A pivotal choice: Trump vs. Harris on climate change

WASHINGTON — The window is closing for nations to reduce enough of the pollution that is heating the planet to avoid the most dangerous levels of climate change, according to scientists across the world. And the outcome of next week’s presidential election could determine whether the United States and other countries meet that challenge.

If he returns to the White House, former President Donald Trump, who last month called climate change “one of the greatest scams of all time,” plans to build on his first-term attacks on the environment when he pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations.

In a second term, he has promised to end federal support for a clean energy transition and hamstring wind and solar development while expanding oil and gas production — including drilling in the fragile Arctic wilderness. He has said he would again withdraw the country from the Paris accord and potentially go further, blocking the United States from negotiating future global climate agreements.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has called climate change an “existential threat,” has not laid out a detailed plan regarding climate and the environment.

But she is widely expected to continue federal support for wind, solar and other forms of clean energy, along with electric vehicles, in an effort to bring clean energy manufacturing onto U.S. shores while shifting the economy away from fossil fuels. In 2022, she cast the tiebreaking vote on the biggest climate law in U.S. history, the Inflation Reduction Act, and has pledged to fully implement it.

Although congressional Republicans may block new laws and the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court has hemmed in the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, a President Harris would be likely to try to use regulatory power to cut the emissions that are driving climate change. She is also expected to try to reduce the air and water pollution that is prevalent in marginalized communities.

Trump, on the other hand, plans a full-scale repeal of what he calls the Biden administration’s “kamikazee climate regulations.” His immediate agenda includes rescinding limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and automobiles.

“Energy will be front and center in terms of a Day 1, early agenda,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative research group that promotes fossil fuels. “It’s an issue that unites Republicans nearly unanimously, and President Trump has been absolutely clear in terms of how he views these issues.”

After beating Trump in 2020, President Joe Biden quickly rejoined the Paris Agreement, a voluntary pact among nearly 200 nations to curb climate change. At global climate talks last year, those nations agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. Trump considers the Paris accord “a rip-off” and recently told an NBC News reporter, “We’ll take ‘em out so fast your head will spin.”

Several people close to the Trump campaign said there is also an effort brewing to convince Trump to withdraw from the underlying treaty, the United Framework Convention on Climate Change. The move could be challenged: While the Constitution gives the Senate the power to enter into treaties, it is silent on the question of termination. If successful, such a move could prevent the United States from participating in future global negotiations on climate change.

Allies of Trump have promised that, this time around, the former president would be better positioned to dismantle environmental and climate rules, aided by conservative judges he appointed and loyalists he intends to install throughout the government.

Trump has promised to grant virtually all permits to drill oil — which he calls “liquid gold under our feet” — on public lands and waters, keep coal plants burning and make it easier to build gas pipelines. That would result in additional greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to another billion cars on the road, according to a study by Carbon Brief, a climate analysis site.

Scientists have called this a pivotal decade in setting policies to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. As the world’s sole superpower and the country that has pumped the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, the actions of the United States can influence the pace of progress at home and abroad.

But Trump does not consider climate change a problem, or even a scientific reality. As hurricanes Helene and Milton battered the Southeast, Trump ridiculed projections about climate-fueled sea level rise and assured people that if anything they will enjoy more beachfront property.

“The stakes when it comes to climate change literally could not be higher,” said Peter Maysmith, the senior vice president of campaigns for the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group that has spent $150 million on ads in the 2024 election cycle.

“We have one candidate who has been a climate champion, sued Big Oil and cast the deciding vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, running against somebody who calls climate change a hoax, makes fun of wind and solar, and denies the role that climate change plays in worsening extreme storms,” Maysmith said.

Harris has moderated her positions since she served as a U.S. senator from California and ran for president in 2019. At the time she co-sponsored a nonbinding resolution calling for a Green New Deal, which called for converting the electric grid to 100% clean energy this decade, declared clean air, clean water and healthy food to be basic human rights and endorsed free health care and affordable housing for all Americans. The resolution did not pass.

She also favored a ban on hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, which is the process of extracting oil or gas from shale by injecting water, sand and sometimes chemicals at high pressure. The process uses large amounts of fresh water, and raises concerns about groundwater contamination.

Harris says she no longer wants to end fracking and as she campaigns now, she sometimes points out that domestic oil and gas production is at record levels.

Harris has said she wants to improve electrical transmission to better connect remote sources of wind and solar power with population centers. Improving the nation’s electric grids could determine whether the United States can increase enough clean energy to meet its climate targets. The Biden administration has pledged to cut emissions roughly in half by the end of this decade. But it’s largely up to Congress to address the problem.

Without legislation, a Harris administration would have limited tools to cut emissions further. The EPA, which imposed limits on pollution from power plants and vehicles under Biden, could set new controls on big industrial polluters — steel and cement plants, factories, oil refineries and others. Harris could also use executive authority to limit new gas exports or drilling on federal lands, a prospect that fossil fuel executives said they fear.

“American energy is on the ballot,” said Amanda Eversole, the executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry.

Eversole said the industry association has been heartened to hear Harris drop her opposition to fracking. But, she said, Harris has been largely silent on whether she would make it more difficult for oil and gas companies to continue to lease land and waters for drilling.

“When you look at Donald Trump, he has a record on energy,” she said. “The Harris campaign and the vice president herself has yet to really provide a substantive point of view on energy.”

Earlier this year, Trump told oil executives dining at his Mar-a-Lago estate that they should contribute $1 billion to help him win the White House because they will realize that much in savings after he kills regulations that affect their industry, according to several of those in attendance.

Professor Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University, said it’s unlikely that Trump could halt the country’s transition away from fossil fuels because federal subsidies for wind, solar and other clean energy are now part of federal law, making them more difficult to erase than regulations. Yet Trump would certainly slow progress, and he called that dangerous.

“We’re a bit in the soup,” Oppenheimer said. “If we started 30 years ago when a lot of scientists were telling us the fact that the Earth was warming and that human beings appeared to be responsible, we’d be in a lot better position than we are today.”

Now, he said, “we can’t afford to slow down at all, we have to speed up.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company