Climate on the Ballot
When millions of Americans cast their ballots on Nov. 5, they will be nudging the world in one of two directions: a difficult climate future or one that could be catastrophic. Their vote could alter the strength of hurricanes, the intensity of droughts, the rate of sea-level rise, how much land burns, and more.
That’s because a second Trump presidency, scientists argue, would be disastrous for the climate.
At a time when the country needs to rapidly transition to renewable energy, they say, Trump’s fossil-fuel-heavy proposals would make the country more reliant on energy sources that pump noxious fumes into the atmosphere. Some experts say the policies supported by Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand — though perhaps not sufficiently aggressive — would help the energy transition along.
‘Drill, Drill, Drill’
Trump has said he wants to be a dictator — supposedly only on “day one” — so he can close the border and “drill, drill, drill.” He reportedly told fossil-fuel companies he’d do whatever they want if they gave his campaign $1 billion. He seems to have no understanding of how wind power works and vehemently opposes it.
Furthermore, the Trump-aligned Project 2025 includes a fossil-fuel-promoting plan that one analysis says would add nearly 3 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2030. Project 2025 is a blueprint for a second Trump term, led by the Heritage Foundation, that outlines plans to replace thousands of career civil servants with Trump loyalists and significantly restrict abortion access. The conservative policy blueprint would separately be a climate disaster at the worst time.
“It is now very clear that humanity is experiencing the first wave of climate-related damages — from extensive fires to extreme heat events,” says Daniel Kammen, a distinguished professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Aggressive transition plans to clean energy are a global imperative.”
Trump’s agenda would be a major setback, Kammen says, and the effects would be long-lasting. He says the U.S. must make the right infrastructure choices to meet its climate goals, and a second Trump administration would harden the fossil-fuel industry’s grip on the energy sector.
“If we build a lot of fossil-fuel infrastructure, then solving climate change is going to be harder, because those assets really only make sense if you use them for half a century,” says Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “If you end up retiring them in 10 or 15 years, that’s going to be expensive and politically hard, because these companies have invested a lot.”
If the U.S. is spending billions of dollars investing in fossil-fuel infrastructure and simultaneously kneecapping the growth of the renewable energy sector, experts say, then the nation will remain dependent on fossil fuels for years to come, and this would be a major impediment to reaching the climate goals laid out in the Paris Agreement.
“It would make it virtually impossible to avert a catastrophic 1.5 C [3 F] warming of the planet,” says Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Beyond Trump’s general order to “drill, drill, drill” and his opposition to renewable energy, Project 2025 outlines specific policies that would deal a hefty blow to the climate fight. The document calls for increasing drilling and repealing the Biden administration’s historic Inflation Reduction Act, which included hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-energy investments. It also calls for eliminating many environmental protections and dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which does significant climate research.
“You can look at something like Project 2025, and it pretty clearly lays out that the goal of Trump and his supporters is to lock us into fossil fuels,” Dessler says.
“Solar and wind are now our cheapest energy sources, so the market is pivoting towards them, and it’s going to take government intervention to actively stop the market from pivoting,” he adds. “That’s essentially what they’re talking about.”
If the Trump administration were to successfully carry out its plans, the U.S. would start to lag in a major economic sector while other countries began to dominate. If China, for instance, is focused on building solar panels, wind turbines, and more while the U.S. is still fiddling with antiquated technology, then America will begin to fall behind.
“For the U.S., that’s a disaster — a disaster politically, environmentally, and economically,” Dessler says.
Kammen says the Biden administration has made a valiant effort to invest in fighting climate change and transitioning the U.S. to renewable energy, but much more needs to be done. He says the country needs to continue the efforts this administration has made.
“To accelerate this critical clean-energy-climate progress, a Harris-Walz administration needs to accelerate access to clean transportation, invest in clean-energy access for everyone … and decarbonize ‘hard to decarbonize’ sectors, such as heavy industry, trucking, and aviation,” Kammen says.
Americans won’t just be voting on the domestic issues that are discussed so often like abortion rights, immigration, and the economy when they go to the polls in November. They’ll be adjusting a finely tuned clock that’s counting down to a critical juncture.
Voting can feel like an individual matter, but the scope changes when humanity faces a collective crisis and the actions of nations will determine whether the world encounters a challenging future or one far more dire. The choice Americans make later this year could set off a domino effect for the entire planet, and climate scientists say it’s crucial that voters understand the weight of their decision.
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