You wouldn’t know it from the four debates, in which the moderators asked zero questions about climate and the topic came up only when Hillary Clinton raised it in answering questions on other topics. But this U.S. Presidential election, among many other superlatives, is the most important in history for humanity’s effort to arrest the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before we ensure truly horrific impacts on society and the natural environment.
The numbers are not good. Carbon dioxide concentrations are above 400 ppm – higher than since millions of years ago (when sea levels were dramatically higher). We break global average temperature records almost every year, and will almost certainly do so again this year. Earth’s polar “cryosphere” is dwindling fast – with the melt raising sea levels and causing new forms of routine coastal flooding. We are well on our way to destroying some of the most sublime, defining features of our planet, including ancient and glorious coral reefs.
But there is also newly concrete cause for optimism: In the last few years we have just adopted a series of international and national policies that – while very far from a complete answer to the climate change -- represent real, even startling progress. These include the December 2005 Paris Agreement (which has already garnered ratifications from the United States, China, the E.U., India, Brazil and others, and will go into force next month), and major new international agreements on aviation emissions and hydrofluorocarbons (ultra-potent greenhouse gases found in air conditioners).
And despite a do-nothing Congress, in the last eight years there has also been significant and under-appreciated progress at the federal level in the United States. Acting under the Clean Air Act and Supreme Court precedent confirming that it applies to greenhouse gases, the Obama Administration has adopted rules that significantly cut emissions from the largest categories of source – cars and trucks, fossil-fuel burning power plants, and oil and gas production facilities. The Administration has required that federal agencies factor into their decisions the cost to society of carbon pollution. Besides these legal breakthroughs, a complex set of factors – including plunging costs of renewable energy; reduced costs of natural gas compared to (higher-emitting) coal; state climate and clean energy laws; and the retirement of antiquated coal plants -- has in the last decade brought about significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from the country’s largest category of sources. Carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity generation sector -- our largest emissions category -- are now at 21 percent below 2005 levels. There is every reason to expect much deeper cuts: the cost of clean, renewable energy is dropping below that of climate-destabilizing fossil energy.
It would still be desirable to have a sufficiently strong congressional majority to give us comprehensive, ambitious climate legislation. But even without that, we have made, and can continue to make, huge progress under existing statutory law – bolstered by actions by climate-hawkish states, motivated citizens, clever inventors, and private companies eager to profit from clean energy’s massive economic upside.
Against this bittersweet backdrop of mounting climate risk and stirring political, legal and technological breakthroughs in addressing it, we find ourselves with the following additional singularity: Never has there been such a gulf between the major parties’ presidential nominees on climate change policy.
For the first time since it became a political issue in the 1990s, one of the major-party tickets is composed of candidates who flat-out deny that climate change is worth addressing. Both Donald Trump and Mike Pence have repeatedly called climate change a hoax. Trump has declared that he intends “cancel” our participation in the Paris Agreement, and to rescind the Clean Power Plan (the Administration’s main rule limiting carbon emissions from existing power plants), and many other Clean Air Act regulations. Myron Ebell, Trump’s transition chief on environmental issues, is a hardcore climate skeptic and opponent of greenhouse gas regulation. For his part, Mike Pence has insisted that the Earth’s atmosphere is cooling, had an dismal environmental record in Congress, and, as governor, has supported lawsuits seeking to invalidate federal carbon regulations. Blinkering both environmental and economic reality, Trump talks about restoring coal to a central place in the American economy. Trump and Pence want to reverse course, undo the major steps already taken, and make denial of climate change the guiding principle of our law and diplomacy.
Hillary Clinton, in contrast, recognizes climate change as an “urgent threat,” has a keen interest in climate policy, and has developed an ambitious climate program. She supports the Paris Agreement, and, as Secretary of State, helped to lay the groundwork for it. She has pledged to defend the Clean Power Plan and other federal climate regulations and to pursue additional means to reduce carbon pollution and promote renewable energy. Her campaign chair is a leading climate hawk. All indications are that she would make climate a top priority and build upon what has been achieved over the last decade, nationally and internationally. No doubt the path will be rocky, as there will be many (as there have been with Obama) who believe she should be more ambitious. But there can be little doubt Clinton will be facing in the right direction; using her presidency to explain the challenges and elaborate on what the climate science is saying; and directing the federal government to facilitate and expediting the massive shift toward clean energy that is already happening. She will advance the cause of mitigating climate risk, and build on the real progress we have made nationally and internationally.
Because the next President will play a “central role” in determining whether the big international and domestic legal advances – the Paris Agreement, the Clean Power Plan, etc. – survive and develop, or wither and perish.
So the climate stakes of November 8 could not be higher. Victory for two men who advocate not just inaction on climate, but the affirmative dismantling of important steps already taken, would be the largest political setback the climate movement has ever suffered. It would massively set back the diplomatic breakthrough in Paris, and loudly proclaim to the rest of the world that the United States does not care about climate mitigation. By contrast, Hillary Clinton is running on a strong, detailed, explicit climate platform and, even if that platform is only partly successful, will be certain to move things forward, not backward.
If climate change is a concern for you, now is the time not just to vote on it, but to spend the next 13 days working to sure your friends and fellow citizens do too.