The Stakes

Why Beating Trump Is Absolutely Necessary

Kamala Harris addressing the global climate talks in Dubai last fall

This epochal presidential campaign entered a new and I think more hopeful phase yesterday—I’m feeling buoyant, and ready to get to work. At least for a day, it feels like Kamala has a true fighting chance, and my oh my is that a fine feeling.

But first I want to remind everyone of why it matters so much. And that’s because the climate catastrophe is now playing out in real time. She may be the last president able to truly help stem the tide. Here’s a new study that shows “a large decline in the land carbon sink in 2023.” The paper—rushed into circulation this week by its alarmed authors—shows that the earth’s forests and soils absorbed considerably less carbon than usual last year, because the Canadian wildfires and widespread droughts reduced their ability to soak up the gas from the atmosphere. As Evrim Yazgin explained in Cosmos magazine,

In other words, the authors suggest, the warming already caused by the emissions of greenhouse gases may be creating a feedback loop in which increased temperatures and dryness are weakening carbon sinks which leads to increased emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere.

The authors warn: “If very high warming rates continue in the next decade and negatively impact the land sink as they did in 2023, it calls for urgent action to enhance carbon sequestration and reduce greenhouse gasses emissions to net zero before reaching a dangerous level of warming at which natural CO₂ sinks may no longer provide to humanity the mitigation service they have offered so far by absorbing half of human induced CO₂ emissions.”

Now, this is not necessarily the start of some doom-cycle—it definitely doesn’t mean, as one Tweeter insisted, that “carbon dioxide isn’t being absorbed any more.” As that most level-headed of climate observers Katharine Hayhoe explained, “last year the carbon flux was very strongly affected by a multitude of factors, many of which were affected by El Nino and of course many of which were also affected by human-caused climate change. The net result was not that the sinks stopped absorbing, but that the balance for one year tipped in the direction of absorbing less than humans produced.”

But it does underscore what I think is the most important news about our climate predicament—it’s now happening in real time, month by month; a series of dynamic events that are stretching our ability to anticipate or fully understand. It’s akin to the February study indicating that the Atlantic currents that stabilize the temperature of western Europe were faltering, and that they could collapse as soon as…2025. The earth’s climate system is now enduring a series of body blows, and how they all add up is increasingly hard to calculate. In one sense that makes no difference. As Hayhoe says, the task remains the same because

both the long-term trends AND the individual extreme years tell us the same thing: we need to cut our carbon emissions as much as possible, as soon as possible. As the IPCC says, “every bit of warming matters” and we know that the faster and the more we do this, the better off we’ll all be: and by “we” I mean the 99.99999% of people and 100% of nature that is not vastly enriching themselves from digging up, processing, and burning fossil fuels.

Which brings us back to politics. We measure our physical life in trips around the sun, and we measure our national life in four-year blocks. The current one expires in 106 days, and the one after that will take us to the end of the decade. I don’t think it’s hyperbole—indeed it’s the conceit of this entire ‘Crucial Years’ project—to say that this next term will be decisive, our last chance to operate with anything like a free hand in the fight to cut those emissions. Before long, if we don’t get our act comprehensively together, we will be be facing even more dire choices, like whether to fill the atmosphere with sulfur to block out some of the sun. So what happens in November, given America’s leading role in both creating and managing global climate chaos, will be our highest-leverage chance remaining to affect how high the temperature of our planet rises.

As I’ve been trying to say in one column after another, we can’t let Trump back in. And I feel some renewed sense of hope this morning that it may not come to that. Joe Biden’s courageous decision to stand aside, a step I believed all along he would take, gives the opening we need to spend those 106 days in an all-out organizing effort, undistracted by questions (both legitimate and trollish) about his age and condition. Instead, we have the chance to focus on Donald Trump, whose unfitness for office is far clearer in many ways, for me most obviously by his unchanging insistence that the climate crisis isn’t real.

It’s, by the way, a ‘conviction’ that it turns out to be contagious. Here’s J.D. Vance way back in 2020, as unearthed by Lisa Friedman from a speech at Ohio State:

“We have a climate problem in our society.” He praised solar energy and he called natural gas an improvement over dirtier forms of energy, but not “the sort of thing that’s gonna take us to a clean energy future.”

And here’s Vance two years later in a speech to the American Leadership Forum, as he seeks Trump’s support for his Ohio Senate bid

He acknowledged that the climate was changing but said that humans had no role in the changes. “It’s been changing, as others pointed out, it’s been changing for millennia.”

He went on to distinguish himself by explaining that wind turbines “don’t produce enough electricity to run a cellphone on” and by moaning about the “wanton harassment of fossil fuel companies.” (He also introduced legislation to end federal incentives for EVs, though he might have to shift there a little—the boss, after a pledge of $45 million a month in campaign contributions from Elon Musk, was heard to say yesterday that maybe electric cars weren’t so bad after all).

So let’s be clear—MAGA owns the Republican party lock, stock and barrel of oil, and MAGA thinks physics is fake.

Whereas Kamala Harris? She’s pretty darned good on climate stuff. Now, since most of what we know about her stands on energy and climate date from the 2020 primaries, it’s important to remember the context. We were pretty near peak-Greta (the massive school strikes of autumn 2019 were just a month or two in the rearview mirror), and polls were showing that the number one issue for many Democratic voters was climate change. And this was a primary fight. So don’t look for her to be stressing all these positions in the next three months.

But, her “Climate Plan for the People,” she laid out a common sense manifesto:

My plan sets out a bold target to exceed the Paris Agreement climate goals and achieve a clean economy by 2045, investing $10 trillion in public and private funding to meet the initial 10-year mobilization necessary to stave off the worst climate impacts. It modernizes our transportation, energy, and water infrastructure. It accelerates the spread of electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines. And it makes big investments in battery storage, climate-smart agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and the innovative technologies that will build our carbon-free future.

By 2030, we will run on 100 percent carbon-neutral electricity, all new buses, heavy-duty vehicles, and vehicle fleets will be zero-emission. All new buildings will be carbon-neutral. We will protect 30 percent of our lands and oceans. We will transition our public lands from producing the fossil fuels that represent 24 percent of national emissions to carbon sinks. And to power this transformation to a clean economy, we will empower the American workforce and create millions of good jobs. 

Among other specifics, she proposed to “convene a meeting of major emitters in early 2021” that would include “the first-ever global negotiation of the cooperative managed decline of fossil fuel production”. Which, in fact, is exactly what we need, and if we didn’t do it in 2021, well, 2025 is considerably hotter.

In her years as a district attorney in San Francisco, and then as AG in California, Zoya Teirstein writes, she

created an environmental justice unit to address environmental crimes affecting San Francisco’s poorest residents and prosecuted several companies including U-Haul for violation of hazardous waste laws. Harris later touted her environmental justice unit as the first such unit in the country. An investigation found the unit only filed a handful of lawsuits, though, and none of them were against the city’s major industrial polluters. 

As attorney general, Harris secured an $86 million settlement from Volkswagen for rigging its vehicles with emissions-cheating software and investigated ExxonMobil over its climate change disclosures. She also filed a civil lawsuit against Phillips 66 and ConocoPhillips for environmental violations at gas stations, which eventually resulted in a $11.5 million settlement. And she conducted a criminal investigation of an oil company over a 2015 spill in Santa Barbara. The company was found guilty and convicted on nine criminal charges.

Sometimes she went a little further rhetorically than she had in practice—during the campaign, for instance, she said she’d sued Exxon Mobil while attorney general in Sacramento. But, alas, she hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to pull the trigger. Still, it’s an excellent thing to contemplate—and since the least competent member of the Biden administration must be Merrick ‘Local Train’ Garland, maybe she could hire her New York counterpart Letitia James, who actually did take on the oil giant. (Jamie Henn has a great list of the ways she could litigate against Big Oil). In any event, it’s all been enough for Bloomberg to proclaim that she’d be a “tougher oil industry opponent than Joe Biden.”

“She is the kind of leader who will hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, and that’s what we need right now,” Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from Harris’ home state of California, said in an interview. “She would absolutely carry on and build on the success of the Biden administration on climate and clean energy.”

Oh, and…she’s from California. Which is the epicenter (outside of China) of the clean energy revolution. So one guesses she’s not scared of getting cancer from a windmill.

You may notice the pace of these newsletters getting a little less frequent between now and the election. I’m going to spend most of them on the road, doing what I can to elect Harris. It’s time to lick climate denial in America once and for all.

In other energy and climate news:

+If you thought Trump 1 was bad, the Times reports that Trump 2 will be far far worse for environmental regulations in this country, because—thanks to efforts like Project 2025—they’ve got every plan firmly in place.

“Because of the Supreme Court in particular, he’ll be able to get away with a lot more than anyone ever suspected,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush. She said the courts have effectively given a second Trump administration a “free hand” to slash regulations.

That could mean a drastic transformation of the E.P.A., which was created by a Republican, Richard Nixon, and for five decades has played a powerful role in American society, from forcing communities to reduce smog to regulating the use of pesticides. Businesses and conservative groups have long said that excessive regulation drives up costs for industries from electric utilities to home building. Environmentalists say that handcuffing the E.P.A. now, when time is short to contain global warming, could have dire consequences…

In a 32-page section on the E.P.A., the plan takes aim at the agency’s authority to tackle global warming, including by revisiting a 2009 scientific finding that says carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health. The blueprint also calls for repealing regulations governing air pollution from factories that crosses state borders and for reconsidering limits on PFAS, toxic compounds known as “forever chemicals” that have been detected in nearly half the nation’s tap water.

Project 2025 also calls for eliminating E.P.A.’s office of environmental justice, which focuses on reducing pollution in low-income and minority areas;breaking up an office dedicated to children’s health; resetting scientific advisory boards “to expand opportunities for a diversity of scientific viewpoints”; and appointing a political loyalist as the agency’s science adviser in order to “reform” the agency’s research.

“To implement policies that are consistent with a conservative EPA, the agency will have to undergo a major reorganization,” reads the section on the E.PA., which was written by Mandy Gunasekara, the agency’s chief of staff during the Trump administration.

+From Spencer Glendon and Barney Schauble, more on the ongoing meltdown of the insurance industry

Today’s insurance markets are full of quirks that derive from assumed stability:

• Virtually all property insurance is annual. There is no term structure.

• After a claim, the insured is expected to rebuild the same building in the same place.

• Insurance is only available for damages to a structure, not to the value of the land.

• Regulators often insist on the use of backward-looking data, prohibiting the use of climate models and climate-aware catastrophe models.

• Regulators also regularly limit the amount by which insurance rates can rise year-to-year.

Climate change undermines all of these assumptions.

+Your regular election-season reminder that you can keep track of payoffs from the fossil industry to its favorite politicians here

+From the brilliant Kate Aronoff and the Roosevelt Institute, a powerful report on the prospects for the kind of managed decline of the fossil fuel industry that Kamala Harris was talking about on the campaign trail in 2020. I can’t do justice to its scale and savvy with excerpts, so I will just give you a sense of the introduction and then set you to work reading it on your own

This report will first examine how near-term trends facing the fossil fuel industry threaten to shift mounting private liabilities onto the public. It will then explore the range of tools the US government has historically put behind both the development of the fossil fuel industry and a broader, public-purpose mission of energy independence. This is best understood as industrial policy, defined here as the state-aided and targeted shift of resources toward particular economic sectors and activities. Defining US support for its fossil fuel industry as such is meant both to elucidate the considerable governmental support that sustains conventional energy production and to provide inspiration for what a more robust green industrial policy directed explicitly toward an energy transition—rather than simply energy diversification—could look like. Finally, the report describes a menu of public policy options for leveraging similar tools to manage the declines in US oil and gas production likely to happen as a consequence of ordinary profit-seeking behavior by corporations, including via corporate consolidation, companies’ focus on delivering shareholder returns, and the depletion of prime shale reserves. Recommended measures range from lower-hanging fruit (i.e., changes to agency rules) to the creation of new institutions to handle the financial, administrative, and coordination challenges that the coming decades pose. 

These changes, focused primarily on domestic oil and gas extraction, are intended to set the stage for the US to adopt a more holistic approach to managing its energy transition by expanding the role of the public sector on both sides of the decarbonization ledger.

+The team at ClimateCriminals.org has identified its 2024 list of villains. They tend to run oil companies and banks, no huge surprise, though I was very happy to see Richard Edelman, ceo of Edelman public relations, make the list too. Maybe he can put out a press release!

+Brett Christophers has an important piece arguing that our sense of rapid progress on renewable energy is badly skewed by the fact that China is soaring so rapidly that it is wrecking the curve.

Debunking the “exponential growth” narrative is important not just because it is misleading in so far as it mistakes a Chinese story for a global one. It is also important because the narrative is politically salient and dangerous.

If we are achieving exponential growth with our existing approaches, why would we change anything about how we are presently going about things? Exponential growth bespeaks success, not failure.

Indeed, the narrative of exponential growth in renewables underpins a slew of Pollyanna-ish recent books that implicitly or explicitly endorse what are largely business-as-usual approaches to the climate crisis. More specifically, they endorse what passes for business as usual in the bulk of the world outside China, where, of course, business as usual looks notably different.

Decarbonising electricity generation as rapidly and as widely as possible surely ranks as one of humanity’s most pressing tasks, not least given that the electrification of transportation, buildings and industry is at the core of existing strategies for mitigating global warming more or less everywhere

+From the Washington Post, a wonderful account (god newspapers can be great) of a hot day on one street in the nation’s capitol

On Wednesday near Minnesota Avenue and Naylor Road, Rich Gibson camped in a folding chair all day — a pair of gold-framed prints of African art leaned against a tree.

The licensed clinical social worker has been unhoused for the past two months, and as afternoon temperatures climbed to 101 degrees, the shady spot brought the best relief he could manage.

Gibson had two hopes: a cool breeze and a customer for the art that might fund his next meal and a sweet tea with tons of ice.

“I’ll sell you the whole thing for $15,” Gibson pitched.

Low on cash and out of favors from family and friends, Gibson perched on the sidewalk with his wares.

The unhoused often seek shelter in vacant apartment buildings nearby, but not during the heat wave, Gibson said. Indoors was simply too hot.

“If you come by at night, you’ll see people sleeping under these trees, brother. For real, nowhere to go,” Gibson said.

By midafternoon, he hadn’t made a sale, and cool breezes were nearly as rare as customers. A friend offered Gibson a place for a few days, but there was no air conditioning.

He shifted to a new quest: a cheap box fan.