In Trump-Biden face-off, voters can't tell between arsonist and fireman

Biden has frustrated environmentalists at times with compromises such as approving the Willow drilling project in Alaska and pulling some regulatory punches on emissions and corporate disclosures. During his first term, Trump ditched the Paris accord and loosened regulatory fetters on the fossil-fuel and other polluting industries at the worst possible moment, just as the global concentration of atmospheric carbon was reaching dangerous levels.

By Mark Gongloff

If you were shopping for toaster ovens and your choice was between one that posed a 1 per cent chance of setting your house on fire and a competing one that would not only 100 per cent set your house on fire but proudly guaranteed it right on the box, then you would probably go with the 1 per cent model.

US voters face a similar choice this November when it comes to which presidential candidate will set the climate on fire. But they don’t seem to realize how much of a no-brainer that choice truly is.

President Joe Biden may not have a spotless climate record, but he has done much more to ensure a livable environment for future generations than any of his predecessors. Donald Trump, on the other hand, not only has history’s worst climate record, but he has announced, loudly and often, that his second term would be far, far worse.

Voters haven’t received the message, according to poll after poll. The latest is from CBS News, which found that 49 per cent of Americans have heard little or nothing about what Biden has done for the climate. More alarmingly, most Americans think neither Biden’s second-term policies nor Trump’s would make any difference to the climate. That is dangerous nonsense.

The list of what Biden has already done is long and substantial, and it goes beyond the Inflation Reduction Act, easily the biggest climate bill in history. He also passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Chips and Science Act, both with significant investments in the renewable-energy transition. He rejoined the Paris accord to limit long-term warming to 2 degrees Celsius, tightened emissions standards for power plants and cars and limited oil and gas drilling and liquefied natural gas exports. To name just a few things.

Biden has frustrated environmentalists at times with compromises such as approving the Willow drilling project in Alaska and pulling some regulatory punches on emissions and corporate disclosures. But he has done these things mostly in the name of getting reelected — which may sound cynical, until you consider the person who will be elected if Biden is not.

During his first term, Trump ditched the Paris accord and loosened regulatory fetters on the fossil-fuel and other polluting industries at the worst possible moment, just as the global concentration of atmospheric carbon was reaching dangerous levels. A Trump restoration would again come at a key point, just when scientists say the window to avoid the worst effects of a chaotic climate is slamming shut.

And Trump’s advisers are vowing to wreck progress even more aggressively in a second term. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 lays out an agenda for Trump II that includes leaving the Paris accord again; undoing Biden’s efforts to regulate pollution; repealing the IRA or at least neutralizing it by closing the Energy Department loan office; throwing the entire country open to oil and gas exploration; and dismantling the climate-tracking National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. To name just a few things.

A second Trump term would add 4 billion extra tons of carbon to the atmosphere, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief, a nonprofit advocacy group. That’s about two-thirds of what the US produces in an entire year and matches the combined annual emissions of the European Union and Japan. The global clean-energy transition has built up anti-Trump defenses in the past four years, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning and I have written. But make no mistake about it: A second Trump presidency would be a disaster.

So the whole planet needs Biden to do a much better job of communicating the stark contrast between him and Trump. The first step will be overcoming the mistaken sense among his voting base that he has failed them with his compromises.

“The key voters that put Biden in office in the first place — young people, people of color, women in the suburbs — were very concerned about climate,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told me in an interview. “Some of these same demographics think he’s done nothing or worse because of the Willow decision.”

Seven out of 10 Biden voters in 2020 said climate was important to their vote, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Nearly a fifth of Biden voters consider it their top priority, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. If he wants these voters back at the polls in November, then Biden must convince them early and often that staying home and giving Trump the White House would make all their worst fears come true.

The trick is that Biden may also need to win swing voters, most of whom don’t care as much about the environment and may fear (incorrectly) that there’s a trade-off between fighting global warming and growing the economy. That’s one reason Biden and his advisers spend so much time trumpeting the jobs the IRA and other climate actions create.

The good news is that the politics of this issue have shifted drastically in recent years. As evidence, Biden made his climate promises sharper for the general election campaign than during the Democratic primaries in 2020, Leiserowitz notes. Most Americans now think global warming is real and human-made and support Biden’s policies when they hear about them.

But we can’t wait for the battleship of public opinion to complete its U-turn. We don’t have another four years to waste.