Wildfires have forced thousands of people to evacuate and destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures. A heatwave has blanketed the Southwest in sweltering, deadly heat for weeks. The devastating hurricanes, which nearly wiped out entire towns, are just some of the climate disasters that have claimed hundreds of lives in the United States so far this year. Conservatively, such disasters cost the country $150 billion a year, and that’s when temperatures have risen only 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. No region of the country is immune.
Climate scientists clearly agree that the world needs to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid increasingly worse disasters and social chaos. Policies implemented in the coming years will determine what the future climate will look like and what threats the world will face. The United States is essential to this effort. And in the 2024 presidential election, a contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, voters will have to choose between diametrically opposed visions of what the country should do. “When it comes to climate change, the contrast between Trump and Harris could not be more stark,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in energy and climate.
Over the past four years, the Biden-Harris administration has taken more steps than any U.S. presidential administration to address the climate crisis. Primarily through the enactment of the Inflation Control Act (IRA), which Harris cast as the tie-breaking vote. The administration also strengthened many environmental regulations and made environmental justice a key goal. In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Harris said Americans deserve the “freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that causes the climate crisis.” Ta.
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President Trump has said he wants clean air and water, but his administration has rolled back more than 200 environmental regulations. He appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned decades of wetland protections and weakened the role of science in government policymaking. And plans developed under the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” (widely considered the blueprint for the second Trump administration) will further develop that deregulation, maximize fossil fuel production, and It aims to dismantle much of the country’s climate science apparatus. Although the Trump campaign has sought to distance itself from Project 2025, many former Trump officials helped draft it. And in 2018, the Heritage Foundation touted that the then-Trump administration had adopted nearly two-thirds of the conservative think tank’s policy recommendations. President Trump also said he would cancel unused IRA funds and said climate change is “not our problem.” But the United States has historically been the largest contributor to global warming, and a wealth of research shows that climate change is exacerbating extreme weather disasters here and elsewhere. “No matter how you slice it, this is definitely an American problem,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation (EI), a nonpartisan energy and climate policy think tank. “We can’t build walls for climate change.”
Climate policy past and present
The Biden-Harris administration’s largest signature climate initiative to date is the IRA, which pledged $369 billion in climate investments over 10 years. Added to this are climate-related provisions in the bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. There are also major new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency targeting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, methane pollution from the oil and gas industry, and emissions from vehicle tailpipes. According to the EI report, this policy push has “more than doubled the pace of annual emissions reductions over the past decade compared to the rate of emissions reductions achieved in the 2010s.”
Renewable energy and battery storage have dominated new power generation projects in the U.S. in recent years due to added investment, tax incentives, and continued declines in costs. Electric vehicle sales reached record levels in 2023. But oil and gas production has also reached record highs under both the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and the United States is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas.
It’s unclear exactly where Harris stands on the issue of U.S. fossil fuel production, but she has spoken about the need for a mix of energy sources and no longer supports banning hydraulic fracturing. said. Trump, meanwhile, has said he wants to start “drilling, drilling, drilling” from day one, Stokes noted. washington post When President Trump met with oil company executives this spring, he reportedly said he would immediately reverse many environmental policies if he raised $1 billion for his re-election bid. Project 2025 also calls for reducing government research into clean energy technologies and maximizing fossil fuel extraction on federal lands.
To provide a broader view of how potential policies under Harris or Trump would shape future U.S. emissions, EI’s Orbis team developed an open-source computer model. We used an energy policy simulator. The researchers compared current policies under the Biden-Harris administration with more ambitious policies to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and those outlined in Project 2025. They found that the latter scenario “fundamentally halts the progress made so far.” I created it,” Orbis said. And even if current policies are not sufficient to meet international climate goals, any progress will be made because “every tenth of a degree[of warming]is more damaging than before.” It is very important whether you can get it or not.
Amanda Montanez. Source: Energy Innovation Policy and Technology
And repealing the IRA provisions and other Biden climate policies would not only affect emissions. “We’re clearly in the midst of a massive manufacturing renaissance in the United States,” Orbis said. Part of the reason is that IRA incentives have made building clean energy companies more competitive. Eliminating these incentives could mean companies taking hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and associated jobs elsewhere. Such a move would “permanently exclude the United States from being a clean energy producer and exporter as the ship sails in the next few years,” Orbis said. Household energy costs will also increase if fossil fuels continue to be extracted and used to generate electricity, the EI report said.
President Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, condemned the IRA and said the Trump administration would destroy it. But in the recent vice presidential debate, he said tackling climate change requires bringing back “as much American manufacturing as possible” and that he would want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States. . But “that’s exactly what the Inflation Control Act does,” Orbis said. “Getting rid of it would be disastrous for those industries.”
While Harris has not laid out specific climate change and energy plans, Stokes and Costa-Samaras, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, are looking to build more affordable housing, especially multifamily housing such as apartment complexes. ) points to her policy proposal to encourage the construction of “Many of the greenhouse gas emissions in the economy affect people’s lives,” Samaras says. If built near city centers or near public transport lines, more people could take trains or buses to work instead of cars. “Housing policy is climate policy,” said Samaras, who until this year worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Disaster preparedness and response
No matter who wins, the next president will have to address the effects of climate change. Disasters such as hurricanes, floods and heat waves will continue to strike the country with increasing frequency and severity.
The Biden-Harris administration is focused on climate resilience and preparing communities to withstand disasters, and has launched an effort to provide funding to states to improve building standards. The IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law “is also the largest and most colossal climate response bill in history,” Samaras said. Harris also criticized President Trump for spreading misinformation about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricanes Helen and Milton.
In contrast, the Project 2025 plan calls for reducing funding for disaster response, ending disaster preparedness subsidies, and eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program. The latter is the only way many people in the United States can pay for flood insurance, but standard homeowners insurance doesn’t because private insurance companies fear the high risk of incurring large costs. Not compensated. Also, during President Trump’s first administration, he refused to approve disaster aid to areas affected by the California wildfires until his staff showed that the area had voted for him, according to multiple sources. staff told Politico’s E&E News. President Trump’s budget request during his first term also included deep cuts to FEMA, including to repair high-risk dams and create flood maps.
Project 2025 calls for stripping the National Weather Service of its forecasting duties, relegating it to data collection only, and transferring forecasting to private companies. The plan would effectively replace a single central alert system with a patchwork of apps and websites that users might have to pay to access. “That’s not fair,” Samaras says. “It’s bad science. It’s going to cost people’s lives.”
For climate experts like Samaras, Stokes and Orbis, the choice in this election on climate change is clear. As Samaras says, “Every year counts. (Every ton of CO)2) is important. Every action counts. ”
