The 2024 Presidential Election Will Make or Break U.S. Climate Action

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Climate scientists are in clear agreement that in order to avoid ever-worsening disasters and disruptions to our societies, the world must rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The policies put in place over the next few years will determine what the future climate looks like and what threats the world will face. The U.S. is crucial to this effort. And in the 2024 presidential election contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, voters have a choice between diametrically opposed visions of what the country must do. “When it comes to climate change, the contrast between Trump and Harris could not be more stark,” says Leah Stokes, a University of California, Santa Barbara, political scientist who focuses on energy and climate.

To provide a broad look at how potential policies under Harris or Trump would shape future U.S. emissions, Orvis’s team at EI used its Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model. The researchers compared current policies under the Biden-Harris administration with more ambitious policies that achieve a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and with the policies laid out in Project 2025. They found that the latter scenario “basically stops the progress that’s been made,” Orvis says. And even if current policies aren’t enough to meet international climate goals, any progress that can be made is crucial because “each tenth of a degree [of warming] is more damaging than the previous one.”