The Stakes: What a Trump or Harris presidency would mean for climate change

The latest entry in an ongoing series about where the 2024 presidential candidates stand on issues of major importance to voters. Previous entries have covered their positions on abortion and the border.

In 2023, Congress passed sweeping legislation signed into law by President Biden to accelerate the U.S. economy’s transition away from fossil fuels in an effort to slow steadily rising global temperatures.

As a campaign issue in the 2024 presidential election, climate change presents voters with a stark choice. Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris differ both on whether global warming is even happening and whether the government should be taking steps to try to address it.

Voters are slightly less divided, with 78% saying they believe in climate change and 54% saying that it is being caused by human activity, according to an Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released in June. That same poll found that for people who have personally experienced “extreme climate events like hurricanes, droughts, floods, unusual temperatures and wildfires,” 82% believe climate change is happening and 68% think it is an important issue for the 2024 election.

From a scientific standpoint, the consensus among experts is clear. Unless mankind stops burning fossil fuels and adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, climate change will continue to worsen. In order to avert a cascading series of consequences that have already begun, world governments must work together to quickly transition to clean sources of energy.

“Every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards,” the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a report published last year. “More intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall and other weather extremes further increase risks for human health and ecosystems. In every region, people are dying from extreme heat.”

As the melting of the polar ice caps has accelerated, the rate of sea level rise has increased dramatically across the coastal areas of the Southern U.S. Parts of that same region can expect an average of 14 to 18 inches of sea level rise over the next 26 years, according to government forecasts. At the same time, summers are getting hotter, hurricanes are getting stronger, rainfall events are becoming more extreme. As a result, many areas are facing a homeowners insurance crisis that could lead to a mortgage crisis, a potential crash of home values and the next big financial crisis for the country.

Still, addressing the causes of climate change has become a partisan issue, with 71% of Democrats in the Associated Press/NORC poll saying that they support reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, versus just 27% of Republicans who do.

With that backdrop in mind, here’s what Harris and Trump have done so far on the issue of climate change — and what they plan to do next.

Where they're coming from

Where Trump is coming from: On numerous occasions Trump has called climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese government in order to try to weaken the U.S. economy.

He also consistently portrays environmental regulations as foolish because they are antibusiness and has attacked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its staff of “rogue bureaucrats,” who he blames for enacting rules that inhibit the oil and gas industry.

Trump also routinely misrepresents scientific findings on the impacts of climate change. “The oceans are going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 300 years,” Trump said at a campaign rally in July. “We’ll have a little bit more beachfront property, that’s not the worst thing in the world.”

In fact, sea levels will rise by more than that each and every year in the near future and before the end of the century will ultimately submerge existing coastal properties.

Where Harris is coming from: During the presidential debate in September, Harris chided Trump for saying climate change is a “hoax,” but then she proceeded to tout what some might consider a contradictory message when it comes to fighting rising global temperatures.

“I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested over $1 trillion in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” Harris said.

Unlike Trump, Harris regularly talks about climate change in terms of the economic impact it is already having on the American people.

“I do believe that elected leaders have a duty to protect our communities,” Harris said during a 2022 briefing on climate resiliency in Miami. “And the climate crisis has, of course, made that duty more important than ever before.”

Harris has also been consistent about the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

“The science is clear,” she said in Miami. “Extreme weather will only get worse, and the climate crisis will only accelerate.’'

She has not explained how continuing to increase domestic gas production will help address what she has called an “existential threat.”

What they've done in office

What Trump did in office: In 2019, Trump officially pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international treaty that sought to keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. According to his administration, the agreement was an “unfair economic burden imposed on American workers, businesses, and taxpayers.”

During his term in office, Trump also set about dismantling dozens of executive orders put in place by President Obama to address climate pollution, including regulations limiting power plant emissions and further restrictions limiting emissions from cars and trucks.

Under Trump, the Department of the Interior approved oil and gas leasing on federal lands that had been previously protected from drilling. It also relaxed a slew of environmental regulations and weakened federal efficiency standards.

Trump approved a right-of-way that would have allowed the Keystone XL pipeline to be built across U.S. land. He also took aim at the EPA, appointing climate change skeptic Scott Pruitt as its head. The agency then proceeded to relax rules on methane emissions for oil and gas companies, revoked California’s authority to set its own emissions standards and relaxed restrictions on emissions from refrigeration and air conditioning systems.

What Harris has done in office: Harris cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate that secured passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the single biggest piece of climate legislation in U.S. history. The law was designed to spur the country’s transition to clean sources of energy through a series of tax credits and incentives. It also provided hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for several new initiatives, including the construction of solar power facilities, replacing the Postal Service gasoline-powered delivery trucks with electric models and modernizing farming practices.

As a U.S. senator from California prior to becoming vice president, Harris was a sponsor of the Green New Deal. Pushed by progressive Democrats, that plan, if it had passed and been signed into law, would have initiated a robust federal mandate to address climate change that would have gone far beyond the Inflation Reduction Act.

In 2019, when she first ran for president, Harris suggested the possibility of fining or charging oil companies with a crime for their role in helping to bring about climate change.

"These big oil companies, these fossil fuel companies, look, you should be really prepared to look at a serious fine or be charged with a crime. Because here’s the thing, these big oil companies and these fossil fuel companies have been making so much money and profiting off of this pollution," Harris said.

What they want to do next

What Trump wants to do next: Trump’s energy policy proposals can be summed up in three words: “Drill, baby, drill.” He often promotes the view that the economic fortunes of the country depend on increasing oil and gas production. He is also passionately opposed to continuing any federal regulations put in place to address climate change, including the Inflation Reduction Act.

With coordination from the oil and gas industry executives, Trump has gone so far as to draft detailed plans for rolling back all Biden administration climate rules if he is elected in November, the Washington Post reported.

Those plans came about after Trump hosted a meeting of oil executives for a dinner in May at his Mar-a-Lago home and country club where he asked them to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign in exchange for scrapping climate change regulations.

Trump has also promised to once again go after the EPA and to roll back all of the agency’s regulations on the energy sector that were written to help the Biden administration meet its goals of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

“I will restore my famously successful executive order requiring that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated,” Trump pledged in April.

What Harris wants to do next: On her campaign website, Harris states that she will “unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis.”

Harris has also shied away from providing details about how she plans to do that, though she continues to stand by the approach of using tax breaks and incentives established in the Inflation Reduction Act to help spur the transition to clean sources of energy.

At the same time, Harris has reversed her prior opposition to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique used to extract oil and gas that studies have shown is responsible for a 40% increase in atmospheric methane this century.

“I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States,” Harris said during her debate with Trump.

In January, the Biden administration announced a temporary pause on U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas so that the government can further study its impact on climate change.

Under Biden, the United States has become the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. A Cornell University study released in October found that due to factors like methane leaks, processing and shipping, “liquefied natural gas leaves a greenhouse gas footprint that is 33% worse than coal.”

Harris has not indicated if she would end the pause on exports if elected president.