THE 2020 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND CLIMATE CHANGE
By Jens Asker Aarkrog Wahlgren
After sitting through the first of the US presidential debates, I am inclined to agree with the CNN reporter, Dana Bash, who post-watching the debate stated: “This was a shitshow.” The political visions evaporated under a cacophony of yelling from two elderly white men, who each did little to convince the American people of their fitness for the Oval Office. For those of you who were as equally confused as me about what each of these two candidates will do to address the most pressing issue of our generation, climate change, fear not! In this article, I will provide a quick overview of the climate ambitions of respectively President Trump and former Vice President Biden.
President Trump
It is generally difficult to pinpoint exactly how President Trump wishes to address climate change as he rarely finishes a sentence on the issue. In the debate, he stated “We have the lowest carbon. If you look at our numbers, we are doing phenomenally.” This statement raises one crucial question: The lowest carbon of what? The US certainly does not have the lowest carbon emissions, quite the contrary if you look at a report from ‘Our World in Data’ that classifies the US as one of the top carbon polluters. 4.36 percent of the world’s population lives in the US, but the US population is accountable for 15.6 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.[1] Though it is true that carbon emissions in the US decreased by 2.8 percent from 2018 to 2019, they were coming from a huge increase in 2018.[2] This indicates that the US is not doing as phenomenally as the President claims it is.
When asked about whether humans are causing climate change, the President answered: “To an extent, yes. But many things do.” Why is the President so hesitant to completely agree with science? The way I see it, there are two explanations to this. First, he has built a reputation of the US as a global leader, constantly contributing more to other countries than these countries contribute to the US. He withdrew the US from the Paris Accord because it according to him was “unfair” to the American people. Second reason may be found in the President’s promise to put the economy first. On his website, it is written that the President has rolled back regulations on methane and carbon emissions put in place by the Obama Administration, because they spun energy prices out of control and were harmful to the US economy. Should Trump receive four more years in the White House and Mitch McConnell continue as the Senate majority leader, it appears unlikely that we will see big structural climate reforms on a scale needed to reach the Paris Accord.
Former Vice President Biden
Though former Vice President Biden in the debate refused to associate himself with the New Green Deal proposed by the left-wing, he still has a climate plan – the so called ‘Biden Plan’. On his website, the former Vice President writes: “The United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge.” It would appear as if Biden disagrees with the President on whether the US is already a leader in the transition to a low-carbon society. Not only should the US rejoin the Paris Accord, they should “rally the rest of the world to meet the threat of climate.”
Strictly on a discursive level, Biden’s ambitions significantly surpass those of Trump’s. But as we all know, there is a long way to go from words to action. Biden’s plan suffers from a lack of concrete quantitative promises. A federal investment of 1.7 trillion US dollars over the next ten years has been promised, but how this astronomical amount of money is to be spent remains only vaguely described. Some will be spent on building 500.000 new public charging stations for electric vehicles, a good portion will go to the research and development of biofuels to cars and planes, and another chuck will be used on decarbonizing the agricultural sector – though it remains unclear how this decarbonization will take place.
To sum up, none of the two candidates provide plans that meet the immense challenges of climate change. However, one candidate has a climate plan and the other one does not. Biden has acknowledged the need for the US to do better, while Trump continues to sing the same tune about the US already doing too much. It would appear as if this election may not be about finding the perfect candidate, who has all the answers to climate change, but instead be about deciding whether to encourage progress and take one step in the right direction or maintain status quo.