Card #4: Climate and Energy

Biden-Harris Team on Climate and Energy 

We are all witnessing, if not directly experiencing, the sometimes devastating results of our changing weather. Sixty-nine percent of Americans support prioritizing the development of renewable energy sources.

President Biden and his administration take very seriously the need to expand clean energy and reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change. They have tightened regulations on pollutants and extractive industries and acted to protect vulnerable ecosystems and human communities. Since rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office in 2021, President Biden and his team have worked diligently and accomplished much, though the President notes there is still much more to do. They have…

• Passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), “the most comprehensive climate legislation the U.S. has ever seen.” Directing nearly $400 billion in funds, tax credits, and other incentives to develop and deploy clean energy at all scales, it has attracted hundreds of billions in private investment. It is expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
• Passed the CHIPS and Infrastructure and Jobs Acts, funding advanced energy technologies, ecosystem restoration and resiliency, water infrastructure, EV charging, and more.
• Added protections to millions of acres of public lands: restored, expanded, and created new National Monuments; put conservation, clean energy development, and recreation on a par with grazing and extractive industries on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and so much more.

Donald Trump on Climate and Energy 

We are all witnessing, if not directly experiencing, the sometimes devastating consequences of our changing weather. Sixty-nine percent of Americans support prioritizing the development of renewable energy sources.

When Mr. Trump was president, he withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, making us the only country in the world to neither sign nor ratify that agreement. He called climate action too expensive and rejected the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming, largely through burning fossil fuels.

As president, Mr. Trump championed the production, use, and export of traditional fossil-fuel energy sources—it’s no surprise his slogan is “Drill, baby, drill.” He reduced government regulation and oversight of private industries, ordered all federal agencies to target for elimination any rules restricting US production of energy, and appointed former oil, gas, coal, and agricultural executives and lobbyists to many key energy-linked administrative jobs, including at the EPA and Department of Interior—appointees openly in favor of increasing fossil fuel development and hostile to regulations they saw as decreasing production. 

Overall, Trump repealed or weakened some one hundred environmental rules—or, as he boasted, “We’ve CUT nearly 25,000 pages” of “job-killing regulations.” According to Inside Climate News, these actions completed “a near total elimination of his predecessor’s most significant measures.”