The Climate Stakes of This Election

When Joe Biden was still running for reelection to the presidency, he often repeated the line that voters should keep him in the White House to “finish the job.” Though she would be loath to describe her mission that way, that is more or less what Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, has proposed since she took on the nomination — or perhaps more precisely, that she will keep doing the job, though the job may never be finished.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, wants to quit the job, burn down the workplace, and steamroll the rubble. At least, that’s how it can appear on some issues, climate change perhaps more than any other. There are few policy areas where this election presents such a stark difference in which path the candidates propose to take.

Let’s begin by considering Harris — a fairly ordinary Democrat when it comes to climate, in that she has committed herself to strong climate action but has not put it at the top of her policy agenda. Her truncated presidential campaign reflected that emphasis, which might have given climate activists some reason to be disappointed if what they were looking for was someone who would place their issue at the center of her campaign. Unlike abortion and economics, climate was absent from Harris’ TV ads and usually mentioned only in passing on the stump.

But by now, most advocates are savvy enough to understand that campaigning and governing are not the same thing. The commitments a president makes during the campaign matter, but structural factors matter more as the policymaking process unfolds. Where is the center of gravity in their party on the issue, and what demands will the party’s coalition make? Who are the personnel staffing key agencies, and what are their priorities? How do existing laws and programs position the administration if there is no new legislation? What other forces are trying to move climate policy in either direction?

Taking all those factors into consideration, the most likely outcome of a Harris presidency is that her administration would maintain the trajectory Joe Biden established (even if there is plenty of room for her to expand on Biden’s climate accomplishments). Subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will keep flowing. More loans will bolster innovative green tech. Many of the Biden administration appointees who currently work on energy and climate will probably stay in their jobs, or at the very least be replaced by officials with a similar outlook.

In other words, while Biden has been the most aggressive president in history on climate change, Harris would come in a close second if she does little more than continue Biden’s policies. And she hasn’t promised much more than that — during the campaign, Harris proposed no new large-scale climate initiatives.

If nothing else, that was realistic, since the prospects for a sweeping new climate bill on the scale of the IRA getting through Congress would be slight. That’s especially true if one or both houses are controlled by Republicans, a distinct possibility no matter who becomes president.

If that president is Donald Trump, on the other hand, and Republicans control Congress, the IRA and other laws that fund climate programs would be under threat. Even if the GOP does have full control, however, it doesn’t mean the entire IRA is headed for repeal. Much of the money from recent climate legislation has gone to districts represented by Republicans, who will resist a wholesale dismantling of the law, and even oil companies support some provisions from a simple desire to minimize regulatory uncertainty.

Nevertheless, a Congress determined to roll back Biden-era climate legislation will have plenty of targets to aim at, and it’s a near certainty that at least some of the provisions in the bills Biden signed would be undone. Trump would almost certainly withdraw again from the Paris climate agreement (Biden recommitted to it after Trump rejected it in his first term), move to increase fossil fuel production on federal land, stymie enforcement of environmental laws, and be a loud and consistent voice for rejecting climate science and increasing emissions.

On the campaign trail, Trump continues to promise that he will “terminate the Green New Scam” and claims that global warming is a myth “because we’re actually cooling.” Increasing domestic fossil fuel production is so important to him that he proclaimed it reason enough, along with border security, for him to become “a dictator” for a day upon taking office. On that first day, he has said, “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

But it’s more than the quantity of drilling, especially since America is already producing more oil and gas than any country ever has. Earlier this year, Trump told oil executives they should raise $1 billion for him, which, given the tax and regulatory benefits he plans to bestow on them, would be a bargain. While fossil fuel industry contributions haven’t reached that billion-dollar line, the industry’s help for Trump has been substantial.

In a Trump administration, most of the action would be in federal agencies. As Bloomberg recently reported, climate deniers with ties to Trump are “laying the groundwork to bring back coal-fired power plants, gut science at the Environmental Protection Agency and neuter the modeling used in the federal government’s national climate assessment and other reports” should he win. Though Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, it provides the most detailed elaboration of current Republican thinking on climate policy; among other things, it suggests rolling back green subsidies, shuttering the Department of Energy office distributing loans for clean technology, scaling back regulations meant to limit emissions, and weakening enforcement of environmental laws.

The most critical goal of the project, which Trump embraces wholeheartedly, is to turn thousands of civil servants into political appointees so they can be fired at will and replaced with more loyal cronies. Those who work on climate-related issues, whether scientists or administrators or weather forecasters, would probably be high on the list.

And we can’t ignore a factor that will help shape climate policy no matter who wins: the Supreme Court. When it has been discussed during this campaign, the subject has usually been the 2022 Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the court’s recent decisions on the legal architecture of government regulation could have an effect just as momentous for climate policy as Dobbs has had on abortion.

In the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, the court ended “Chevron deference,” essentially seizing for itself the responsibility to guide implementation of laws that had previously rested with federal agencies. The effect on future climate policy will likely be enormous. We are at the front end of a wave of lawsuits by fossil fuel companies and polluters of all kinds looking to the court’s conservative majority to neuter environmental regulations. There’s no telling just how far the conservative majority will go, but there isn’t much reason for optimism in the short run. And the court’s direction could be determined by who gets to make the next couple of appointments; everything from a new liberal majority to a 7-2 or 8-1 conservative supermajority is possible in the coming years.

While neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump put climate change at the center of their campaigns, the climate kept intruding, whether in the form of wildfires or heatwaves or hurricanes. Just as those disasters are likely to worsen, the policy fights over climate in the next four years will intensify. When we look back, 2024 may or may not turn out to have been the most important election of our lifetimes. But either way it turns out, the consequences will be profound.