What are the options for the United States as it faces up to the deeply-felt cost of fuel in the midterm election rout of the Republicans? Could it rejoin the world at COP31?

I spent most of November 4 watching the full day’s coverage of the US elections.

It was an amazingly detailed and choreographed entertainment featuring literally hundreds of interviews with people at voting centres.

Apart from the odd comment that was obviously a party slogan, the vast majority of voters talked about the cost of fuel destroying their budgets – at home and work.

They also hated the Middle East war that made the oil price so hurtful.

No one mentioned that the Democrats had a policy to fix this situation because they didn’t have one. The public seemed to just want to send a powerful message to President Donald Trump that he caused the issue through the Middle East war.

Climate change was not on the agenda either, as noted by the NY Times. Even the Democrats said nothing about solutions to climate or oil.

The only suggestion I heard was that maybe Trump would drop a nuclear bomb on Iran to fix the oil situation. And the only mention of Elon Musk was that he lost many millions on the campaign to save some Republicans – and failed. 

How did this happen?

The fourth oil crisis

The reality is that we should have addressed the transition away from oil many decades ago. This is the fourth global oil crisis, covering the past five decades.

I was living in the US during the first oil crisis in 1973-74. It was a shocking experience, as the country literally fell apart as the price jumped and the shortages led to social collapse.

People held up service stations and stole from neighbours to get to work.

I began a long academic career where my research and activist focus was on removing dependence on oil through new technologies that are now part of the net-zero transition.

I worked with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the co-ordinating lead author for transport and we laid a clear process for the net-zero transition to include the end of oil vulnerability.

The net-zero transition

Globally, net-zero has been adopted since the COP21 Paris agreement and, 10 years on, we are preparing for COP31 with a strong sense that we now know how to fix climate and oil.

Solar is the fastest growing energy source in history. Batteries and EVs are following the same trajectory with prices dramatically dropping. 

Where is the US?

I have lived and worked in four US cities over the past decades.

I tried to work through the options and to help put it on the global and US agenda through IPCC and making it a public issue. But it never really caught on in the transport arena there, with only a few places like California taking it seriously.

The dependence on cars, trucks and associated oil is deeply held in the US culture and the structure of its economy, and its cities and regions. Finding more oil seemed to be the main political goal.

Only Musk’s brilliance in creating Tesla and beginning to work on EV trucks showed some US leadership on replacing oil.

Then he went into a strange other world that makes Tesla drivers blush. He supported Trump, who took the US into being one of only four countries out of 197 that have left the Paris agreement.

So, on midterm election day it did not surprise me to see that the public was trying to attack the Trump administration over the terrible gas prices, but had no real policy leads to vote for. 

The oil transition is happening

In Australia, we are accelerating into the net-zero transition because we have been able to buy cheap solar, batteries and EVs.

We are one of the leaders as we are able to purchase these cheap technologies from China, in exchange for our iron ore and critical minerals. With no tariffs.

The next steps in the transition are becoming apparent.

The Chinese transition

China’s approach to the shift away from all fossil fuels, including oil, has been to mass produce the best new technologies using robots and AI.

That process enabled it to sell cheap solar, batteries and EVs to the world once its local markets were saturated. The cost of photovoltaic solar panels and batteries have dropped to 1 per cent of what they were 10 years ago.

We now know that the next technologies for net-zero hitting our market in 2027 will be for EV trucks and trains, as well as agricultural and mining machinery.

We can plan for that as we know they will be better and cheaper. And there will be a transition away from oil vulnerability.

What can the US do?

The US can get serious at COP31 and join with us in the net-zero transition.

If it doesn’t, the world may be watching a major contraction of the US economy as it tries to hold onto yesterday’s fuels and vehicles.

Can we convince the new Democrat-based US system to join this transition? 

We don’t want a nuclear bomb and Musk has opted for the stars as his focus. It’s time to re-join the world in COP31.

Peter Newman AO is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University