The Climate Question the Next President Will Have to Answer

Tonight’s presidential debate was held while wildfires rage in Nevada, Southern California, Oregon, and Idaho. Louisiana is bracing for a possible hurricane landfall. After a year of floods and storms across the country, more than 10 percent of Americans no longer have home insurance, as climate risk sends the insurance industry fleeing vulnerable places. Record heat waves have strained infrastructure and killed hundreds of Americans. For millions more, the ravages of climate change are already at their doorstep.

These are all material miseries—tragedies and health hazards and inconveniences—that America’s two presidential candidates could use to connect with voters. Arguably, voters are owed a plan that would address these problems. Yet during the debate, climate discussion did not go far beyond Donald Trump making a scattered mention of solar energy—warning that under a Kamala Harris presidency, the country would “go back to windmills and solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out,” before adding, incongruously, “I’m a big fan of solar, by the way.” Harris, meanwhile, doubled down on her statement that she would not ban fracking. The moderators did broach the topic, asking the two candidates, “What would you do to fight climate change?” Harris briefly mentioned people losing their homes and insurance rates rising due to extreme weather. And she stressed that “we can deal with this issue”—before speaking about American manufacturing and U.S. gas production reaching historic levels. Trump spoke about tariffs on Mexico-produced cars. Neither mentioned what they would do to cope with the threat of more chaotic weather.

Yet the near-total absence of climate talk in the 2024 presidential election is divorced from the reality the next president will have to face. Harris, if she’s serious about continuing Joe Biden’s legacy, will eventually have to articulate some plan for what should happen next beyond implementing Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the single largest climate policy the country has ever seen. And Trump may not be concerned about raising carbon emissions, but he will have to deal with the reality of climate change, like it or not. The next president will be a climate-disaster president, and will likely be forced by circumstance to answer at least one climate-change question. And at this point, it’s not just “What would you do to fight climate change.” It’s “How will you help Americans handle its effects?”

Right now, America’s political conversation about addressing climate change is effectively on pause. Trump has promised at several rallies to “drill, baby, drill,” and he told oil executives that it would be a “deal” for them to donate $1 billion to his campaign, given the money he would save them by rolling back taxes and environmental regulations. Harris, by contrast, would almost certainly take at least as strong a stance on climate change as Biden has, but her campaign team, at least, appears to have decided that these issues are not politically advantageous to bring up in live events. She has scarcely mentioned climate change, though her platform has generally affirmed she would advance environmental justice, protect public lands, and build on the IRA.

And yet, this year alone, the United States has seen 20 disasters and counting that did more than $1 billion in damage, part of a general upward trend of these high-devastation events. (In the 1980s, the country saw an average of fewer than four such events each year.) How the federal government intends to aid communities affected by storms, floods, and fires should be a standard part of any debate conversation now. Beyond disasters, the candidates could be asked about their plans for dealing with heat: Under the Biden administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration took steps to address, for the first time, the problem of workers dying in extreme heat, for example. Yet the climate dangers facing all Americans go far beyond that and will accelerate in the next four years. What are the candidates’ plans for them? What will happen to the ailing National Flood Insurance Program? How will firefighting forces, now routinely stretched beyond capacity, be supported? Climate chaos is an oncoming train, but levers do exist to slow it down and buffer its impact. Harris’s official platform says that she will increase “resilience to climate disasters.” Neither Trump’s platform nor the GOP’s mentions the topic at all.

Whether the two candidates would try to do anything to slow climate change itself is a different question. Trump’s position is clear: He removed the U.S. from the Paris Agreement once and would likely do so again, blocking climate action on the international stage. Project 2025, a policy document closely affiliated with the Trump campaign, would see federal climate-science and weather-forecasting departments dismantled, along with a long list of environmental policies and the mechanisms to enforce them.

Harris’s intentions are also clear: She would address climate change, though the details on how are fuzzy. The U.S. is newly the world’s top oil and gas producer, drilling more oil now than any country ever has at any point in time. The country is essentially already drill-baby-drilling. This presents a clear contradiction for U.S. climate policy. What would a Harris presidency do about that, if anything? She has already walked back her 2019 campaign pledge to ban fracking, saying that she would not do that if elected president. (The comment, made after Trump attacked her stance in Pennsylvania, a major fracking state, represents one of her most definitive comments yet on anything climate-related.) She repeated that position during the debate, and spoke about the country’s success as an oil producer, emphasizing the importance of relying on “diverse sources of energy so we reduce reliance of foreign oil.”

Harris can certainly tout the record of the Biden administration, which passed the IRA and has been quietly issuing updates on energy-infrastructure policy, such as a recent update on solar-permitting reform. But the IRA on its own is not enough to achieve the U.S.’s emissions-reduction goals or its energy-delivery needs. Harris will surely do something to further meet the moment on climate policy, should she be elected president. But we don’t know what. Trump, meanwhile, would be a major setback for America’s climate future.

For at least some viewers watching tonight’s debate from battened-down Louisiana or burning Iowa or scorching Arizona, those questions are likely top of mind. Even if the climate crisis isn’t most voters’ top issue, it can still swing elections, according to one voter analysis of the 2020 presidential outcome. And more than one-third of U.S. voters say that climate is very important to them in this election. But this isn’t just a question of how people will vote in November. It’s a question of how the next president will confront what is coming, with more and more force every year, for the country.