Forest fires forced thousands to evacuate and destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures; Heat waves suffocated the Southwest weeks of suffocating and deadly heat at the end and hurricanes that have caused catastrophic damagewiping out nearly entire villages—these are just a few of the climate change-fueled disasters that have claimed hundreds of lives in the US this year. Conservatively, such disasters cost the country $150 billion annually, and it has warmed just 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. No part of the country he is immune to the consequences.
Climate scientists clearly agree: to avoid further catastrophe and disruption in our societies, the world must rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The policies implemented in the coming years will determine what the future climate looks like and what threats the world will face. The US is central to this effort. And in the 2024 presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, voters may have diametrically opposed visions of what the country should do. “On climate change, the contrast between Trump and Harris couldn’t be more stark,” says 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 the most action of any US presidential administration to address the climate crisis, notably by enacting the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), for which Harris voted to break the tie. The administration has also strengthened many environmental regulations made environmental justice a key goal. In his acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris said 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 fueling the climate crisis.”
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Trump has said he wants clean air and water, but his administration rolled back more than 200 environmental regulations. He has appointed the judges of the Supreme Court it overturned decades of wetlands protections and it weakened the role of science in government policy-making. And Plans established within the 2025 Project of the Heritage Foundation (considered 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 write it. And in 2018 the Heritage Foundation said the then-Trump administration had adopted nearly two-thirds of the conservative think tank’s policy recommendations. Trump has said he will suspend unspent IRA funds and that climate change is “not our problem.” But The US is the largest historical contributor to global warmingand numerous studies show this climate change increases extreme weather disasters here and elsewhere. “In any case, it’s firmly a US 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 put up a climate wall.”
Climate policies past and present
It is the largest climate signature initiative of the Biden-Harris administration The IRA committed $369 billion in climate investments more than 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 Environmental Protection Agency regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, methane pollution from the oil and gas industry, and vehicle exhaust emissions. This policy push “is more than doubling the annual rate of emissions reductions this decade compared to the rate achieved in the 2010s,” they said. EI report.
With additional investment, tax incentives and continued cost declines, renewable energy and battery storage have dominated new power generation projects in the US over the past two years. Electric vehicle sales hit record highs in 2023. But oil and gas production has also hit record highs under the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and the US is the world’s leading exporter of natural gas.
Where Harris stands on US fossil fuel production is unclear, although he has spoken of the need for a mix of energy sources and said he does not support a ban on fracking. According to Stokes, Trump, on the other hand, said that on the first day he wants to start “digging, digging, digging” and has Washington Post notify when he met with oil executives in the spring, Trump said he would immediately roll back some environmental policies if he raised $1 billion to help him get re-elected. Project 2025 also calls for curtailing government research into clean energy technologies and maximizing fossil fuel extraction on federal lands.
To provide a broad view of how potential policies from Harris or Trump would shape future US emissions, Orvis’ EI team used its Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model. The researchers compared current policies under the Biden-Harris administration with the more ambitious policies that achieve the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and the policies set forth in Project 2025. The latter scenario “essentially halts the progress that has been made”. done,” says Orvis. And even if current policies 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 last.”
Amanda Montañez; Source: Energy Innovation Policy & Technology
And rejecting the provisions of the IRA and Biden’s climate policies would not only affect emissions. “We’re clearly in the midst of a huge manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.,” says Orvis, and that’s in part because IRA incentives made it competitive for clean energy companies to build here. Abolishing those incentives could mean companies would shift hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to other countries. Such a move “would forever exclude the US from being a producer and exporter of clean energy because the ship will be sailing for years to come,” Orvis says. Extracting fossil fuels and using them for power generation would also increase household energy costs, the EI report found.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has condemned the IRA and said a Trump administration would dismantle it. But in the last vice presidential debate, he said that to combat climate change “you should get as much American manufacturing back as possible, and you want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America.” But “that’s exactly what the Anti-Inflation Act does,” says Orvis. “Eliminating that would be disastrous for those industries.”
While Harris has not outlined specific climate and energy plans, Stokes and Costa Samaras, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, have proposed his policy to encourage the construction of more affordable housing (especially multi-family housing, such as apartment buildings). “A lot of greenhouse gas emissions in the economy are concentrated where people live,” says Samaras. By building closer to urban centers or public transport routes, this could mean more people could take trains or buses to work instead of driving, for example. “Housing policy is climate policy,” says Samaras, who also worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy until this year.
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 plague the country with increasing frequency and severity.
The Biden-Harris administration has emphasized climate resilience and preparing communities to better withstand disasters, launching an initiative. giving states money to improve building codes. The IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act “are also giant pieces of climate resilience legislation, the biggest in history,” says Samaras. And Harris condemned the misinformation Trump has spread about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
The Project 2025 plan, on the other hand, Calls for cuts to disaster response fundingend disaster preparedness grants and eliminate the National Flood Insurance Program. The latter is the only way for many People in the US can afford flood insurancewhich is not covered by standard homeowner’s policies because private insurers fear the high risks of high costs. And in his first administration, Trump refused to accept disaster relief To areas affected by wildfires in California, workers were shown voting in those areas, multiple workers told POLITICO’s E&E News. So are the budget requests made during Trump’s first term introduced major cuts to FEMAamong other things, to repair high-risk dams and make flood maps.
Project 2025 calls for divesting the National Weather Service of its forecasting duties, which would turn it over to data collection, and shift forecasting to private companies. The plan would effectively replace the single central warning system with a patchwork of apps and websites that users would have to pay to access. “It’s equitable,” says Samaras. “Science is bad. It will cost people their lives.”
For climate experts like Samaras, Stokes and Orvis, the climate choice in this election is clear because, as Samaras says, “Every year matters. Each ton (CO2) issues. Every action is important.”
