This is a very big year for elections around the world, but no election has more potential to affect the planet’s warming climate than the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Tonight, the two men will be onstage for their first debate, the highest-stakes moment of the race so far.
It’s unclear if CNN’s hosts will ask the candidates about climate change. But the last time Biden and Trump debated, in October 2020, Biden 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 again in a vastly different world. The climate crisis is even more urgent now. The world sweated through the hottest year on record, millions of people felt the effects of the toxic fumes of the record-breaking wildfires in Canada, and the ocean became so warm that coral reefs bleached at levels scientists had never seen before.
Today, I’d like to explain what each candidate’s record tells us about the very different paths U.S. climate policy could take. The stark differences between the candidates have major implications for the planet’s climate.
Biden’s record
The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, its signature climate law, in 2022, which is helping the United States build renewable energy plants, create battery factories, retrofit homes to make them more efficient, introduce more nature-friendly agricultural practices and a lot more. The plan’s tax credits and other provisions have been so popular that its price tag has effectively doubled.
Biden’s policies also include sticks. He set new rules that include limits on emissions that effectively require electric vehicles to account for a majority of the new cars sold by 2032, an obligation for coal plants to eliminate about 90 percent of their emissions by 2039 or shut down, and a requirement for oil and gas companies to 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 the crucial support of Senator Joe Manchin. There is also concern that many of the I.R.A.’s policies exclude Chinese-made green technologies, often the cheapest and most efficient available, which may slow progress on curbing emissions.
Biden has also allowed some major oil and gas projects to go through, including the Willow project in Alaska and a permit for the Mountain Valley pipeline, despite his promise four years ago of “no more drilling, period.” The burning of fossil fuels like oil and gas is the main cause of global warming, and under Biden’s presidency the United States has become the biggest oil producer in the world.
Trump’s record
During his term, Trump delivered on many of his campaign promises to dismantle the regulations that were in place to fight global warming, which he characterized as deterrents to economic growth. He also took the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a global pact designed to avert more planetary warming.
Trump favored fossil fuel development. During his term, he approved a major oil pipeline, the Keystone; expedited 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, which is partly led by former Trump administration officials, calls for increasing the production of fossil fuels and declares that the federal government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources” on public lands. Trump has supported many of the plan’s ideas on the campaign trail this year. He has also promised oil executives that he will reverse regulations that affect 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 the dismantling of energy transition programs and for rollbacks of renewable energy tax credits enacted 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 an “assassination” of jobs.
Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations during his term as president. Most of them were aimed at reducing the emissions of heat-trapping gases, including measures that limited pollution from power plants, cars and trucks. Project 2025 calls for Trump to do the same in a second term. He has pledged to rescind “every one” of the Biden administration’s regulations that are 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 onto a plan to plant one trillion trees, and although he hasn’t focused on it recently, Republicans have continued to support it. Planting trees is not nearly enough to slow warming, and planting the wrong trees can be really bad for the environment.
The bottom line
The Biden administration’s climate policies are expected to cut the country’s greenhouse house gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030, from 2005 levels, though his policies are not meeting expectations in some areas.
In March, the news service Carbon Brief estimated that a Trump victory could result in more than four billion tons of additional U.S. emissions by 2030. The extra emissions in a second Trump term, Carbon Brief estimates, “would negate — twice over — all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.”
Maggie Astor contributed reporting.
The vanishing islands that didn’t vanish
On a wisp of land in the Indian Ocean, two hops by plane and one bumpy speedboat ride from the nearest continent, the sublime blue waves lapping at the bone-white sand are just about all that breaks the stillness of a hot, windless afternoon.
The very existence of low-slung tropical islands seems improbable, a glitch. A nearly seamless meeting of land and sea, peeking up 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 paying 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 climate change might ravage in their entirety. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geologic history were bound to be corrected and the tiny islands returned to watery oblivion, probably in this century.
Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them. — Raymond Zhong
Read more about why scientists think some islands are growing.