The True Environmental Stakes of the 2024 Election
The True Environmental Stakes of the 2024 Election
This Earth Day, keep in mind that it’s not just democracy on the ballot in November. It’s the future of the planet.
FIFTY-FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY, on April 22, 1970, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson gave a speech in Denver, Colorado. The occasion was the first Earth Day—which Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin who had served a stint as the state’s governor, had envisioned and organized as a nationwide event. To say it was a smashing success would be an understatement.
More than twenty million Americans took part in that first Earth Day, making it, to this day, the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. American Heritage magazine called it “one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy.” It now bills itself “the largest civic event on Earth,” with observances in 192 countries.
Nelson, in his Denver address, took an expansive view of Earth Day, proclaiming it “dramatic evidence of a broad new national concern that cuts across generations and ideologies.” He said: “Earth Day can—and it must—lend a new urgency and a new support to solving the problems that still threaten to tear the fabric of this society . . . the problems of race, of war, of poverty, of modern-day institutions.” Earth Day was about changing how we lived, in order to have a better world to live in. As Nelson put it:
Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality, and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.
Our goal is a new American ethic that sets new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution.
To ponder those words in light of the last half century is a bittersweet experience. Yes, that first Earth Day and the passions it stirred did highlight enormous public support for the environment that cut across partisan lines. Later that year, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency; he would also sign into law the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, all transformative pieces of legislation.
But today, it’s difficult even to imagine the nation pulling together politically on anything that isn’t primarily about enriching corporations or waging war. Our post-truth era has broken the consensus that protection of the environment is a good thing. Today, we have right-wing news outlets that openly scoff at any and all efforts to rein in pollution, protect living things, or reduce dependence on the fossil fuels that have already done significant and irreversible harm to the planet.
Earlier this year, Fox News host Jesse Watters alleged that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that studies weather, oceans, and the climate, is skewing data on rising global temperatures by putting its thermometers on “little heat islands”—in cities, among heat-retaining parking lots, on airport runways, and even in the exhaust fans of A/C units. “No wonder we think the Earth’s warming,” Watters said. “We’re literally cooking the books.” These claims earned a rating of “False” on PolitiFact.
Meanwhile, we continue to break records for rising temperatures (March was the tenth consecutive month in which the planet set a new record for heat) and to pay the entirely predictable (and predicted) costs associated with it. Last year, the United States experienced a record twenty-eight weather events that each caused more than $1 billion in damage.
“You know, we are seeing billion-dollar weather disasters year after year,” Leah Stokes, associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently told CBS News. “We’ve just finished the hottest decade in modern recorded history. And we’re seeing things like forest fires and drought and heat waves that are killing Americans. So not acting on climate change is terrible for the economy.”
LET’S NOT DELUDE OURSELVES: There is nothing that we can do to avoid the impacts of a warming planet, no way to not pay a price for the damage that has already been done and is certain to get worse. The planet will continue to get hotter, in some places to the point of becoming unlivable; the storms will continue to grow more frequent and destructive; the oceans will continue to rise; whole communities and even nations will be forced to relocate. Things will never again be the way they were.
That’s the bad news. The good news, such as it is, is that things can always get worse, and they will, unless we rise to meet the challenge of the moment. There is still a chance that, through collective action, some of the most severe effects of climate change can be mitigated or even prevented.
That is something that ought to unite us across political lines, as the first Earth Day did. But, maddeningly, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have spent decades creating a sharp divide on this issue.
A recent Pew Research Center poll found that just 12 percent of Americans who say they are or lean Republican think addressing climate change should be a top priority. That compares to 59 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Similarly, in a 2022 poll, just 23 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaners saw climate change as a major threat, compared to 78 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners.
The differences are never starker than in the race for president.
Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, one of the hallmark achievements of his presidency, provides nearly $400 billion to reduce carbon emissions, expand renewable energy, and make electric cars more affordable. It has created jobs, revived economies, and put the United States on track to achieve between 35 percent to 43 percent reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by the year 2030.
In January, Biden paused issuing export permits for new liquefied natural gas projects, pending a Department of Energy (DOE) review to consider their economic and environmental impacts, as climate activists had urged. Writing in the Guardian, environmentalist Bill McKibben credited Biden with doing “something remarkable, and almost without precedent—he actually said no to big oil.”
According to Stokes, the hundreds of billions of dollars that Biden has invested in clean energy, matched by substantial spending by the private sector, is “reinvigorating our economy, because it’s helping to build, you know, clean technology here in the United States, through good paying jobs, often that are unionized.” As she told John Dickerson of CBS, “President Biden has really shown us a way that we can act on the climate crisis that is really good for the economy.”
As with his spectacularly botched handling of COVID-19, Donald Trump has taken a dismissive stance toward climate change, calling it a “make-believe problem,” “nonexistent,” and a “hoax.” During his tenure in office, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement signed by 195 nations. He packed the EPA with industry lobbyists and set them loose rolling back regulations, denying science, and kneecapping environmental research.
For years, the former and would-be future president has mocked concerns over rising oceans, which has the potential to submerge entire cities and countries, by claiming, as he did on a podcast last April, two days before Earth Day, that that some people are up in arms because “the ocean will rise by 1/100th of an inch over the next 350 years.” If only that were true. According to NOAA, the global sea level is currently rising by about 1/8th of an inch per year, meaning that the sea level along the U.S. coastline is expected to rise ten to twelve inches between 2020 and 2050 alone. CNN reports that the sea level near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is “expected to rise nearly 3 feet by 2150 relative to 1995–2014 levels.”
Trump has repeatedly called for the elimination of Biden’s clean energy tax credits and promised to end incentives to spur electric vehicle production. “You can be loyal to American labor, or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics, but you can’t really be loyal to both,” he said at an event last fall. In case that wasn’t unhinged enough, he then added, “They’re destroying our country.”
If Trump manages to return to the Oval Office, he has also vowed to ramp up efforts to increase fossil fuel extraction—or, as he puts it, with palpable glee, “Drill, baby, drill.” (Never mind that domestic crude oil production is at an all-time high under Biden, an accomplishment his administration is downplaying because it appears to run against its larger environmental agenda.) Trump would also likely again withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, lift Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas projects, and spike an EPA plan to charge the oil and gas industry a fee for methane emissions, a leading driver of climate change. And he would probably take steps to sell off more federal land to boost mineral, gas, and oil extraction.
THERE IS IN ALL OF THIS more than a whiff of pure madness: Earth is threatened by something we’re doing, so let’s do more of it. Let’s “drill, baby, drill” until every fossil fuel exec is hemorrhaging cash and every exploitable square inch of the natural environment is ruined. Let’s reject the notions of conservation, and shared sacrifice, and all the other things conservatives are supposed to believe in, and lay waste to the planet. It’s fun.
This is, of course, not true of all Americans, or even of all conservative Republicans. Trump’s know-nothing posture on climate change is not universally shared even among Republican lawmakers, who are notoriously friendly to the oil-and-gas industry. There is in Congress something called the Conservative Climate Caucus, which according to Politico has more than eighty members, or about a third of House Republicans. “Acknowledging human contributions to climate change is a prerequisite for joining the group,” the news outlet reports.
But the group was dealt a setback by the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, described as a “pivotal ally” of the group; his replacement, Mike Johnson, decidedly is not. And the prospect of another Trump term “threatens to undermine the work many Republicans have done lately to try to improve their party’s image on climate issues, specifically to show that they care about actively solving the climate crisis.”
Al Gore, the former vice president who has been sounding an alarm about climate change for more than four decades, puts things into perspective. Even if Trump were to return to power, he told the New York Times last week:
I think that the favorable trends in renewable energy, battery storage, electric vehicles, green hydrogen, circular manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, sustainable forestry, would all continue to move in the right direction. However, the momentum from what they’re doing now will not get us to where we need to be.
We need skilled and determined leadership from the White House in the United States in order to accelerate progress. The crisis is still getting worse faster than we’re deploying the solutions. If we gain more momentum, we’ll begin to gain on the crisis itself.
Absent the momentum that can only come from strong leadership, the nation’s ability to respond to the climate crisis with the seriousness it deserves will be sorely compromised. There is still a chance that we can rise to meet the existential challenges of the moment, but only if the denialism that Donald Trump represents is defeated. The promise of Earth Day has been deflated by the reality of our selfishness, but hope is not dead yet.
McKibben, for one, sees the transition to cleaner energy as inevitable, now that “solar power and wind power have become the cheapest forms of energy on the planet,” which will deplete the power of the fossil fuel industry, slowly but surely.
“So the day will come when this is no longer the [political] issue that it is now,” McKibben recently told Boston’s public radio station WGBH. “The question is, will that day come while we still have ice at the North and South Pole and the odd coral reef in between?”
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