Two-thirds of the way through Thursday night's presidential debate, CNN journalist Dana Bash finally asked the candidates how they would address a challenge that scientists say poses an existential threat to human civilization: climate change.
Perhaps not surprisingly, former President Trump made a number of false claims about his record during his first term.
After spending most of his two-minute response time returning to an earlier discussion topic, Bash pushed him to say something about global warming. Trump responded that he wants “absolutely pristine clean water” and “absolutely clean air.”
“We were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything,” he said, referring to his first term. “And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever, and my top environmental people gave me that statistic.”
The reality is this: Air and water quality in the United States has improved steadily for decades thanks to federal laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. But scientists have found that polluted air and water continue to afflict tens of millions of people with illness and premature death. And during his first term, Trump tried to roll back limits on air and water pollution from power plants, trucks, and other sources. He has made it abundantly clear that he would do the same in a second term.
Trump's claim of the “best environmental numbers ever” also ignored the premise of Bash's question: climate change.
Although planet-warming carbon emissions fell sharply during the final year of Trump's first term, due to an economy slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, they rose slightly between 2016 and 2019. And if Trump had been able to avoid it, emissions would have increased even more. further. He glorified coal, oil and gas even as they polluted the air and water he claimed to love; criticized solar and wind energy with false talking points; and he pulled the United States out of the international Paris climate agreement.
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In Thursday's debate, Trump claimed that the Paris agreement, which Biden eventually rejoined, would cost the country $1 trillion. He did not cite a source for that number. And he didn't come close to acknowledging that heat waves, wildfires, floods, storms, droughts, migration flows and crop failures, already being exacerbated by rising temperatures, will cost America much more than the price of the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. , according to climate and economic experts.
Trump also claimed that the Paris agreement will cost China, Russia and India “nothing.” Another lie. The three countries, like all other signatories to the Paris agreement, have pledged to do whatever is necessary to try to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which, according to scientists, implies reducing carbon emissions by 43% by 2030, a difficult task.
Biden seemed taken aback by Trump's misleading statements, saying, “I don't know where he's been.”
“I haven't seen any indication of him claiming that he has the biggest heart here and that he's really concerned about pollution and the climate,” Biden said.
The current president has at times frustrated climate activists, approving the massive Willow oil drilling project in Alaska and making other policy concessions to moderate lawmakers and voters that are arguably incompatible with a secure future.
But Biden also secured congressional approval of the Inflation Reduction Act, a $370 billion clean energy bill that represented by far the largest climate investment in U.S. history. He is pushing initiatives to protect public lands, train young people for climate-focused jobs and expand American manufacturing capacity, all designed to reduce heat-trapping pollution.
“By 2035 we will have reduced pollution by half,” he said Thursday.
Let's hope this turns out to be correct.
If Trump is elected, the odds drop substantially.
More cable news coverage wouldn't hurt. In total, the candidates spent about two and a half minutes discussing the climate crisis during Thursday's debate before moderators moved on to other topics.
