As a scorching early summer heat wave bakes the Northeast and Midwest, it’s an apt time to focus on climate policy and politics — and to note that extreme weather should be a central issue in next week’s presidential debate.
Climate change marks a continental divide between President Biden and former president Donald Trump and the parties they lead. From debilitating heat to devastating storms to raging wildfires to fierce floods to rising and ravaging seas, the predicted impacts have arrived in force. In 2023, the United States recorded the most extreme weather ever documented, with 28 climate-related calamities that each wreaked more than $1 billion in weather-related damage, for a total cresting $92 billion, according to a report by BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Forty percent of Americans lived in a county that suffered extreme weather in 2021, with at least 656 deaths attributed to those disasters, according to The Washington Post.
Sadly, though scientists have warned about the perils of global warming for decades, it took the actual empirical experience of its effects to jolt Washington out of the dogmatic deadlock encouraged by the fossil fuel industry. That said, climate policy counts as an area of significant achievement for Biden. With the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats passed a $370 billion-over-10-years array of incentive-based policies that have sparked a welter of clean energy work, from wind to solar to batteries and beyond.
Since the August 2022 signing of the IRA, the United States has seen a record $303 billion in investment in clean technologies, with 104 manufacturing facilities planned, according to BloombergNEF. In 2023, renewable energy rose to almost 9 percent of total US energy use and met 23 percent of electricity demand.
Now, much more transitional progress will be needed if Biden is to halve the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. In a more logical world, the best idea would be a rebatable carbon tax. By including the cost of their ill effects in the price of fossil fuels, such a refunded levy would provide an efficient market mechanism to speed necessary changes. If some nations refused to adopt such a tax, carbon tariffs imposed on their products by importing countries could offset that refusal. Sadly, such an idea seems to be too sensible to ever be enacted.
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Still, the current choice this nation faces couldn’t be clearer.
Donald Trump, who once called climate change a hoax, has no interest in doing anything about it. The GOP-nominee-to-be is trying to stay ambiguous, ridiculing Biden’s climate policies while avoiding specifics of his own. Still, he has derided the IRA’s tax credits and incentives, and in his MAGA campaign manifesto, he calls for bolstering Social Security and Medicare by cutting “the billions being spent on climate extremism.” House Republicans, meanwhile, have made it clear they hope to repeal many of Biden’s clean energy incentives.
Further, Trump wants to pump as much oil as possible. As he puts it in his campaign plans, “We will develop the liquid gold that is right under our feet …” (Oil, that is. Texas Tea. Why, the first thing you know, ol’ Jed’s a millionaire … )
At an April Mar-a-Lago meeting with big oil bosses, meanwhile, Trump outlined an anti-environmental bargain: They should pony up $1 billion or so to his campaign because if he won, he’d save them more than that by reversing Biden’s regulations.
During his time in office, Trump did his best to weaken rules and regulations on smokestack and tailpipe emissions. He has also raised ridiculous doubts about, and grossly exaggerated actual problems with, wind and solar power, as he tries to delegitimate them in the eyes of the electorate.
Internationally, he would again take America out of what he refers to as the “horrendous Paris Climate Accord, so unfair to the United States, good for other countries.” That agreement sets voluntary greenhouse gas reduction goals. The rationale for the agreement’s varied reduction targets and timetables is that developed nations, which have historically emitted more, should go further, faster, than less developed countries. Those differential schedules irk conservatives, but the reality is that, since there is no nonvoluntary international mechanism to set or enforce national targets, a Paris-like agreement is what we’re left with.
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In addition to passing the IRA, Biden has pushed steadily ahead on climate, though he’s obviously very conscious about not doing so much that he will trigger a backlash against those measures.
That hasn’t satisfied climate activists. Nevertheless, the contrast with Trump is enormous.
Prone to missing the forest for the trees, moderators of presidential debates often don’t do well in probing candidates on their stands on complex, multifaceted matters such as climate.
But with much of the nation sweltering, the heat is on CNN to give the crucial issue of climate the attention it merits.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.
