Fears around what the outcome of the upcoming US Presidential elections will mean for the green energy transition and fight against climate change are somewhat overblown, Presidential Climate Commission executive director Crispian Olver has said.

“We're all on tenterhooks for the outcome of the US elections. We don't know. It's basically neck and neck between [Kamala] Harris and [Donald] Trump. I think in the climate space, the outcome is maybe a little bit overblown. I'm not sure America's ever going to reverse the Inflation Reduction Act investments, but certainly the signals that get sent into the global community are going to be radically different,” he said at the fourth yearly Climate Summit, in Johannesburg, on October 1.

He did, however, note that a Trump regime in the US could perpetuate what he called “Republican-driven winds” blowing against environmental, social and governance (ESG), which were felt across the globe.

He said ESG has “lost a little bit of the shine” it had two years ago.

“[Then], it was all any of us spoke about. Now it's a little bit more of an uphill battle. In the climate space, leaders across the board – political and corporate and other institutional leaders – continue to irrationally discount the future. That means that we're radically underestimating the cost that we're going to pay in terms of loss, damage and adaptation. We're not taking account of the fact that those costs are orders of magnitude bigger than the mitigation investment that we could make today to avoid those costs,” Olver said.

State-owned utility Eskom chairperson Mteto Nyati, however, said a Trump Presidency would certainly represent a negative outcome for South Africa and the rest of Africa.

“If we can end up with Trump as US President, we'll have a US that is more focused on itself and less focused externally. That [holds] implications for economies like South Africa and for regions like Africa, because we need to continue to be driving this agenda of growth, and to do that, you need partnerships. You need the investments that are related to that. If you have less of that, and more of an economy that is looking at itself inwardly, that is going to be negative for us,” he said.

Olver noted that the US impact, while important, needed to be seen in the context of worldwide fragmented geopolitics, particularly among the US, China and Russia, which had led to a highly protectionist set of trade regimes that appeared to transcend political leaning.

“We've seen how these carbon border adjustment mechanisms are now pushing a carbon price a little bit inequitably into the global economy and linked to that there is a level of resource nationalism, particularly around this new green energy transition,” Olver said.

Nyati hoped that, regardless of the US election outcomes, many private US companies would do what they believed was right.

“We know that the individuals in companies do not necessarily follow. They are independent. But it will certainly influence how they think about our geography. We need to pay attention to what is going on [in the US], and it will certainly have an impact, one way or the other, on us,” he said.

Standard Bank chief economist and research head Goolam Balim pointed out the potential impact of the US pulling out of the Paris 2050 agreement, which Trump would reportedly see to if he came to power.

“The US has committed to Paris 2050 and, when assembled with the other partners that have also so subscribed; effectively 89% of the world's economies, when measured by greenhouse-gas emissions, are committed. If the US withdraws, it's clearly a very substantial withdrawal at a political level.

"However, there is some level of mitigation in the sense that multinational corporate America will be more sensitive to climate dynamics. So, we could get a constructive fissure between headline political tote and corporate America's subscription to the idea of climate responsibility,” he said.