On November 5, the United States will elect its 47th president. The election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris promises to be close, with polls unable to offer any clear predictions about the winner. Given this uncertainty, it is worth considering how each candidate could act in two specific areas that affect the global economy and international stability: energy and climate.

The outcome of the election will also affect the Kurdistan Region. Long a vital component of the global energy system as an oil exporter, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has also made serious commitments in recent years to bolstering its production of clean energy resources and implementing policies to address climate change. Given the close relationship between the United States and the Kurdistan Region, the new leadership in Washington will shape Erbil’s trajectories in energy and climate.

As in any campaign season, it can be difficult to speculate about future policies based on the candidates’ rhetoric. Yet Trump’s longstanding rhetoric and policies reveal an unequivocal backing of U.S. fossil fuel production. He has pledged to tear down environmental regulations put in place by the Biden Administration, even claiming on September 10 during a debate with Harris that production would have been “four times, fives time higher” over the last three and half years had he been president.[1] Trump also abhors international climate agreements; symbolically, his first act as president in 2017 was to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement.

Harris, for her part, is more circumspect about oil and gas in rhetoric and has not articulated concrete policies on energy, prompting most analysts and journalists to assume that she will continue the Biden Administration’s policies. As vice president, she cast the deciding vote on the administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the most consequential policy ever advanced by the United States in clean energy and climate change mitigation. She will likely champion existing global frameworks on climate while continuing support for U.S. oil and gas producers.

Markets matter

Regardless of the president in office, U.S. domestic and foreign oil and gas policy has been consistent and easy to understand since the start of the shale boom in the late 2000s, and arguably for the past 100 years: produce as much as possible and create export markets through either positive commercial energy diplomacy or through coercive measures like sanctions, so long as U.S. domestic supplies are secure.

Since 2008, U.S. oil production has increased every year except in 2016 when global prices collapsed and in 2020 and 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic suppressed demand across the world.

The global price of oil, driven by global supply and demand balances, is the ultimate arbiter of U.S. oil production levels, with geopolitical events, global economic trends, and the energy transition also shaping oil’s future.

So, while Trump may well juice U.S. production at the margins through removing emissions-reducing regulations, he will not significantly increase it because he is president. Moreover, major oil and gas companies are incentivized to reduce emissions to meet the carbon border adjustment mechanism standards for oil and petrochemicals in Europe, the United States’ most important export market.

Another example of how close the candidates are on oil and gas is the Biden Administration’s pause on liquified natural gas (LNG)-export permitting since January 2024. Trump says he will lift it immediately, but even the Biden Administration indicates that it will lift it by early 2025. The pause was initiated because of the over capacity of U.S. LNG export facilities and concerns about the future of ability of overseas markets to import increased U.S. supplies. Once again, the market drives U.S. oil and gas policy, not the president, barring more aggressive U.S. measures that either sanction Iranian oil supplies or radically disrupt global trade, about which more below.

China and the energy transition

The United States is a swing energy player: it is the world’s largest fossil fuel producer but is also capable of investing in renewables on a large scale. For instance, U.S. solar power production will increase by 63% from 2023 to 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Market forces have also compelled the U.S. state of Texas – a traditional powerhouse in oil and gas – to account for over 27% of total wind-capacity generation in the country. Nuclear power and carbon capture technologies have also attracted significant investment in recent years.

Largely through tax incentives, the IRA involves investing nearly $400 billion into wind, solar, battery power, and electric vehicles. A Harris victory would assure its continuation, whereas a Trump victory would lead to some rollback of these incentives. However, many of the Republican party’s members of Congress come from states where the IRA has been a bounty in creating jobs and jumpstarting clean energy industries, and are unlikely to support a full repeal of the legislation.

Regardless of U.S. clean energy policy, there is an inherent contradiction in U.S. energy strategy that hinders the energy transition: tariffs on China. First instituted during Trump’s first president, the Biden Administration instituted new tariffs on China in May 2024 that hiked rates from 7.5% to 25% on batteries, 0% to 25% on critical minerals, 25% to 50% on solar cells, and a whopping 25% to 100% on electric vehicles. In his campaign rhetoric, Trump is floating a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods and vows to wield tariffs more broadly.

Given China’s dominance in producing clean energy technologies and processing critical minerals, it is doubtful that the United States can bolster its own manufacturing capabilities alongside those of its allies to help meet the world’s climate goals – or even the Biden Administration’s own goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% to 52% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.

With trade wars becoming the primary manifestations of the broader geo-economic competition between the United States and China, the fate of the climate hangs in the balance. A thaw in U.S.-China relations could rebuild the former supply chains of global trade that powered the 2000s and 2010s, but that seems extremely unlikely for many reasons, not least because energy is at the heart of the U.S.-China competition.

At this stage, the world is divided into two large energy blocks: the U.S.-Gulf-Russia fossil fuel-producing block that wants to extend the use of oil and gas in the global energy system, on the one hand, and the China-EU clean energy-championing and fossil fuel-importing block that seeks to use cheaper, cleaner resources that are domestically generated.

This global energy divide, undergirded by U.S.-China trade barriers, is not going to change because of U.S. leadership, but Harris’ more climate friendly approach to energy could offer more room for case-by-case deals compared to Trump’s anti-clean energy approach.

Geopolitics and predictability

Whereas the U.S.-China rivalry is mostly geo-economic, the United States’ geopolitical rivalries with Russia and Iran could have the greatest impact on the Kurdistan Region, and there are potential differences between the candidates that could shape U.S. policy across Eurasia.

Commonly held public narratives purport that Trump would wrap up the war in Ukraine with a peace agreement, whereas Harris would continue the Biden’s Administration’s support for Ukraine, hoping the U.S. Congress continues to fund it. These are simplistic narratives because they depend on Russia President Vladimir Putin’s actions. Moreover, Trump has demonstrated support for Ukraine in the past, even though he suggested that he would end aid to Ukraine in June.

The Middle East is, of course, the locus of geopolitical tension, with threats of a wider regional war with Iran on the horizon. If a scenario like the Tanker War in the 1980s – when oil exports from the Gulf were threatened and curtailed – were to unfold, Trump could arguably be more aggressive in applying U.S. military force to the region given the moves that he authorized during his presidential term, such as the assassination of Iranian spymaster Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. At the same time, Biden sent U.S. troops to Israel – a first-ever instance of such support to the U.S. ally – and billions in military aid to Saudi Arabia in early October. A wider war would be messy, but the United States would be involved regardless of the president.

Geopolitics is inherently volatile, but even more so when there is a declining hegemon – the United States – and a rising hegemon – China – accompanied by an energy transition away from fossil fuels to a host of clean energy resources. This makes speculations about how a U.S. president might act challenging, to say the least, as the possible events of the next four years are impossible to predict.

Trump, in fact, has used unpredictability as a strategy in foreign policy to keep the United States’ friends and enemies alike on uncertain ground. This is perhaps advantageous in some instances, but also makes it challenging for other countries to react. Harris, on the other hand, offers much more predictability in foreign policy, like what we saw with Biden.

What is predictable is that the coming years in energy and climate will have unpredictable results regardless of the U.S. president.

[1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/oil-prices-could-shake-up-trump-harris-energy-fight/