This year’s COP has been unusual from an American perspective, given its unique timing shortly after the announcement of the 2024 US presidential election results. All members of the US delegation serve under the Biden-Harris Administration and are left in the tricky position of reassuring international partners of the US’s commitment to climate action amidst expectations of President-elect Trump’s second withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. The question of whether the US will stay in the Paris Agreement dominated discussions among American entities at COP, including the CEO of American oil company ExxonMobil urging Trump not to withdraw from the treaty.

Throughout the first week of the conference, numerous appearances were made by John Podesta, the top US climate negotiator, and Ali Zaidi, the top climate advisor to President Biden. Their remarks revolved around four main points:

1. The US has already deployed nearly $500 billion in clean energy technology domestically under the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), which represent the largest pieces of climate legislation in the history of the world.
2. Numerous American state and local governments remain committed to the goals of the Paris Agreement through the America Is All In movement.
3. The American private sector is expected to continue providing capital for the global energy transition.
4. Expansion of the US domestic nuclear energy sector has broad bipartisan support and is expected to continue through the change in administration. (To this end, on the second day of COP29, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a new framework to triple nuclear energy capacity in the US by 2050.)

The US’s turn to industrial policy as climate policy through provisions under IRA and BIL raises the question of geopolitics and strategic competition in the global energy transition. Some provisions in green industrial policies can be seen as promoting protectionism over climate action. Indeed, China has lodged a complaint against the US in the World Trade Organization (WTO) over certain tax credits within the IRA that it sees as unfairly favoring American goods over imports.

In a panel hosted at the UN Climate Change pavilion, Erik Solheim, the former Norwegian Minister of Climate and the Environment, summarized this tension by contrasting the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) with its tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs). CBAM, which adds a tariff on carbon-intensive imports, can be interpreted as climate action in that it encourages exporters to adopt the EU’s stricter environmental standards for manufacturing. On the other hand, the EU’s tariffs on Chinese EVs can be interpreted as protectionism at the expense of climate action in that it raises EV prices and thereby slows EVuptake in the EU.

While supply chain security concerns have served as a great motivator of climate action in the US, they sometimes produce contradictions like the above. The fundamental question remains: should green industrial policy be driven by climate goals or by security concerns?