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As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump marketing campaign for the November election, farmers throughout the U.S. grapple with excessive and unprecedented climate: blistering heatwaves, extreme drought, explosive wildfires, devastating storms, and lethal floods. Local weather insurance policies haven’t been an enormous level of dialogue on the marketing campaign path, however the subsequent president’s method to the altering local weather could have large implications, affecting all the things from biodiversity to human migration to farmers’ means to provide meals.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sounded a final alarm for the planet in March 2023, emphasizing that we have to make “speedy and far-reaching transitions” throughout the board, together with in meals and agriculture, inside the present decade. The report warns that because the local weather warms and farmers face growing challenges, meals insecurity and provide instability will rise.
“There’s a quickly closing window of alternative to safe a livable and sustainable future for all,” the authors mentioned. “The alternatives and actions carried out on this decade could have impacts now and for hundreds of years.”
Particulars on the presidential candidates’ particular local weather insurance policies stay scant, however their monitor data, get together platforms, and election-season statements level to the type of method every would possibly take if elected. And they could not be more different. On the subject of vitality manufacturing, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases—and the rules that form it and quite a few different climate-related insurance policies—the 2 candidates’ opposing approaches would have wildly totally different implications for the state of the local weather—and the ensuing stability of the meals system.
The 2024 Democratic platform acknowledges the local weather disaster as “an existential risk to future generations” and displays that precedence with strong help for clear vitality and climate-friendly regulation. In the meantime, to the Republican mantra of “drill, baby, drill,” Trump has known as local weather change a hoax and promised to realize “vitality dominance” whereas eliminating regulation and undoing the Democrats’ progress towards clear vitality.
Quite a few local weather and setting advocacy teams have endorsed Harris for president. In the meantime, agribusiness pursuits have poured their cash into the GOP.
The Democrats’ Observe Data on Local weather
President Joe Biden’s administration has weathered blended opinions on local weather. For the previous six years, the U.S. has produced more crude oil than some other nation, and the Biden administration approved hundreds of permits for drilling and fracking on federal land, just like the Alaska Willow oil drilling mission. And whereas Harris known as for a ban on fracking in 2019 throughout a presidential debate on CNN, she has since changed her position.
Nonetheless, the Biden-Harris administration set the purpose of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and made unprecedented investments in renewable vitality. The $1.6 trillion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—which incorporates $369 billion for clean-energy tasks and decarbonizing the vitality and transportation sectors—is probably the most aggressive piece of local weather laws in American historical past. Harris forged the tie-breaking vote to move it.
Moreover, below Biden and Harris, the U.S. Environmental Safety Company (EPA) finalized robust air pollution requirements for cars and fossil fuel-fired power plants.
Although Harris has not made local weather a spotlight of her 2024 marketing campaign—and has not revealed specifics about her local weather agenda this yr—her campaign has said she plans to construct on Biden’s local weather legacy. Some have a look at her Climate Plan for the People, which she unveiled throughout her run within the 2020 primaries, as a sign of the place her priorities would possibly lie. The plan known as for a $10 trillion private and non-private funding in local weather motion over the following decade and included funding clear vitality, electrifying transportation, and pursuing climate-smart agriculture.
In her earlier roles, Harris has held big polluters to account and supported bold climate action, typically framing the disaster by the lens of environmental justice, recognizing that poor and minority communities bear the brunt of air pollution and trying to reverse the inequities. As California’s lawyer basic, Harris sued the Obama administration to cease offshore fracking within the Santa Barbara Channel and amassed $50 million in settlements from lawsuits in opposition to fossil fuel companies together with Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66. And as a U.S. Senator, in 2019, she joined Consultant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in co-sponsoring the Green New Deal, a plan to transition the nation to scrub vitality whereas offering job ensures and high-quality healthcare.
“Kamala Harris has been a driving pressure in delivering the strongest local weather motion in historical past. She’s able to construct on these good points from day one as president,” mentioned Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the NRDC Motion Fund, in a statement. “Harris grasps the urgency and scale of the problem…. She’ll increase local weather ambition to verify we confront the local weather disaster in a method that makes the nation extra inclusive, extra economically aggressive, and extra vitality safe.”
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