That contest is playing out amid record and unseasonal heat — or at least, what would have once been unseasonal heat — across much of the country this Halloween weekend, according to NBC.
Record highs are expected across the Midwest this week and across the Northeast through the weekend. In Austin, where Saul is writing this, the temperature is 13 degrees above average.
That heat is the effect of a jet stream that is unusually far north, in a dynamic that climate change could be worsening. In September, scientists announced that August capped a 15-month period of monthly global heat records.
The sticky election-season temperatures underscore the climate stakes of the presidential contest between Vice President Harris and former President Trump — as well as the wide range of areas where the two are in quiet agreement:
- Both candidates, for example, have espoused support for expanded U.S. oil and gas production — a prime current and historic contributor to rising temperatures.
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Both propose some version of tariffs on the Chinese-made cleantech and electric vehicles that currently offer the cheapest alternative to fossil fuels, and the creation of new U.S. critical mineral supply chains to replace it.
- Both have offered measured support for expanded nuclear energy.
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Both, if pressed, will offer some version of an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.
Meanwhile, neither has offered any comprehensive vision of what a post-oil future would look like. While Harris has run in part on the sweeping clean energy buildout that her administration helped accelerate with the Inflation Reduction Act, that package — and the broader array of global climate commitments it’s part of — falls far short of what’s needed to head off dangerous warming, according to a recent report by the United Nations.
That said, there remain significant differences between the two campaigns’ energy policies and their climate implications, as The Hill has reported.
Harris’s campaign, and the Biden-Harris administration in general, has broadly supported U.S. investment in clean energy. She has also backed stricter regulations on power plants that will ultimately drive them to either move off coal and natural gas or rapidly scale up as-yet-experimental means for capturing and storing their emissions.
Unlike Trump, Harris is also broadly in favor of the international agreements — like the 2015 Paris Climate Accord — that are key to keeping the world’s governments working together to reduce emissions.
Trump, by contrast, has been a vocal proponent of the idea that climate change isn’t a problem at all. In an August interview with Elon Musk on X, he told the billionaire that rising temperatures would “create more oceanfront property” (in truth, it destroys that property) and added that America had “hundreds of years left” to burn fossil fuels.
Trump has also said he would pull back unspent money from Biden-Harris climate investments and has vacillated on whether he would try to kill the program entirely. He has promised to roll back EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up the power industry and automobile pollution, as well as “every one of Joe Biden’s industry-killing, job-killing, pro-China and anti-American electricity regulations.”
In general, the Trump campaign has offered a narrative in which all of America’s economic woes, particularly inflation, come down to an alleged “anti-energy crusade” by the Biden-Harris administration — leaving aside that this crusade has coincided with record oil and gas production.
The Biden-Harris campaign’s ambivalent position on fossil fuels may be one reason why, as former government official and climate campaigner Ayana Elizabeth Johnson noted on Tuesday on X, “the environmental movement has a massive voter turnout problem.”
In 2020, she wrote, “8 million of us who were registered and had climate as our #1 issue did not vote.” Better climate policy, she argued, means “we need to elect Kamala Harris — AND climate leaders down ballot.”
It’s hard to overstate the scale of the problem. An October study in BioScience by a dozen leading climate scientists warned that average temperatures are now hotter than any experienced in our species’ multimillion year history, and warned that unchecked warming could lead to “societal collapse.”
A Harris electoral win would be a partial climate victory, not a total one, as Chartbook’s Adam Tooze argued this summer:
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Emissions will continue trending down under both presidents, in large part thanks to past Biden-Harris policies — though Trump’s policies will slow that decrease and lead to billions of tons of additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
- The main benefit of a potential Harris administration, Tooze wrote — in a line heard often among climate campaigners this season — is that it gives the movement someone they can effectively
“push” on climate, rather than someone who is dug in against them.
“We have a very, very long way to go,” he added.
