About this episode
There’s one tool nearly all of us have access to that can change the course of our climate future: voting.
Political leaders control vast budgets, set sweeping policies, and influence market forces on a global scale. And deciding who is leading depends on all of us — the public — making our voices heard.
“Politics is the most important lever for change when addressing the climate crisis,” says Nathaniel Stinnett of the Environmental Voter Project, a group working to mobilize voters who care about climate. “If climate voters show up, they can choose the next president, they can determine the Senate, and they can determine the House,” he says.
But it seems like it’s especially hard to get people motivated to vote this year, when — at least for the moment — the choice for president is between the same two candidates we’ve seen before. Regardless of who leads the tickets in November, the choice is really between two parties, two paths for our climate future that couldn’t be more different.
In the last four years, President Biden’s administration has made huge strides toward reducing emissions and building a renewable energy economy with several pieces of new legislation.
“More money than has ever been spent on clean energy, on climate initiatives, in one go, in the United States, in history,” says New York Times Reporter Coral Davenport.
Biden has been a very successful and consistent climate leader. His landmark climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, puts $370 billion over ten years toward climate initiatives, a truly unprecedented investment. Still, the administration hasn’t done a good job making voters aware of its wins.
“Voters don't seem to really get that [the Inflation Reduction Act] is done and it's a law and sort of all this money is being poured into this and it's a big deal,” Davenport says. “It's a huge first step and it's also not enough. It will have a huge impact in transforming the nation's energy economy and reducing emissions tremendously.” But she says in order to avert the worst, most deadly and expensive impacts of climate change, “we need to do a lot more really fast.”
By contrast, the Trump administration eroded decades of progress on environmental and climate goals. It removed protections from waterways and weakened limits on carbon dioxide and mercury pollution, and stripped language about climate change and carbon from federal websites. If he’s reelected, Trump has promised to double down on fossil fuel production, to limit subsidies for electric vehicles and batteries, and to roll back as many of Biden’s efforts as he can.
This fall, the U.S. role in the climate emergency is on the line. And the results of this election will be profound, not only for this country, but for our planet.
“The consequences are so significant, globally, that we're all kind of watching with horror and bated breath from outside the United States,” says historian Emma Shortis.