On one of the most consequential nights in the 2024 presidential race, the fate of our entire planet received all of 120 seconds.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump were each allotted one minute to discuss their plans for fighting the climate crisis during the September 10 presidential debate. Harris’s response to the question, which arrived in the final moments of the 90-minute event, did not put forward specific policy proposals to build upon the wins of the Inflation Reduction Act, such as laying out plans for how the U.S. would cut carbon emissions to meet Paris climate agreement targets. In fact, Harris several times praised the expansion of oil and gas development under President Joe Biden’s administration and doubled down on her promise not to ban fracking. Trump, on the other hand, gave a characteristically rambling response that neglected to answer the question at all, and, somehow, ended with him spouting a debunked claim about a Russian oligarch paying out Hunter Biden.
The climate crisis has long gotten the short end of the stick at presidential debates, despite posing a century-defining existential threat and galvanizing a worldwide youth movement. Four years ago was the first time that a presidential debate moderator asked a direct question about climate change since 2000. In other years, candidates made passing mention to the issue or, in 2012, failed to discuss it at all.
But 2020 seemed to mark a turning point. “We can get to net zero in terms of energy production by 2035,” Biden pledged during the September 29 debate. He noted that the United States contributes a disproportionate chunk to global greenhouse gas emissions and reiterated his commitment to rejoining the Paris Agreement — which the U.S. did in February 2021.
It is a failure of stunning magnitude that, nearly a quarter of a century after George W. Bush and Al Gore discussed climate change on the presidential debate stage in 2000, we only heard some brief and vague remarks during this year’s event.
“We have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” Harris boasted. “I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” she continued.
That Biden’s........