goods like solar panels if he becomes president again.

But Vice President Kamala Harris has also been hyping an America First energy policy. While the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Joe Biden represents the single-largest US investment to address climate change, his vice president has been taking credit for how it expanded oil and gas development. 

“I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” Harris said. 

It’s part of a stark bipartisan shift from the one-time consensus support for free trade and open markets. But it’s a particularly notable change in tune from Democrats, who once made global, collaborative action on climate change a central issue. 

Harris, during her first run for president in 2019, pledged to ban fracking, a controversial technique for extracting oil and gas from shale rock, and one that is largely responsible for making the US an oil and gas power again. 

Biden promised no new fossil fuel extraction on federal lands and to restore America’s climate standing on the global stage. Biden did bring the US back into the Paris climate agreement shortly after taking office, but since then has overseen a massive expansion in oil and gas production and ramped up fossil fuel exports to other countries. At the Democratic National Convention last month, climate change scarcely came up at all. Now US energy production is at an all-time high, and the US is producing more oil and gas than any country in history. 
Why the change? The simple reason is that voters right now care a lot more about the economy and much less about the environment. “It’s not the climate politics of four years ago, or eight years ago,” said Noah Gordon, who leads the climate program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Though it remains a priority for many young Democrats, the spike in inflation and gasoline prices in the past several years pushed concerns about greenhouse gasses onto the back-burner. And when Democrats have acted on climate change, they haven’t received much credit from voters, many of whom are not even aware of the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. 

“If voters think climate policy is a loser for jobs and the economy, it becomes a losing issue,” said Samantha Gross, who heads energy security and climate research at the Brookings Institution, in an email. “So if you care about the climate, solutions need to speak to voters’ economic concerns, like job creation and maintenance.” 

Instead of talking about climate change as its own issue, Democrats have increasingly broken it down into a subset of things that voters do demonstrably care about, like insurance rates, housing, energy prices, and food security. And when they do talk about climate change by name, it’s primarily to highlight how addressing warming can create new economic opportunities. The fact that the US’s largest climate investment in history is called the “Inflation Reduction Act” speaks to this strategy. 

“​​When we invest in climate, we create jobs, we lower costs, and we invest in families,” Harris said earlier this year. 

The Biden-Harris administration has thus spent the past four years promoting job creation without being too picky about where they’re coming from, including the fossil fuel sector, and using protectionist trade policies to promote domestic energy production. 

But this shift in focus is leading to the US deliberately taking some of the cheapest clean energy options, like solar panels and cheap EVs made in China, off of the table, while extending a lifeline to some of the dirtiest sources of energy. 

This in turn has a cost for the planet: a slower path to decarbonization for the US, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter. And that means locking in more warming and all its myriad harms for the world. 

Putting jobs first has big political upsides, and some environmental downsides

For a long time, climate change was a direct function of economic output. As countries built more cars, roads, buildings, bridges, and farms, they burned more coal, oil, and natural gas, which produce greenhouse gasses that heat up the planet. That’s why early industrializing countries like the US are the biggest historical emitters of carbon dioxide, and why the unprecedented industrial giant that is China is now the world’s biggest current emitter.

But as energy efficiency has increased and clean power has taken root, economic output no longer has to be tied to greenhouse gas increases. More than 30 countries (including the US) have severed the connection between emissions and economic growth, meaning they’re generating wealth and prosperity at a higher rate than they’re heating up the planet as they reduce their relative use of fossil fuels. 

And increasingly, many countries see a business opportunity in limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Clean technology sectors like solar power, electric vehicles, and batteries have been a major focus in China, contributing $1.6 trillion to its economy and driving 40 percent of its gross domestic product growth last year alone. China now has 80 percent of the world’s solar manufacturing capacity, and its intense investment in the sector has helped drive a precipitous decline in global solar panel prices. 

But as China gains momentum, and as its government doubles down on export-driven growth, its cheap products are undercutting efforts in the United States to build up its own clean tech sector. To compete, the US has struck back with tariffs of up to 100 percent on Chinese EVs, 25 percent on EV batteries, and 50 percent on solar cells. Legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act contains additional tax credits for energy projects that require the use of US-made hardware and mandates that grantees buy American products. 

These trade hurdles on other countries have helped shield US workers. Jobs in the US clean tech sector grew at more than double the rate of overall employment. However, they impose a cost on consumers and the overall economy, raising the prices for many of the tools required to curb emissions, including blocking some of the cheapest, most popular EVs in the world, which come from China, from US roads. 

This is all a clear demonstration that the US government is prioritizing domestic jobs and limiting China’s influence ahead of the most efficient ways to reduce carbon emissions. And these are efforts that have largely drawn support from both parties. Republicans in Congress have even introduced a border-adjustment carbon tax that would add a fee to goods imported from countries deemed to be major greenhouse gas emitters (i.e., China). 

But “Buy American” provisions have also created friction with US allies and trading partners like the European Union that want to sell their clean technologies in US markets. These requirements also create more competition for limited supplies of US-made hardware, sometimes leading to delays and raising costs of projects as US factories struggle to compete. And tariffs on China aren’t airtight: Chinese companies are relocating factories for components like batteries to South Korea and Morocco to dodge US regulations. 

Such measures may be necessary to build a political coalition to support an energy transition, but they make the overall process slower and more expensive, and they’re difficult to undo. “It becomes hard to roll back tariffs once they’re implemented,” Gordon said. 

The Biden administration has also shown that it’s concerned about the political consequences of switching to clean energy too quickly, especially if those actions are viewed as contributing to higher prices. They weakened vehicle pollution rules that were designed to accelerate the shift to EVs. They’ve also continued to push for more oil and gas drilling in the US, even tapping reserves to lower gasoline prices, while also renewing alarm about the US’s energy imports. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil,” Harris said at the debate.   

Though the Biden administration did pause approvals of new export terminals for liquefied natural gas, US LNG exports are still poised to double by 2030 — and could rise higher depending on who takes the White House next year. 

Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are on the cusp of leveling off and could soon begin their decline. But the pace of that drop-off — and America’s influence on it — will shape whether or not the world will meet its climate change goals. 

As the US puts up trade barriers to get ahead, the world is falling behind schedule.