OPINION PIECE: Impact of the US presidential elections on the biogas sector
By Chris Huhne, Senior Adviser, World Biogas Association
The United States presidential election presents not just the US but the world with a fundamental choice between continued decarbonisation to tackle climate change, and a potentially disruptive stop in the world’s largest historical emitter (though China now outstrips the US in current emissions). The stakes for our industry are high. Rarely is a single election result likely to have such a profound impact.
A win for Kamala Harris would chart a broadly similar path to that charted by the Biden administration of which she is vice-president. She has rowed back on more radical pledges to stop fossil oil and gas fracking,
and has shed some of the green rhetoric beloved of her native liberal California. But the shortest political distance between two points is rarely a straight line. Internationally and domestically, policy would not change a lot.
By contrast, a win for former President Trump would be a sharp about-turn, as it was when he was last in the White House between 2017 and 2021. At that time, he pulled the United States out of the Paris agreement on climate change, reached at the Paris COP in 2015 (and which entered into force globally in 2017). Mr Trump’s own speeches have been light on specific policy commitments, but his campaign has stated that a Trump administration would pull the US out of the agreement again.
That would be more serious the second time round, because it would be harder to argue that Mr Trump represented a short inter-regnum before normal business resumed (as it did shortly after Joe Biden took office in 2021). The impact on wavering countries – and on their ambition in putting together stretching Nationally Determined Contributions to the global effort – would be more profound. This would particularly be the case if the administration not only pulled out of the Paris agreement but also withdrew the United States from the underlying 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), as some influential supporters – and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – have urged.
A withdrawal from the UNFCCC would undermine global climate funding, and therefore the basis for what has been the only international pathway to tackle global warming. Some legal scholars also point out that it would be far harder to reverse than merely pulling out of the Paris agreement, and a reversal (assuming a repeat of 2021) might require a positive vote in the US Senate. International treaties cannot be signed just by the President, but require a two-thirds majority in the US upper house. A Trump reversal could therefore look a lot more final and decisive, dealing a sharp blow to global climate efforts.
There will also be knock-on effects globally from the US domestic changes. The Trump campaign has made clear its desire to axe the Inflation Reduction Act (the mis-named climate legislation that ironically has particularly benefited Republican states with its tax credits). There is a shortage of specifics, but it is fair to assume that many of the renewables that have benefited from the IRA will be hit. Bloomberg NEF, the consultancy, estimates that the total withdrawal of IRA tax credits would cut renewables investment by 17 per cent in 2026. Other renewable sectors – like offshore wind – also rely on federal regulation which could be withheld. That would be bad news for European developers like Denmark’s Orsted or Norway’s Equinor with off-shore wind projects in the US, and would reduce the speed of the transition to clean energy.
However, a complete repeal may not be likely. Many renewables projects – notably solar and on-shore wind – are being built out in Republican states. Budget changes will depend on whether the President’s party controls the House of Representatives, and indeed whether all Republicans support change. (In August, 18 House Republican congressmen wrote to Speaker Mike Johnson asking to protect IRA funding). A split election – with rival parties controlling different parts of the executive and legislature – complicate the potential outcomes.
Then there are the implications of one of Mr Trump’s favourite lines: “Drill, baby, drill”. My suspicion is that the federal government will have only a modest influence on US oil and gas output, since the shale drillers were heavily burned by over-expansion in the last business cycle when they had to promise Wall Street not to repeat their debt-funded breakneck growth. (One of the largest, Pioneer Resources, has now been bought by ExxonMobil). Permits for drilling on federal lands are probably largely symbolic, but if there were a substantial increase in US fossil fuel production then the impact would be to reduce global oil and gas prices: not necessarily good news for biogas and biomethane or indeed other renewables that compete.
Mr Trump has made promises that Americans will enjoy much lower oil and gas prices, but that on balance seems unlikely. Indeed, one clear Trump commitment is to stop the Biden administration pause in permitting export terminals for Liquefied Natural Gas (although this has not affected those LNG terminals already under construction or being expanded). In the longer term, assuming new terminals are built after the current crop that has already made the US the world’s largest LNG exporter, this may help ease European and Asian natural gas prices (and ironically raise US natural gas prices). But these are second order effects. The big picture of a Trump victory would be a substantial pause – and maybe worse – to global efforts to tackle climate change.
