Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed to each other on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on the matter of climate change: one thinks rising temperatures pose an existential threat, the other thinks climate science is nonsense.

That gulf in views was put on full display in the last minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC News Live Prime host and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis asked the pair what they would do to fight climate change. Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has implied on many an occasion that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we know is that it is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who is living in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who is now being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up.” In the past couple of years, private insurance companies have begun dropping policies in fire- and flood-prone states like California and Florida.

While Harris pointed out the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them, choosing instead to cite investments in climate change made by the current president. “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” She got that $1 trillion sum by adding up all of the administration’s major investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely connected to climate change.

Trump didn’t answer the question at all, instead making a convoluted point about domestic vehicle manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden is getting millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They’re selling our country down the tubes,” he said.

Trump slashed scores of environmental rules and climate regulations during his four years in office and appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who have since made it harder for the federal government to clamp down on pollution. He also withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact to slow planetary warming, though President Biden later reentered it.

Before Tuesday’s debate, it seemed likely that Harris would cite her record as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she formed the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at penalizing companies for polluting. Or her tenure as California attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the company’s attempts to cheat smog emissions standards. But she didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.

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Instead, Harris doubled down on her recent efforts to make swing-state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania forget about the anti-fracking position she took during her 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “in favour of banning fracking,” but she recently walked that back. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said early in the debate. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases on fracking.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the single-largest investment in fighting climate change in American history, something Harris chose not to point out.

Rather, she advocated for an energy strategy that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something resembling an “all of the above” approach in order to boost American energy independence. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”

Harris wasn’t the only one eager to talk oil and gas at the debate. Onstage, Trump frequently returned to a familiar set of energy-related talking points. He skewered President Biden, and Harris by association, for high gas prices, which spiked again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said that they aim to eliminate the country’s vast reliance on fossil fuels in the near future.

Trump also went after sources of renewable energy, saying that, while he is a “big fan of solar,” Democrats have commandeered “a whole desert to get some energy out of it.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has approved 33,500 acres of land, some of it desert, for solar installations since 2021.

As the debate wrapped up, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had succeeded in her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she’s not the anti-fossil-fuel crusader Trump has been working to pin her as. But she did leave Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift.

“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”

Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.

This article originally appeared in Grist; it has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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The near-term future of sustainable finance is on the ballot box, with Donald Trump promising to fight environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, while Kamala Harris would bring policy predictability, working to settle important issues on ESG rights and corporate disclosure. While a Trump victory would threaten $1 trillion in low-carbon investments, Harris would challenge the sector to better address the financing needs of ordinary Americans facing large utility bills or small businesses grappling with rising costs.

Early in the campaign, Trump pledged to “protect Americans from radical leftist ESG investments” and to “set the example for Republicans across the country to follow my lead in fighting ESG.” A Trump victory – especially if Republicans also win control of Congress – would empower the administration to reverse a decade of progress on shareholder rights, attack the right of pension trustees and other fiduciaries to incorporate ESG into pension investments, and revoke requirements on corporations to disclose key information on carbon emissions and their investment risks.

The conservative policy document Project 2025 is a blueprint for how a Republican administration and Congress would dismantle sustainable investing, says Kyle Herrig, spokesperson for the ESG advocacy group Unlocking America’s Future. “The ESG section of Project 2025 will create severe, long-lasting damage to our economy and environment,” he said in a recent statement releasing a report analyzing the document’s recommendations on sustainable finance.

In the last two years, Republicans have mounted a war against ESG investing (calling it “woke capitalism”), prompting many states to boycott ESG fund companies and managers, sometimes at great cost to themselves. These battles are expected to ramp up if Trump wins the presidency and Republicans control Congress.

One of the most significant Project 2025 recommendations is a call to reinstate a Trump-administration regulation stipulating that pension trustees would only be permitted to consider “pecuniary” issues in investment decisions. The rule would overturn a Biden policy specifically permitting trustees to consider ESG issues.

Project 2025 also says the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) should revoke a rule requiring publicly listed companies to disclose their operational carbon emissions and climate risks. Project 2025 also recommends enacting legislation to repeal financial-institution disclosure requirements on conflict minerals, mine safety, resource extraction and CEO-to-staff pay ratios. As well, it calls for the federal government to investigate ESG firms on collusion and price-fixing and anti-competitive behaviour – accusations against the industry that have been found to be groundless.

Bryan McGannon, managing director of the US Sustainable Investment Forum, the umbrella organization for the sustainable finance industry, says he is particularly concerned that Republicans will attempt to roll back shareholder rights on ESG and other issues. “Shareholder rights is the thing they will go after, and they have been trying to for ages,” he says.

Last year, Republican members of the House presented a series of bills that would bar investors from presenting proposals on ESG matters for a vote at corporate annual meetings. The bills would roll back SEC reforms from 2009 that enabled investors to submit ESG proposals, shareholder-rights attorney Sanford Lewis said in a blog post.

Since those reforms, shareholder proposals have helped to pressure hundreds of U.S. companies on ESG issues. Many companies  have made important concessions on ESG issues as a result of this process. In 2023, for example, New York City pension funds withdrew proposals on labour rights at DoorDash, Walmart and Apple after the companies conceded to policy changes or greater disclosure around their employment practices.

If Republicans are successful in making these bills law, they would remove this important tool from shareholders at a time when many are having critical discussions with companies on climate issues, Lewis said. “In a year of global flooding, wildfires and heat – a climate emergency worldwide – it would silence the voice of investors and ask them to invest as if climate change is not happening.

Corporate disclosure at risk?

On other issues – ESG consideration on pension investments and corporate climate disclosure – McGannon believes a Trump administration would have less power to cause lasting damage than on shareholder rights. It’s unlikely the courts would uphold an outright ban on ESG consideration through a reinstated pension rule, he says, because the financial industry widely accepts the principle that ESG issues hold important pecuniary implications of risk and return. But a Trump rule could succeed in “muddying the waters,” he says, discouraging trustees from adding sustainable investment funds to the list of investment options available to members of some retirement plans.

On carbon dioxide reporting, corporations are facing a growing trend worldwide – in Europe, California, China and elsewhere – to disclose CO2 emissions and risks. While Trump may be able to slow this trend in the United States, he won’t be able to stop it, McGannon says. “The reality is that something like 3,000 U.S. firms – the biggest U.S. firms – will be obligated to disclose [emissions and risks] under reporting frameworks more comprehensive than the U.S. climate rule.”

Harris would bring policy stability

If, on the other hand, Harris pulls off a victory come November, McGannon believes she would uphold the Biden administration reforms in the courts where they are currently under review. However, he also predicts that a Harris administration would not re-enter the policy debates of the last few years by strengthening the rules or adding new ones.

Regardless, McGannon and others think a Harris administration will likely seek to bolster private investment for the climate transition and community development – two important goals of the sustainable finance industry. As a senator, Harris was an early co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, a comprehensive climate and economic package aimed at creating millions of jobs through renewable energy, energy efficiency and retraining for displaced workers.

As vice-president, Harris was Biden’s key representative on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), focusing on its funding for community climate initiatives. One IRA program Harris helped to launch was a national green bank to help fund a network of community-development financial institutions. These institutions will, in turn, finance clean power options in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The bank started operations last month with the help of $5 billion in federal funding.

More recently, CNN reported that Harris will announce plans to create a new fund to cover the interest costs of small business loans by community banks and other local lenders. In contrast with her climate-focused announcements, this new initiative would address the needs of small businesses generally, encouraging community lending institutions to expand financing to small local companies.

McGannon says that Harris’s vision fits within a tradition of Democratic policy-making to incentivize private capital for community and economic development, a component of sustainable finance called impact investing. “She hasn’t laid out a whole lot of detail yet for us to think about, but I think it’s smart policy-making to use those levers in the marketplace.”

The outcome of this election will have a big impact on the future of the sustainable finance industry over the next four years, determining whether it wastes more time and effort on Republican culture wars or if it can move on to address questions of real importance to Americans like how to help communities make the switch to clean energy and finance the expansion of small businesses in a low-carbon economy.

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

The post What will the U.S. election mean for sustainable finance? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Now, as he and Harris launch their campaign in earnest, environmental advocates are hoping he’ll use his straight-talking to get more Americans on board with climate action – even if his environmental record is mixed.

“As governor, Tim Walz has made huge strides to address the climate crisis,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, Sunrise Movement’s communications director. “He has done this by pitching climate action as a way to make people’s everyday lives better, create good-paying green jobs and invest in making communities stronger.”

During his time as governor, the former teacher and school principal, has adopted strict emissions standards for cars and ushered in legislation that will see Minnesota’s electricity generation be carbon-free by 2040. But he has also faced criticism from some environmentalists who argue that the agricultural industry has too much influence over state officials.

Earlier this summer, a coalition of environmental groups called People Not Polluters said the agencies and regulators in Walz’s government suffered from what they termed meaning they were “routinely” siding with “polluters, not people,” having approved a controversial Enbridge oil pipeline in 2020 and failed to address pollution in private wells.

“Governor Walz didn’t create this problem, but he needs to fix it. Instead, it is getting worse on his watch. So the Legislature needs to hold hearings,” Minnesota environmentalist Don Arnosti told the MinnPost in June 2024.

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Reflecting on Walz’s time as  a congressman from 2007 to 2018, the League of Conservation (LCV) gave his voting record a 75% on its scorecard, which analyzes how Congress votes on issues such as energy, climate change and worker protection.

Despite this less-than-sparkling congressional scorecard, most major environmental organizations have fallen in line behind the Harris-Walz ticket, given his stronger record as governor. Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club, trumpeted Walz’s experience.

“The Harris-Walz ticket is one that understands the fight before us, isn’t afraid to tackle climate change head-on and will continue to build upon the legacy of the Biden-Harris administration moving forward,” Jealous said.

Coral Davenport, of The New York Times, wrote that if Harris and Walz win the election in November, Walz “would bring the most substantive record on climate of any incoming president or vice president since Vice President Al Gore.”

At a time when the world needs the United States to up its climate ambition, advocates say that his record might prove to be invaluable.

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That’s according to Jason Miller, a senior adviser to former president Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. On the day that U.S. President Joe Biden dropped his bid for reelection and endorsed Harris, Miller told NBC that Harris’ comments on plastic were part of the “radical record” she developed as a prosecutor and attorney general in California. The far-right Fox News commentator Sean Hannity weighed in on Harris’ record separately, telling viewers: “I love my plastic straw; I hate those paper straws.”

It’s unsurprising rhetoric, given the contemporary conservative movement’s tendency to conflate environmental pollution and personal freedom. But the plastic pollution crisis is no joke — every year, more than 460 million metric tons of plastic are produced globally, and just about 9% of it is recycled. The rest festers in landfills, emits toxic chemicals into the air when incinerated, and strangles aquatic life when it escapes into the world’s rivers, lakes, and coastal waters.

Meanwhile, recent polls show that Americans overwhelmingly want government action to address the problem. According to a recent survey from the nonprofit Oceana, three-fourths of registered voters support national policies that reduce single-use plastics; other surveys show even stronger support for reducing plastic production overall.

So what would a Harris presidency mean for plastics?

Harris’ track record on the subject is sparse, but experts say her background as California’s attorney general, combined with her record in the Senate and comments she made as a 2020 presidential candidate, augur well. If nothing else, Harris could build on progress achieved under the Biden administration, like a recently announced strategy to eliminate single-use plastics from federal operations.

“There are not a lot of data points,” said Sam Pearse, plastics campaign manager for The Story of Stuff Project, a nonprofit that advocates against plastic pollution. “But she has both the know-how and credentials to challenge plastic pollution as president, and hold polluters to a higher standard.”

Here’s what we do know about Harris’ views on plastics. She did say, in a 2019 interview with CNN, that the U.S. should ban single-use plastic straws. (She joked about the need for “innovation” to make better alternatives than paper-based straws that tend to wilt when wet.) But that wasn’t exactly a groundbreaking policy position; in 2019, support for plastic straw bans functioned mainly as a culture wars flashpoint for presidential candidates. Plastic straws make up just 0.25% of the estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic that end up in the world’s oceans each year.

More significant was her co-sponsorship, along with four other Democratic senators, of the federal Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act of 2020. This far-reaching Democratic bill would have phased out a whole host of unnecessary single-use plastic products — yes, including straws — as well as created incentives for recycling beverage containers, held companies financially responsible for the plastic trash they generate, and placed a temporary pause on new or expanded plastic manufacturing facilities pending a comprehensive environmental review. That bill, as well as subsequent versions introduced in 2021 and 2023, never got a floor vote in the House or Senate, but environmental groups think it helped drum up awareness among the public and legislators about the kinds of systemic interventions needed to address the plastic pollution problem.

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“To have her support as a sponsor is a huge signal that she believes in addressing this problem from a life cycle perspective,” said Julie Teel Simmonds, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, a group that advocates for political candidates who will prioritize environmental issues. The term “life cycle” refers to all stages of plastic production, use, and disposal, in contrast to a perspective favored by industry groups that focuses mostly on reducing plastic litter.

Other environmental advocates said Harris’ track record as California’s attorney general could indicate a willingness to take on big plastic polluters. In 2011, Harris sued water bottle companies for claiming that their plastic bottles were “100% compostable and recyclable.” She also sued BP, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66 — companies whose fossil fuels are used to make plastic — for environmental violations, and oversaw an investigation into Exxon Mobil’s alleged efforts to lie to the public about the risks it faced from climate change.

None of this means that plastics (and the petrochemicals used to make them) will be a top priority for a potential Harris administration. Historically, action on plastics has tended to fall low on Democrats’ political agenda, even compared to other environmental problems. But the plastic pollution crisis has become much more visible over the past few years, in part due to United Nations negotiations over a treaty to “end plastic pollution.” Those negotiations are set to conclude by the end of the year, though further discussions around implementation could continue long after then.

The Biden-Harris administration has also ramped up the U.S.’s efforts to address the plastic pollution crisis, including most recently by announcing a target to phase out government procurement of single-use plastics from all federal operations by 2035. An interagency plastics policy committee set up by the Biden-Harris administration has also begun to acknowledge and address environmental justice issues caused by plastic production facilities, which tend to be sited near poor communities of color. A former White House staffer told Grist that Harris’ office has expressed interest in continuing this work.

The same can’t be said for a second Trump administration, according to several experts Grist spoke with.

“The extent to which a Trump administration would be willing to acknowledge the scope and the breadth of plastics and the effect that the oil and gas industry has on plastic is like, zero to negative a million,” said Rachel Karasik, a plastics research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, which focuses on a range of water-related issues, including plastic pollution.

Back in 2019, in the aftermath of Harris’ 2019 straws comment, Trump’s then-campaign manager Brad Parscale swiftly launched a line of 9-inch, Trump-emblazoned plastic straws that raised nearly half a million dollars in just one week. They were apparently so popular that the first batch sold out within hours.

Although the last Trump administration didn’t totally ignore plastics — it released an interagency strategy to clean up “marine debris,” including plastics, in October 2020 — experts told Grist that a second time around would probably see the reversal of Biden-Harris plastics policies and the loosening of environmental restrictions on production facilities. They also said Trump would likely pull out of negotiations over the U.N. plastics treaty, much as he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement in 2020.

This is in contrast to hopes that the Harris administration will join a “high-ambition coalition” of countries supporting a strong agreement, and effectively implement the treaty’s provisions domestically. “Harris is at least competent and a true public servant, and she believes in international diplomacy and tackling global problems,” Teel Simmonds said. “I can’t say the same for Trump.”

This article was first published by Grist. Read the original article here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” he said in another statement. Not long after, Harris announced via the Biden campaign that she intends to run for president. “I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said.

During his term, President Biden managed to shepherd a surprising number of major policies into law with a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate. His crowning achievement is signing the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — the biggest climate spending law in U.S. history, with the potential to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. In announcing his withdrawal, Biden called it “the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world.”

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Eco-right organizations such as the Conservative Climate Foundation and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions were set to hold a reception on Tuesday at a horticultural conservancy where members of the Conservative Climate Caucus will speak. But their concerns about a warming planet will likely go largely unnoticed by the most powerful elements of today’s Republican Party. And anything they say is bound to be drowned out by former president Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he was picking Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Vance, for his part, seems to be an embodiment of two important threads that have been pervasive in today’s GOP: limitless loyalty to Trump and an unwillingness to support policies to wean the United States off fossil fuels.

The Ohio senator’s name is more commonly associated with the former than the latter of these two concepts, but his connections to the fossil fuel industry run deep. Vance has been a supporter of expanding hydraulic fracking for gas in his state, which is the sixth largest in gas production. In the 2022 election, Vance’s campaign was among the top 20 recipients in the country of fossil fuel donations, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. And Vance’s personal investments are also heavily tied up in oil and gas. Financial disclosure forms he filed in 2022 show he owned between US$100,001 and $250,000 in a crude-oil-futures exchange-traded fund called K-1 Free Crude Oil Strategy ETF.

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Vance’s political rhetoric and actions have matched the state of his personal and campaign finances. In 2022, he said he was “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man” and said the climate has been “changing for millennia.” He once said the climate crisis was “created” to “justify Democratic donors” and has criticized environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing as a “massive racket to enrich Wall Street.” Like his fellow Republicans, he has also opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, a law that has pumped more than US$12 billion into Ohio’s clean economy. And last year, he introduced a bill that, if passed, would repeal federal tax credits for electric vehicles and replace them with credits for gas-powered cars.

“Time and again, JD Vance has gone out of his way to minimize the very real climate crisis we face and cast doubts on the human behavior driving it,” Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement. “Now, Vance joins a ticket that has sought to sell out Appalachian communities by pushing for the expansion of dangerous fracking . . . as well as by seeking to defund vital Inflation Reduction Act investments that are targeted to support jobs in energy communities like the ones he claims to represent.”

J.D. Chameleon

Vance rose to prominence after Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir about his childhood in Ohio and his family’s Appalachian roots, became a popular bestseller and later a movie. In the book, he draws from his own experience to try to explain why some working-class parts of America are turning away from Democrats.

Once a vocal critic of Trump (having reportedly called him “America’s Hitler” in 2016), he ultimately apologized and fell in line when he started running for Senate in 2021 and needed the former president’s endorsement. Vance has undergone a similar evolution on climate policy. In 2020, he acknowledged the harms of climate change and said natural gas was not “the sort of thing that’s going to take us to a clean energy future.”

There was a time when Vance was considered a moderate voice, but the one-term senator has taken up the ultra-conservative mantra of Trump’s supporters, opposing measures that would enable access to abortion and provide greater rights to 2SLGBTQIA+ people.

Vance beat out two other fossil-fuel-friendly lawmakers on the shortlist: Florida Senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

A second Trump administration would implement policies that roll back progress on climate with or without J.D. Vance as vice-president. But his selection will add yet another politician with ties to the fossil fuel industry to Trump’s inner circle.

“Donald Trump was the worst president ever for clean air, clean water, and protecting a livable future,” Jealous said. “With the selection of JD Vance as his VP pick, that climate-denying legacy would only worsen in a second term. Voters should reject this ticket and the reckless policies it would bring with it.”

The post What Trump’s VP pick could mean for climate policy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

After four years of Donald Trump’s coal and fracking cronies, U.S. environmental groups were elated that progressive, professional experts were taking back government.

Sure, there was a jolt of concern in mid-November when Biden appointed Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond as incoming director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, with special responsibility for climate issues and the pandemic. The 12-year congressman earned a reputation as a climate conservative, supporting fossil-fuel exports and offshore drilling while opposing efforts to tighten regulations on fracking and the disposal of toxic coal ash.

But Biden went on to make better choices. In December, he appointed former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Gina McCarthy, a key architect of the Paris Agreement, to run a new White House office on climate change. As president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, McCarthy sued the Trump administration more than 100 times over its attempts to ease environmental regulations.

And then there’s Michael Regan, Biden’s popular pick as the new EPA head. Regan began his career as an air-quality specialist with the EPA. He then spent eight years at the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy organization best known for championing early bans on whaling, leaded gasoline and hazardous chemicals such as CFCs.

For the past four years, Regan was an activist secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. Inheriting a dispirited department that was defanged by a previous Republican administration (sound familiar?), Regan tightened regulations and signed significant mitigation deals with chemical and energy companies. “Michael Regan will be exactly the kind of administrator that the EPA needs to fix the damage that was done under four years of Trump and tackle the climate and health crisis facing Americans,” said Jeremy Symons, an environmental consultant who worked with Regan at Environmental Defense.

As the first Black person to run the EPA, Regan will also focus on environmental and economic justice. On his appointment he announced, “We will be driven by our convictions that every person in our great country has the right to clean air, clean water and a healthier life, no matter how much money they have in their pockets, the color of their skin or the community that they live in.”

Given the Trump-inspired insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, this message can’t can’t be emphasized enough. A divided America needs healing. A job-creating green revolution will boost the economy, put the U.S. on a more sustainable track and promote social justice.

Canadians accustomed to the Trudeau Liberals’ lukewarm embrace of climate policies have spent four years worrying about America’s rejection of the environmental crisis. Now, armed with a committed cabinet and an unexpected (albeit slim) majority in the Senate, the 78-year-old Biden may soon challenge Canada to keep up.

The post Biden sets new pace in climate race appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Win or lose, Biden’s “Clean Energy Revolution” gave new hope to activists who have seen country after country (including Canada) pass the buck on climate change. At last a major-party candidate was acknowledging the crisis by committing himself to a detailed plan (19 pages long) that addresses not just carbon emissions but a whole ecosystem of related issues, including housing and social justice.

Best of all, Biden positioned his policy not as a gruelling struggle but as a shining opportunity to make the world healthier, fairer and more prosperous. In a phrase familiar to readers of Corporate Knights, he pledged to “Build Back Better.”

Biden’s plan, should he be elected, includes a pledge to sign, on day one, a series of executive orders “with unprecedented reach” to get America on the right track – starting with rejoining the Paris Agreement. As a president’s powers are limited, he also vowed to demand that Congress enact legislation to reach 100% clean electricity by 2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In his vision, America could become “the engine of the world’s clean energy economy,” developing cutting-edge technology to sell around the world.

Biden, the most “establishment” of all the candidates for the Democratic nomination, seemed an unlikely climate champion. As a senator, though, he introduced Washington’s first climate change bill back in 1986. (His bill died in the Senate, but a version later resurfaced and was signed into law by Ronald Reagan.) The Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice-president, talked the talk on climate issues but spent its first term addressing the 2008 financial crisis and afterward ran into opposition in Congress. Climate activists still begrudge Obama’s 2015 decision to allow Shell to drill for oil in Arctic waters.

When Biden began campaigning for the Democratic nomination, his proposed climate policies electrified nobody. The youth-oriented Sunrise Movement gave Biden’s plan just 75 points out of a possible 200 – far behind the scores of Bernie Sanders (183) and Elizabeth Warren (175). But after sewing up the nomination, Biden pivoted. He adopted the best ideas of his rivals (particularly those of Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee) and appointed outspoken Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and former secretary of state John Kerry to co-chair his climate task force.

By contrast, Trump’s re-election policies included breathless updates on the pipelines his administration had approved and the environmental and public health regulations he’d rolled back (more than 100 in total). A second term would give Republicans more clout to fight the many appeals of their anti-climate policies by advocacy groups and Democratic governors – and more time to appoint GOP judges to rule on those cases.

Worse, it would encourage other countries to ignore emission regulations, further eroding the world’s chances of limiting global warming to the Paris Agreement targets. “If Donald Trump is reelected,” wrote David Roberts at Vox.com, “the likely result will be irreversible changes to the climate that will degrade the quality of life of every subsequent generation of human beings.”

Either way, America seems likely to become a nation of informed, determined and increasingly motivated climate activists.

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