The Election’s Climate Choice
There are many clear choices at stake in tomorrow’s Presidential election. One of the starkest is climate and it comes at a time when the planet is careening toward catastrophic levels of warming.
Vice President Kamala Harris has called climate change an “existential threat.” While she hasn’t detailed a climate plan, she’s widely expected to continue federal support for clean energy and electric vehicles in an ongoing effort to move the American economy away from fossil fuels. In 2022, she cast the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act and has pledged to fully implement it.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has called climate change “one of the greatest scams of all time,” and vowed to end federal support for the clean energy transition, while ramping up drilling for oil and gas, including in the Arctic. He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Accord during his first term and – after President Joe Biden quickly rejoined – has said that he’d do so again.
Data released by the United Nations last week showed that greenhouse gases hit record highs in 2023, with CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere at a faster rate than at any time during human existence. That’s an important reminder, if one was needed at a time of worsening hurricanes and extreme heat, that now is a critical time for setting policies to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. As Peter Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns for the League of Conservation Voters, told the New York Times last week about the choice this election: “The stakes when it comes to climate change literally could not be higher.”
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Elon Musk’s Relentless Trolling Of Democrats Is Tarnishing Tesla
Elon Musk took a break from stumping for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to join Tesla’s third-quarter results call. The electric car maker’s better-than-expected profit news sent the stock soaring, wiping out a slump that persisted for much of the year. Fielding softball questions from Tesla fans and analysts, the billionaire CEO was notably more impassive than in his spasmodic hopping-filled campaign appearances. Not once during the meandering 72-minute call was Tesla’s volatile leader asked the most obvious question: should he take strident public stands on politics and social issues that are at odds with Tesla core buyers who largely identify as Democrats?
“Tesla’s are the best cars so it still has this advantage. But over time it will become harder for Tesla to get new customers due to his politics,” said long-time investor and former Musk fan Ross Gerber, CEO of Los Angeles-based wealth manager Gerber Kawasaki, who still has a $52 million stake in the company. “Most CEOs intelligently stay out of politics for good reason. Elon doesn’t care about how his right-wing (ironically anti-environmental) support hurts Tesla.”
Multiple consumer surveys back this up. Some 46% of people in the market for an electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle identify as Democrats, while only 21% and 25% percent of buyers of those vehicles say they are Republicans, according to data from Strategic Vision, a San Diego-based research firm that surveys tens of thousands of consumers weekly. Auto researcher Edmunds found in its most recent survey data that 31% of car shoppers say they’re now less likely to consider purchasing a Tesla as their next vehicle specifically because of Musk.
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Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania professor of earth & environmental science and head of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media, on what’s at stake in the U.S. election
How significant is the outcome of the presidential election for the climate?
I'll be blunt. This upcoming election is a critical juncture where Americans will choose one of two paths, and the difference between those two paths couldn't be more stark. One of those paths, represented by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, involves basically abandoning the efforts that we've already made here in the United States to tackle the climate crisis. That includes dismantling the EPA, getting rid of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which of course runs the National Hurricane Center and the hurricane hunters that make the measurements fly, take their lives, put their lives at risk of flying into hurricanes to make critical measurements that are fed into our models so we can better predict the intensification and the paths of these dangerous storms. It would abandon all that.
But fundamentally it would abandon our commitment to the rest of the world to lead on this issue, to reduce our carbon emissions, to incentivize a shift away from fossil fuels, it would seek to, for example, deactivate the Inflation Reduction Act, which was landmark legislation passed by the Biden Administration, or signed by Joe Biden passed by Congress, the provisions of which have the potential to lower our carbon emissions here in the United States by 40% by 2030. It's not enough. We need to do even more. We need to build on that, but it puts us on the right path.
What are the international implications?
You have on the one hand a Republican party and their presidential nominee Donald Trump, who would in essence end any US leadership on climate. And in the absence of US leadership, we are the world's largest legacy carbon polluter. We have to display moral leadership if we can expect the rest of the world to come to the table, other industrializing nations, China, India, etcetera. And what we know is that when we do take leadership, as we did during the Obama administration and again during the Biden administration, then those other countries come to the table and we begin to forge a path forward to truly take the actions necessary to avert catastrophic warming.
We're at 1.2 [degrees] Celsius warming now. At 1.5 Celsius, 3 Fahrenheit, we will start to see far worse consequences than those that we're already seeing, and we're already seeing dangerous climate change. Just in the last month or so with Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, these are storms that were amplified. They were more intense. They produced greater amounts of flooding rains that in one case killed hundreds of people. We are witnessing the devastating consequences of human-caused climate change. And if we don't take action now and prevent warming of 1.5 [degrees] Celsius, we're already at 1.2. There isn't a whole lot of wiggle room. What it basically means is we've got to ramp carbon emissions down dramatically over the next decade, and bring them down to zero mid-century. The only hope to do that would be to build on the policies that were put in place by the Biden administration.
So that's where we stand. We have a monumental choice before us. It's not getting, in my view, as much coverage as it ought to in the US media because wow, there are so many crises. We face public health crises, international security, crises, wars, et cetera. If we don't act now on the climate crisis, there's no going back. We lock in truly dangerous and deadly consequences for decades to come. And so that's where we are at this very critical juncture.
