The two White House candidates, President Biden and former President Trump, are worlds apart on global warming, and, as Earth Day arrived Monday, climate advocates warned a second Trump administration could have dire consequences for the planet.
“The difference between those two presidencies couldn’t be more stark,” said Pete Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, which has endorsed Biden.
“It’s continuing to make progress and tackling the climate crisis,” Maysmith said, versus “unraveling progress.”
The U.S. has the second-most emissions in the world, behind only China, making its policies key to limiting them.
Human-made activity has driven planetary warming since the industrial revolution — when many national economies became largely based on coal. Since then, the Earth’s average surface temperature has already warmed by around 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
This warming has led to an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, including flooding and droughts, in addition to heat waves. These extremes are expected to worsen if the planet continues getting hotter, especially if key “tipping points” that change the system and are difficult to reverse — such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic permafrost — are reached.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
