Zufall: The 2024 Election’s Climate Implications

I’ve been keeping an eye out for coverage of the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns’ environmental policies since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Harris stepped in. But with less than a month before the election, I realized I didn’t know much about what either candidate was planning. For example, it wasn’t until I saw a TikTok about the Trump associate-backed Project 2025 that I learned about any of the specific environmental actions in the well-publicized document.

To gauge the public’s knowledge on the two candidates’ climate policies, I went to the Evanston Farmers’ Market last weekend to ask around and see if news about the planned climate policy of each candidate had broken through to people. I spoke to patrons waiting in lines at stalls, sitting at picnic tables in the middle of the market and leaving the market.

First, I asked people if they had heard anything about Project 2025, the conservative policy framework written by the Heritage Foundation as well as dozens of people linked to Trump and his campaign.

Everyone I asked (about 15 people across the market) said yes.

Then I asked if they had heard about any Project 2025 environmental policy. All but two said they hadn’t. Most people I talked to had only heard of the project’s plan to eliminate the National Weather Service and other agencies. No one I talked to knew many specifics, and what individuals did know came not from campaign ads but from seeking out news on the subject.

When I followed up by asking individuals if they knew anything about Harris’ plans, I was met with similarly low levels of understanding.

“The Harris campaign is for stopping climate change; guys on the red side don’t really care,” one man said to me. Again, no one reported having seen campaign ads on the topic, or even news coverage of her platform.

This could be due to an assumption that Harris is just going to continue Biden’s environmental policies, two other people told me.

Seeing that people in the community were largely uninformed, I wanted to look into and lay out the two campaigns’ climate policies.

Harris has a nearly 20-year track record of supporting environmental causes starting from her time as the San Francisco district attorney, when she started an environmental justice unit focused on prosecuting companies for environmental crimes. As state attorney general, she investigated Exxon Mobil for misinformation related to climate change and took on other cases against major polluting companies.

During her four years in the Senate, she signed onto existing climate proposals and came up with some of her own. None of the proposals were ever passed, but bits and pieces appeared in the Biden administration’s climate legislation released as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. In her 2020 presidential bid, Harris ran far to the left on environmental policy, supporting the Green New Deal and calling for an end to fracking, a controversial method of accessing underground oil and gas.

She has since softened these positions (thanks largely to her need to win over moderate voters in swing states like Pennsylvania) and is primarily campaigning on the Biden administration’s climate record. The Inflation Reduction Act, which contained provisions like tax credits for renewable energy, is now the basis for her climate policy. On her campaign website, she references the Act and her environmental plans under the heading “Lower Energy Costs.”

The Harris-Walz ticket emphasizes investment in clean energy and the creation of new jobs in this sector. They want to continue the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for renewable energy to make sure there are incentives for using such energy sources. Their environmental policy is economically focused, ensuring that it is beneficial for families in their day-to-day lives.

Trump, on the other hand, does not have a stellar record on climate. While in office, he pushed for deregulation across sectors, which was often destructive for the environment. He issued an executive order stating that for every new regulation (in any sector), two old ones had to be rolled back, which, while not expressly related to climate, applied to legislation around clean air and water. He also moved to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the 2016 international treaty focused on mitigating the effects of climate change, and reduced regulation on fossil fuel emissions and production on public lands. This included the Keystone XL Pipeline, a proposed pipeline to transport tar sands oil, through Montana and South Dakota, as well as other fossil fuel infrastructure. Throughout his presidency, Trump took 74 actions to weaken climate protection, according to the Brookings Institution.

A second Trump term is not likely to be better for the climate. Although he has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, many people in his orbit contributed to the document. The Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, publicly called it “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Within Project 2025’s 900 pages are calls to remove protections on endangered species, expand the Willow project (a controversial oil drilling project in Alaska), allow for drilling in national parks and gut environmental agencies. It wants to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, citing it as a component “of the climate change alarm industry,” along with commercializing and privatizing the National Weather Service.

Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement — the international treaty on climate change signed in 2016 — would just be the beginning under such policies, which also mention stepping away from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and other global organizations. The clean energy investments made under the Biden administration wouldn’t be maintained as the project plans to pull funding from them and from governmental climate research. In short, under a Trump administration guided by the Project 2025 framework, the United States’ environmental policy would become one of deregulation and climate change denialism.

There is a lot at stake across topics in this election, and the climate is no exception. While some of these policies may seem irrelevant to our day-to-day lives, environmental policy has a direct impact on all of us. Hurricanes Milton and Helene have shown us the destructive potential of climate change. Disasters will only become more dangerous without agencies like NOAA and the National Weather Service to inform us. The difference in the policies and promises of the two campaigns could be the difference between being prepared the next time disaster strikes or being caught off guard. As we cast our ballots leading up to and on Election Day, it’s important that we know what climate present and future we are voting for.

Lily Zufall is a Medill freshman. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.