The Crucial Impact of the US Election on Climate Action and Sustainable Investments
At CBS Sustainable Investment Club, we follow with excitement the American election right now, and the historical twist the vote counting has taken.
The fact is, namely, that it has now become even more uncertain who will win the election and lead one of the world’s most powerful countries for the next four years. This is so, as President Trump this morning, Danish time, has claimed that “a major fraud on our nation” is playing out, amid the record high volume of postal ballots. Trump has further vowed to go to the US Supreme Court as the election result hangs in the balance.
The question of which presidential candidate who will take four years in the White House and lead the US is of crucial importance with regard to the effectiveness of the global transition towards a more sustainable future. This is so because the two presidential candidates have very different approaches and ambitions within the climate area.
On the one hand, we have the current incumbent President, Donald Trump, who cannot exactly be said to be a climate advocate. In the wake of hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and extreme heat, Trump has continually questioned the science of global warming. As such, in 2017, Trump announced that the U.S. would cease all participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation. This truly reflects his position on climate change and its (lack of) importance.
Next to Donald Trump on the ballot paper, we have Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. In his election campaign, Biden has had climate as one of his key priorities. Specifically, Biden has vowed to rejoin the Paris Agreement as soon as he is inaugurated, and he has set a goal of achieving a 100 percent clean-energy economy and net-zero emissions by the year 2050. This should be achieved by his climate plan to spend US$ 2 trillion over four years to significantly escalate the use of clean energy in the transportation, electricity, and building sectors, in order to create economic opportunities and strengthen infrastructure while also tackling climate change in the US.
Whether this full amount in Biden's climate plan becomes a reality, however, one must be a little critical of. Nonetheless, Biden acknowledges that the world faces a real climate threat, and recognizes that the United States, as one of the world's largest economies and as the largest CO2 emitters, has to take responsibility through massive investments.
The outcome of the American election campaign will thus have major consequences for the global climate problems we are increasingly faced with, and for the measures (or lack thereof) that will be taken to solve these problems. The outcome will also have a major impact on the companies that work for a more sustainable future – and thus their financial performance in the coming years.