Table of Contents
This is a very big 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 2020Biden 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 in a very different world. The climate crisis is now even more urgent. The world sweated through the hottest year on record, millions felt the effects of toxic fumes from record-breaking wildfires in Canada, and the oceans warmed so much that coral reefs bleached at levels scientists had never seen before.
Today I’d like to explain what each candidate’s track record tells us about the very different paths that U.S. climate policy could take. The stark differences between the candidates have major implications for our planet’s climate.
Biden’s record
The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the signature climate bill, in 2022, that would help the United States build renewable energy plants, set up battery factories, retrofit homes to make them more efficient, adopt more environmentally friendly farming practices and much more. The plan’s tax credits and other provisions are so popular that the price tag has effectively doubled.
Biden’s policy also includes sticks. He set new rules that include emissions limits. These require that electric vehicles make up the majority of new cars sold by 2032. In addition, coal-fired power plants must eliminate about 90 percent of their emissions by 2039 or close. Oil and gas companies must also 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 policies exclude Chinese 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 proceedincluding 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 like 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 in the world.
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 supported 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 massive oil, gas and coal resources” on public lands. Trump supported many of the plan’s ideas during the campaign this year. He also promised oil executives that he would roll back regulations affecting them and said they should 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 dismantling energy transition programs and rolling back renewable energy tax credits put in place by the Biden administration, though Trump would need Congressional approval to do so. Trump has also repeatedly spread misinformation about wind farms, claiming they cause cancer, and has used violent language to describe electric vehicles, calling them a “job killer.”
Trump has rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations during his term as president. Most of these focused on curbing 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 promised to repeal “everyone” of the Biden administration’s regulations aimed at accelerating the transition to renewable energy sources and promoting electric vehicles.
Trump wanted to plant one 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 do so. support itPlanting trees is not enough to slow global warming. Moreover, planting the wrong trees can be very bad for the environment.
it comes down to
The Biden administration’s climate policy is expected to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, although its policies are falling short of expectations in some areas.
In March, the news service Carbon Brief estimated that a Trump victory could yield more four billion tons of additional US emissions by 2030. The extra emissions in a second Trump term, Carbon Brief estimates, “would – twice as many – negate all the problems savings of the deployment of wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.”
Maggie Astor contributed to the reporting.
The Disappearing Islands That Didn’t Disappear
On a patch of land in the Indian Ocean, two plane hops and one bumpy speedboat ride from the nearest continent, the sublime blue waves lapping against the stark white sand are the only thing that breaks 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 expanse, they are among the most marginal environments humans have ever called home.
And indeed, when the world began to pay 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 could wreak havoc on them as a whole. As the ice caps melted and the seas rose, these mishaps of geologic history had to be corrected, and the tiny islands likely returned to watery oblivion this century.
Then, not so long ago, researchers began combing through aerial photographs and discovered something surprising. They looked at a few dozen islands, then hundreds, and now nearly 1,000. They found that the edges of the islands had wobbled back and forth over the decades, eroded here and built there. But overall, their surface area had not shrunk. In some cases, it was the other way around: they were growing. The sea rose, and the islands expanded with them. —Raymond Zhong
Read more about why scientists think some islands are growing.
