What will a second Trump term mean for cleantech and climate mitigation markets?

Nine years have passed since signatories to the Paris Agreement agreed to act to keep the global average air temperature from increasing more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This month, leaders meeting in Baku for the COP29 climate conference learned that 2024 will likely be the year that level is breached.

Just ahead of the start of COP29, science writers meeting in Raleigh, N.C., joined a session focused on part of the solution for the climate crisis: clean technologies, or cleantech. In recent years, government incentives and regulation have helped spur the growth of climate-mitigating technologies. But the Nov. 10 session at ScienceWriters2024 took place amid growing global concern about what a second Donald Trump presidency will mean. Panelists asked: Might the new administration punt responsibility for climate mitigation to the private sector and voluntary markets? How should journalists cover the frontiers of climate solutions under a likely climate science-hostile administration?

During the CASW New Horizons in Science briefing, titled “‘It’s Complicated’: Navigating the world of clean tech without getting scammed (or cynical),” forest economist Erin Sills told science writers that the United States must balance skepticism of technology and its promises with acknowledgment of the legitimate underlying science “as we move into a world where we’re not going to have strong U.S. government leadership on climate solutions.”

“We are going to be looking to the voluntary sector, the private sector… and we’re going to need to both encourage them to innovate and experiment and keep them accountable for the success or lack thereof,” said Sills, who is also the head of the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University.

Sills was speaking from experience studying nature-based climate solutions and voluntary carbon offsets, which give companies, governments, or individuals an opportunity to negate their emissions-heavy activity by paying for strategies that reduce emissions elsewhere. She said nature-based climate solutions are necessary mitigation options, but scrutiny of the way institutions and the carbon credits are structured is also essential.

Moderator Maggie Koerth, editorial lead at the research nonprofit CarbonPlan and a CASW board member, also said the future could see “a lot more emphasis on climate change action having to be a voluntary space,” meaning it will be up to companies to decide on their own to map out and achieve climate goals with little to no oversight from a government body. These are all processes that people have to buy into, Koerth said.

Economic sense

Panelist Alicia Karspeck described an “erosion of trust” in recent years in these markets. Karspeck is co-founder and chief technology officer at [C]worthy, a research nonprofit that develops open-source software designed to ensure that ocean-based carbon dioxide removal is effective and safe. She said building trust is fundamental to effective markets, “even more the case when you don’t have the government actually creating or mandating that.”

Karspeck thinks accurate quantification and reporting will be critical. She used the term MRV: measurement/monitoring, reporting, and verification of greenhouse gas emissions. “It really means this question of, how do we do the right quantification and counting and reporting in the carbon dioxide removal markets so that we can trust that they are real?” she said.

Panelist James Temple, senior editor for energy at MIT Technology Review, has reported on issues with voluntary and private-sector climate mitigation, including an investigation into the “dubious climate value” of a carbon credit policy in California co-published with ProPublica. He said standards will be needed to ensure that voluntary climate solutions are trustworthy and effective. But Temple’s bigger worry is that voluntary action “is not going to get us even close.”

“Ideally, we need mandates to start driving companies to start reducing emissions as rapidly as they can, so that then [private companies] can suck up the price premium of buying green steel and green cement because they have to, because they’re required to by law,” he said. “As long as it’s this massive expense, they’re not going to do it enough on their own.”

The economics can’t be ignored, Temple continued. Trump’s repeated vows to impose steep tariffs on imports and slash government spending are likely to have a significant impact on the U.S. economy. Temple said he’s concerned about how climate solutions will fit into a company’s bottom line if the economy declines.

“It’s one thing when business is humming that we have the Microsofts and Googles of the world coming out with these fairly aggressive voluntary efforts to zero out their emissions,” he said. “That’s all great, and it’s helping us to figure out what sorts of carbon removal methods work and what don’t work. But if we’re suddenly in a recession or a depression, I think the willingness or ability to do volunteer action changes quite dramatically.”

Sills took a slightly different approach to voluntary mitigation strategies and markets: She’s interested in consumer behavior. For her, the key challenge climate leaders must grapple with lies on the demand side—in other words, how to structure solutions in a way that persuades consumers to reduce emissions.

She used carbon offsets as an example of the difficulty. If a conference attendee bought a carbon offset against their flight to Raleigh, “Does that make flying more expensive and make you less likely to take future flights, or make you feel less guilty about flying because you bought the carbon offset and now you’re going to take more flights?”

The journalist’s job

All three panelists seemed to agree that no matter what the political future holds, journalists and writers should not back down from rigorous lines of inquiry when it comes to clean technologies.

There’s no reason for journalists or researchers to shrink from tough questions, Sills said. She pointed toward other countries she’s worked in that have experienced “similar [political] swings,” such as Brazil.

“I’ve seen deforestation go up and down radically in response to changing federal governments there,’ she said. “But I have, throughout that time, worked with partners who keep working on the science, keep working on those solutions. Don’t pull back from the hard scientific questions or the critical questions that journalists are asking because of the political environment.”

Temple agreed that hard questions about whether clean technologies hitting the marketplace work shouldn’t be avoided “just because it can be seen as being negative about or unenthusiastic about addressing climate change.

“We don’t have a whole lot of time here, so false solutions aren’t really going to help us in any scenario,” he said.