In a contrast to the 2020 election, climate change hasn’t gotten a lot of attention this year, at least partly because four years ago the Democratic primary candidates were actively bringing the issue forward and competing to have the best climate plan, which was Jay Inslee’s. When Joe Biden won the nomination and then the presidency, he incorporated a lot of Inslee’s plan into his own policies, particularly his signature Big Fucking Climate bill, aka the Inflation Reduction Act.
But in 2024, the chief discussion of climate and clean energy has focused on Donald Trump’s pledge to undo all the progress that Biden made. Climate made only the briefest appearance in the June debate between Biden and Trump, when Biden tried to talk about his policies and Trump changed the subject and also lied a lot.
In last night’s debate between Kamala Harris and an angry bag of mostly bile, climate was only raised at the very end of the debate, with each candidate getting only a minute to answer because time was running out, and how’s that for a metaphor.
But at least there was a climate question, and Harris answered it aptly, as you’d expect. Then the angry bag of mostly bile ranted for his minute about anything but climate. Not too surprising, since Harris had activated his “tirade” setting early on and he’d come unglued for most of the final 84 minutes of the 90-minute debate. Here’s the clip!
Harris noted that Trump has dismissed climate change as a hoax, then said that people who have been affected by extreme weather and wildfires know how real it is, especially those who have lost their homes, or been “denied home insurance or is being jacked up” for their premiums.
She pretty deftly noted that the Biden-Harris administration has maintained US energy independence while also making possible the first serious shift away from those fossil fuels:
“I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels. We have created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs while I have been vice president. We have invested in clean energy to the point that we are opening up factories around the world.”
Harris contrasted that record to Trump’s big talk about saving manufacturing jobs, which declined under Trump, and noted that she received the endorsement of the United Auto Workers and its president, Shawn Fain, who understand that
“part of building a clean energy economy includes investing in American-made products, American automobiles. It includes growing what we can do around American manufacturing and opening up auto plants, not closing them like what happened under Donald Trump.”
Trump, for his part, didn’t even bother with his usual throwaway line about wanting clear air and water (which ain’t climate) and instead raved about how nobody has a factory job any more, which is bullshit of course. Then he lied some more, claiming that manufacturing jobs are leaving, they’re leaving home, bye bye, meeting some Chinese man on the motorway in Mexico. No, Biden and Harris are not sponsoring Chinese EV plants in Mexico, and Biden has slapped a 100 percent tariff on imports of Chinese-made EVs, a detail that didn’t make it into the debate either.
You could possibly give Trump some credit for being on topic when he lied that his tariffs will save jobs (they never do). He accused Harris of wanting to “kill the United Auto Workers and any auto worker, whether it's in Detroit or South Carolina or any other place” — generously, that may have meant jobs, but his mind is a terribly literal place — and then shifted to an incoherent rant about Joe Biden being paid off by China and Ukraine and “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” and that is Trump’s climate plan.
Worth noting also: Harris pointed out several times that the US is right now pumping more oil than any other country at any time in history, as Heatmap notes,
This framing, highlighting an all-of-the-above approach to energy, is consistent with Harris’s comments earlier in the debate, when she claimed to support fracking and investing in “diverse sources of energy.”
Trump, weirdly, accused Harris of planning to ban fracking “the day after the election,” lying nonsensically that instead of transitioning rapidly to renewables and making them economically viable, Harris would simply turn off the lights out of pure spite:
“They'll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead. We'll go back to windmills and we'll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant? By the way, I'm a big fan of solar. But they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil.”
At the Boise Democrats’ watch party that “I’m a big fan of solar” got a huge laugh.
Finally, on another major Biden-Harris industrial policy achievement, the CHIPS and Science Act, which has boosted the US microchip industry and created a boom in new factory construction to bring computer chip manufacturing back to the US, Trump flat out lied again, winning a fact check from those radical Marxists at the Wall Street Journal. Trump lied that due to Biden-Harris policies, “we hardly make chips any more,” when in reality, the CHIPS Act provides $52 billion in federal subsidies to incentivize chip manufacturing, which the industry has leveraged into even more additional private investment. Says the Journal:
The U.S. has in recent decades lost much ground in chip production to Asia, but the new legislation, called the Chips Act, has sparked several multi-billion-dollar construction projects around the country that, when complete, will markedly boost U.S. production of computer chips. The chip program is one of the largest industrial development programs the federal government has ever administered
We’d say the highest-ever growth in new investments in domestic chip manufacturing is pretty good, but the factories won’t start producing chips until they’re actually built, and by then undocumented migrants may have eaten all the silicon and engineers, how would you like that?
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[Heatmap / ABC News debate transcript / WSJ]
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Trump's climate policy is "drill baby drill" and "The Mayor of Moscow's Wife," which really needs to become an Urban Dictionary entry for some gross mushroom-based sex act.
Using Fox News to support your arguments is like saying you're a marine biologist because you watch Sponge Bob.