This is a very important year for elections around the world, but no election has more potential to impact the planet’s warming climate than the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Tonight, the two men will take the stage for their first debate, the highest-stakes moment of the race so far.
It is unclear whether CNN hosts will ask the candidates questions about climate change. But the last time Biden and Trump debated, in October 2020, Biden promoted a plan to create millions of jobs and improve the environment, and Trump called it a “pipe dream” and an “economic disaster.”
Americans will hear from both candidates again in a completely different world. The climate crisis is now even more urgent. The world sweated through its hottest year on record, millions felt the effects of toxic fumes from Canada’s record-breaking wildfires, and the ocean warmed so much that coral reefs were bleaching at levels scientists had never seen before.
Today I’d like to explain what each candidate’s record tells us about the very different paths U.S. climate policy could take. The major differences between the candidates have major consequences for the climate on our planet.
Biden’s record
The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate bill, in 2022, that will help the United States build renewable power plants, set up battery factories, modernize homes to make them more efficient, introduce more nature-friendly agricultural practices and much more. The plan’s tax credits and other benefits are so popular that the price tag has essentially doubled.
Biden’s policies also include sticks. He set new rules, including limits on emissions that effectively require electric vehicles to make up the majority of new cars sold by 2032, a commitment for coal-fired power plants to eliminate or close about 90 percent of their emissions by 2039 , and a requirement for oil and gas companies to plug methane leaks.
But Biden didn’t do as much as he said he would. A more ambitious version of his climate investment plan failed because it lacked crucial support from Senator Joe Manchin. There are also concerns that many of the IRA’s policies exclude Chinese-made green technologies, often the cheapest and most efficient available, which could slow progress in reducing emissions.
Biden has also allowed some major oil and gas projects to proceed, including the Willow project in Alaska and a permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, despite his pledge four years ago to “no more drilling, period.” Burning fossil fuels such as oil and gas is the leading cause of global warming, and under Biden’s presidency the United States has become the world’s largest oil producer.
Trump’s record
During his time in office, Trump made good on many of his campaign promises to dismantle regulations to combat global warming, which he described as a deterrent to economic growth. He also pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a global pact intended to prevent further warming of the planet.
Trump favored the development of fossil fuels. During his term, he approved a major oil pipeline, the Keystone; accelerated the Dakota Access Pipeline; and signed an executive order to expand offshore drilling.
The Heritage Foundation’s sweeping plan for a future Republican presidency, Project 2025, led in part by former Trump administration officials, calls for increasing fossil fuel production and declares that the federal government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal areas.” resources” on public lands. Trump supported many of the plan’s ideas during his campaign this year. He has also promised oil executives he will roll back regulations affecting them and said they must give him $1 billion to retake the White House. (Senate Democrats are now investigating the meeting.)
Trump has opposed government support for renewable energy. Both Project 2025 and Trump have called for the dismantling of energy transition programs and a rollback of renewable energy tax credits put in place by the Biden administration, although Trump would need congressional approval to do so. Trump has also repeatedly spread disinformation about wind farms, claiming they cause cancer, and has used violent language to describe electric vehicles, calling them a “murder of jobs.”
Trump has rolled back more than a hundred environmental regulations during his term as president. Most of these focused on reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases, including measures that limited pollution from power plants, cars and trucks. Project 2025 calls on Trump to do the same in a second term. He has pledged to revoke “all” Biden administration rules aimed at accelerating the transition to renewable energy sources and promoting electric vehicles.
Trump wanted to plant a trillion trees. While Trump has called climate change a hoax in the past, he has also said he wants to protect the environment. In 2020, Trump signed a plan to plant one trillion trees, and while he hasn’t focused on that lately, Republicans have continued to support it. Planting trees is not nearly enough to slow warming, and planting the wrong trees can be very bad for the environment.
it comes down to
The Biden administration’s climate policies are expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, although his policies are falling short of expectations in some areas.
In March, the news service Carbon Brief estimated that a Trump victory could result in more than four billion tons of additional U.S. emissions by 2030. The additional emissions in a second Trump term, Carbon Brief estimates, “would — twice as much — all the savings achieved over the past five years through the deployment of wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world.”
Maggie Astor reporting contributed.
The disappearing islands that didn’t disappear
On a patch of land in the Indian Ocean, twice by plane and one bumpy speedboat ride from the nearest continent, the sublime blue waves lapping against the stark white sand are about the only thing breaking the silence of a hot, windless afternoon.
The existence of low-lying tropical islands seems unlikely, a glitch. An almost seamless meeting of land and sea, rising like an illusion above the violent oceanic vastness, they are among the most marginal environments humans have ever called home.
And indeed, when the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places where climate change would take hold. could completely destroy it. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geological history had to be corrected and the small islands probably returned to watery oblivion in this century.
Then, not so long ago, researchers started sifting through aerial photographs and discovered something surprising. They first looked at a few dozen islands, then several hundred, and now almost 1,000. They found that the edges of the islands had rocked back and forth over the decades, eroding here and building up there. Overall, however, their area had not shrunk. In some cases it was the opposite: they grew. The seas rose and the islands expanded with them. – Raymond Zhong
Read more about why scientists think some islands are growing.
