This article contains extracts from the latest edition of The Journal’s monthly climate newsletter Temperature Check. To receive future editions free to your email inbox, sign up in the box at the end of the article.
IT IS LESS than two months until voters in the US decide who is going to be the next American president.
Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the issues defining the contest between her and Republican candidate Donald Trump have hinged largely around the economy, migration, foreign policy and reproductive rights.
But what have they been promising – or failing to promise – on climate policy?
Climate, though not the most defining social issue that US voters base their ballot choice on, has been creeping up in importance in voters’ minds.
Research published this summer by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication indicated that over one-third (37%) of registered voters in the US are pro-climate voters, meaning they said that global warming is a very important issue to their vote and that they prefer a candidate who supports climate action.
A further 25% said they prefer a candidate who supports climate action but did not indicate that global warming is a very important voting issue for them. In contrast, around 15% said global warming is not very important for them as a voter and that they prefer a candidate who opposes climate action.
Speaking to The Journal, James M Lindsay, a US policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank that focuses on international issues, said that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump “have opposing views on climate change”.
“Harris views climate change as an ‘existential threat’. She supports Joe Biden’s decision to return the United States to the Paris Agreement,” Lindsay said.
“She cast the tie-breaking vote in the US Senate for the poorly-named Inflation Reduction Act, which is the most significant investment yet by the US government in clean-energy technologies.”
Lindsay said that Harris will almost certainly continue and expand these and other clean energy initiatives from the Biden administration.
“She has abandoned her opposition to fracking, a position she took during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign. But a fracking ban has no chance of passing in the US Congress in any event,” he said.
Meanwhile, Lindsay outlined how Trump calls climate change ‘a hoax’ and has vowed to undo most of Biden’s climate initiatives as well as withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement again like he did in 2017.
Trump has said he will “use his executive authorities to blunt much of the Inflation Reduction Act and urge Congress to repeal those provisions he can’t personally block”, Lindsay explained.
Lindsay said that Trump “vows to maximise domestic oil and gas production, arguing without any supporting evidence that the Biden administration’s opposition to domestic oil and gas production fueled inflation”.
He added that the Biden administration “has not sought to curtail domestic US production; the United States today is by far the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas”.
“Trump has also promised to do away with the new fuel standards the Biden administration has adopted and to take other steps that would encourage the shift toward electric vehicles,” Lindsay said.
Perhaps the most significant climate action question in the US right now is the future of fracking - a type of process for extracting oil and gas.
It’s a technique that’s loathed by climate activists because not only does it extract more fossil fuels from the earth, it consumes and contaminates huge volumes of water, uses harmful chemicals, and releases methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.
During her first bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, Harris had advocated for “putting an end to fracking once and for all”, as well as backing a Green New Deal for renewable energy.
However, when she joined Joe Biden’s 2020 ticket, she stepped back from that position, stating in a debate in 2020 that “Joe Biden will not end fracking”.
Her campaign team had already promised that she would not implement a ban on fracking as president but confirmation of that position came from the candidate herself in an interview with CNN, the first formal interview of her candidacy.
“I have always believed that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines,” Harris said during the interview.
“We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act - we have set goals for the United States of America and by extension the globe around when we should meet certain standards for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as an example. That value has not changed.”
But she also said: “What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
“I made it clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking. As Vice President, I did not ban fracking. As President, I will not ban fracking. I’m very clear about where I stand.”
The US is currently seeing record levels of oil and gas outputs. In the face of an economic boost from fossil fuels, it appears Harris’ campaign is reluctant to commit to necessary climate action at the risk of alienating sponsors and voters in the sector.
That’s especially true in swing states where fracking has a stronghold, like Pennsylvania, where a win in November would give her a much better chance of making it to the White House.
Harris’ attitude to fracking will not be welcomed by climate-conscious voters, but Donald Trump’s positions will certainly not bring any comfort.
During the first year of his presidency, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement - the international agreement made by countries in 2015 to try to limit temperature rise in order to prevent climate catastrophe.
“As President, I can put no other consideration before the wellbeing of American citizens,” he said at the time.
“The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers — who I love — and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production,” he claimed – without considering the threats to Americans posed by climate change.
Trump stopped the US’s implementation of its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the emissions reductions plans each country made for itself under the terms of the Paris Agreement.
Seven years later, campaigning for another term as Commander-in-Chief, Trump’s policies on climate and energy centre around scaling up energy production of the fossil-fuel variety and rolling back support for renewable energy.
Trump was in conversation with Elon Musk – a major supporter of Trump – on Twitter/X last month where the two made what a columnist in The Guardian described later as “discursive, often fact-free assertions” about climate change, such Trump suggesting that sea level rise will create more oceanfront properties. Another Trump supporter and donor, according to the Washington Post, is Harold Hamm, a multi-billionaire who made his fortune in the oil and gas industry, particularly in shale oil fracking.
Trump has attacked Harris by trying to suggest she is too climate-friendly. The Trump campaign has said that “Kamala Harris has long championed the most socialist and anti-American energy elements of the radical left’s ‘climate’ agenda”.
At a rally in late July, Trump said that Harris had “called for slashing consumption of red meat to fight climate change” and that she would “get rid of all cows”, which would later lead, he said, to her “go[ing] after the humans”. His running mate J.D. Vance doubled down on the claim in a speech last month, saying that the Democrat wants to “take away your gas stoves” and “even wants to take away your ability to eat red meat”.
(Harris had previously voiced support during the 2020 electoral cycle for new government dietary guidelines that would encourage people to reduce their meat consumption but hasn’t made the issue part of her current platform – though if any candidate did call for it, it wouldn’t be without reason, as reducing meat consumption is a legitimate way of lowering greenhouse gas emissions.)
The two candidates faced each other for the first time in a televised debate hosted by ABC News this week but climate was only squeezed in as the very last question of the night.
“We have another issue that we’d like to get to that’s important for a number of Americans, in particular younger voters, and that’s climate change,” moderator Linsey Davis told the candidates. “The question to you both tonight: What would you do to fight climate change?”
Harris started by challenging Trump’s climate denialism and detailing the impacts of climate change on people in America. She then moved on to talking about investments in clean energy – which the US Department of Energy considers to be solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, bioenergy, nuclear, and hydrogen – before segueing to talking about jobs in manufacturing, a hot topic for the election.
“The former president has said that climate change is a hoax and what we know is that it is very real,” Harris said.
“You ask anyone who lives in a state that has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who now is either being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up. You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go,” she said.
“We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue and I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels. We have created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs while I have been vice president. We have invested in clean energy to the point that we are opening up factories around the world.”
In response, the details Trump gave about his climate action plans included: Nothing. He said nothing about the climate in his action, instead responding briefly to a point Harris made about jobs before launching in to muddled accusations against the Biden administration and foreign relations.
“That didn’t happen under Donald Trump. Let me just tell you, they [the Biden administration] lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month,” he said.
“It’s going – they’re all leaving. They’re building big auto plants in Mexico, in many cases owned by China. They’re building these massive plants and they think they’re going to sell their cars into the United States because of these people.
“What they have given to China is unbelievable but we’re not going to let that – we’ll put tariffs on those cars so they can’t come into our country because they will kill the United Auto Workers and any auto worker, whether it’s in Detroit or South Carolina or any other place. What they’ve done to business and manufacturing in this country is horrible.
“We have nothing because they, they refuse – you know, Biden doesn’t go after people because supposedly China paid him millions of dollars. He’s afraid to do it. Between him and his son, they get all this money from Ukraine, they get all this money from all of these different countries, and then you wonder why is he so loyal to this one? That one? Ukraine? China? Why is he – why did he get $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow’s wife? Why did he get – why did she pay him $3.5 million? This is a crooked administration and they’re selling our country down the tubes.”
(Trump’s claims about Joe Biden receiving money from foreign countries are among many false and misleading statements that have since been factchecked).
The US’s international footprint, both environmentally and politically, means that how it acts or fails to act on the climate crisis has major implications for climate change on a global scale.
The result of this election will determine how that influence is wielded over the next four years.
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