Action on climate change depends on the 2024 election

wildfires that forced thousands to evacuate and destroyed hundreds of homes and other buildings; Heat waves that smothered the Southwest in oppressive, deadly heat for weeks; and hurricanes that have caused catastrophic damage and almost wiped out entire cities – these are just a few of the climate change-related disasters that have claimed hundreds of lives in the US so far this year. Conservatively speaking, such disasters cost the country $150 billion a year, with warming of just 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. No part of the country is immune from the impacts.

Climate scientists clearly agree that the world must rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid ever-worsening disasters and disruptions in our societies. The measures implemented in the next few years will determine what the future climate will look like and what threats the world will face. The United States is critical to this effort. And in the 2024 presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, voters are choosing between diametrically opposed visions of what the country must do. “When it comes to climate change, the contrast between Trump and Harris couldn’t be more stark,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who focuses on energy and climate.

Over the past four years, the Biden-Harris administration has taken by far the most action of any U.S. presidential administration to address the climate crisis – most notably through the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), for which Harris was the tie-breaking vote. The government has also tightened many environmental regulations and made environmental justice a central goal. During her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Harris said that the people of the United States “deserve the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that is the climate crisis.” heats up.”

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Trump has said he wants clean air and water — but his administration has rolled back more than 200 environmental regulations. He has appointed Supreme Court justices who have overturned decades of protections for wetlands and weakened the role of science in government policy. And the plans laid out as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump administration) would seek to build on that deregulation, maximize fossil fuel production and dismantle much of the government’s climate science apparatus . Although the Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from Project 2025, many former Trump officials helped draft it. And in 2018, the Heritage Foundation loudly announced that the then-incumbent Trump administration had adopted nearly two-thirds of the conservative think tank’s policy recommendations. Trump has also stated that he would withdraw unspent IRA funds and that climate change is “not our problem.” But the U.S. has historically been the biggest contributor to global warming, and numerous studies show that climate change is making extreme weather disasters worse here and elsewhere. “However you break it down, it’s clearly the U.S. problem,” says Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation (EI), a nonpartisan energy and climate policy think tank. “You can’t build a wall against the climate.”

Climate policy in the past and present

By far the Biden-Harris administration’s largest climate initiative is the IRA, which has committed $369 billion in climate investments over ten years. There are also climate-related provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act. There are also important new regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that target carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, methane pollution from the oil and gas industry, and vehicle exhaust emissions. According to an EI report, this policy push results in “the annual pace of emissions reductions this decade more than doubling compared to levels achieved in the 2010s.”

Renewable energy and battery storage have dominated new power generation projects in the U.S. in recent years due to additional investment, tax incentives and continued cost reductions. Electric vehicle sales reached record levels in 2023. But oil and gas production also reached record highs under 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 fossil fuel production in the U.S., although she has spoken about the need for an energy mix and said she no longer supports a fracking ban. Stokes points out that Trump, on the other hand, has said he wants to start “drilling, drilling, drilling” and so on from day one Washington Post reported that in a meeting with oil executives this spring, Trump said he would immediately reverse a series of environmental policies if they raised $1 billion to help him get re-elected. Project 2025 also calls for limiting federal research into clean energy technologies and maximizing fossil fuel extraction on federal lands.

To provide a comprehensive view of how potential policies under Harris or Trump would affect future U.S. emissions, Orvis’ team at EI used its Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model. The researchers compared current policies under the Biden-Harris administration with more ambitious policies that achieve the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and with the policies outlined in Project 2025. They found that the latter scenario “essentially stops the progress that has been made,” says Orvis. And even if current policy measures are not enough to meet international climate goals, any progress that can be made is crucial, because “every tenth of a degree.” [of warming] is more harmful than the previous one.”

And eliminating Biden’s IRA provisions and other climate policies wouldn’t just impact emissions. “We are clearly in the midst of a major manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.,” Orvis says, and that’s in part because the IRA incentives made starting clean energy companies here competitive. Eliminating these incentives could result in companies shifting hundreds of billions of dollars in investments – and the associated jobs – to other countries. Such an approach would “permanently disqualify the U.S. from being a producer and exporter of clean energy as the ship is phased out in the next few years,” Orvis says. The EI report found that continued extraction and use of fossil fuels to generate electricity would also increase household energy costs.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has sharply criticized the IRA and said a Trump administration would destroy it. But during the recent vice presidential debate, he said that combating climate change would require “bringing back as much American manufacturing as possible, and you want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America.” But “that’s exactly what inflation reduction does.” Act,” says Orvis. “Abolition would be catastrophic for these industries.”

Although Harris hasn’t laid out any specific climate and energy plans, Stokes and Costa Samaras, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, point to their proposed policies to incentivize the construction of more affordable housing (particularly multifamily housing such as apartment buildings). . “A lot of the economy’s greenhouse gas emissions come from where people live,” says Samaras. If built closer to urban centers or public transport routes, that could mean more people can take the train or bus to work, for example, rather than driving, for example. “Housing policy is climate policy,” says Samaras, who until this year also worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Disaster preparedness and response

Regardless of who wins, the next president will have to deal with the consequences of climate change. Disasters such as hurricanes, floods and heat waves will continue to strike the country more frequently and more severely.

The Biden-Harris administration has emphasized climate resilience and preparing communities to better cope with disasters, launching an initiative to provide states with money to improve building codes. The IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure bill “are also huge climate resilience pieces of legislation, the largest in history,” Samaras says. And Harris has condemned misinformation spread by Trump surrounding the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

In contrast, the 2025 Project Plan calls for reducing disaster relief funding, ending disaster preparedness grants, and eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program. The latter is the only way for many people in the United States to afford flood insurance, which is not included in standard home insurance policies because private insurers fear the high risk of high costs. And during his first term, Trump refused to approve disaster aid for areas affected by wildfires in California until aides showed him that those areas had voted for him, several aides told POLITICO’s E&E News. Presidential budget requests made during Trump’s first term also included significant cuts to FEMA, including for repairs to high-risk dams and flood mapping.

Project 2025 proposes to relieve the National Weather Service of its forecasting duties, limit it to data collection and shift forecasting to private companies. The plan would effectively replace a single central alert system with a patchwork of apps and websites that users may have to pay to access. “It’s unfair,” says Samaras. “It’s bad science. It will cost lives.”

For climate experts like Samaras, Stokes and Orvis, the choice in this election on the climate front is clear – because, as Samaras says: “Every year counts.” Every ton [of CO₂] affairs. Every action counts.”