“We are in a very fragile moment,” said Ali Zaidi, President Joe Biden’s national climate adviser. “The inflection point breaks in two very different directions.”
This week, that reality is a subject of intense interest for businesses, climate activists and government officials gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly and related climate events dubbed “Climate Week NYC.”
American voters will have a major say in which direction the fight against climate change proceeds. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have sought to turn clean energy into “a stalking horse for Chinese dominance, a driver of rising energy costs, or a globalist ploy. Trump promises to cancel Biden’s vehicle-emissions regulations, unlock more oil drilling, and once again take the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, wrote Time’s Justin Worland. Trump has called the shift to EVs a “transition to hell.” He has blasted the Inflation Reduction Act, with its many incentives to spur the move to clean energy, as a “green new scam” and promised to claw back unspent funding from the IRA if he wins the presidency.
Would he succeed? As Worland reported, “Even in some deep-red regions, new jobs making clean technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles are winning the backing of climate-skeptical Republicans.” It’s not unusual, he wrote, to see a Republican lawmaker at a groundbreaking for a solar-panel factory or an EV plant. “Democrats hope—with good reason—that continued investment will broaden support for climate measures.”
But in rural western Michigan, he pointed out, where two major EV-battery plants are planned, “the conversation sounds completely different. Residents have been inundated with mail campaigns and ads from right-wing activists and organizers decrying the plants.” Republican Congressman John Moolenaar spent more than $60,000 of federal funds on a campaign that included an ad claiming that the battery maker “does the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party.”
A growing cohort of climate advocates view the simmering anti-climate narrative “with a concern bordering on panic,” in Worland’s words. They have seen versions of the same fight playing out elsewhere, and it hasn’t gone well. In Europe, farmer protests and rising energy costs have put pressure on the European Union’s Green Deal.
The result, amid the hottest year on record, is a sort of climate retreat. Even French President Emmanuel Macron, a supporter of climate initiatives, last year called for the EU to embrace a “regulatory pause” on new environmental rules.
American officials have argued that “stitching the green transition into the tax code,” as The Hill’s Tobias Burns put it, and incentivizing private business is a good way to insulate the shift away from fossil fuels from political pressures. “This is now the tax code,” White House economist Lael Brainard said. “These rules are complex, they take a very long time to write, and they take a very long time to amend.”
Worldwide, voters still seem to care about climate change. In the EU’s 2023 poll of citizens across the bloc, 93 percent said they believe climate change is a serious problem. “It’s not that they deny the facts,” says Teresa Ribera, a vice president of the Spanish government and minister of ecological transition. “They lack confidence in institutions to shape the proper responses.”
So climate advocates, researchers, and public officials are “scrambling,” wrote Worland. Legislators are tweaking proposals to soften their impact on low-income people, and forward-thinking policymakers are devising creative ways to keep vulnerable communities from being left in the dust. Many other politicians are backtracking, making a counterintuitive bet that by taking a few steps back on climate policy they will help protect climate efforts by keeping right-wing politicians out of office. But slowing down carries grave risks too. The longer we take to cut emissions, the worse warming will be. To get through this moment, leaders will need to thread a needle.
Making that needle tougher to thread are “three big things (that) have shifted since the Paris accord,” wrote Somini Sengupta and Max Bearek of The New York Times: “China has raced ahead of every other country, including the United States, to dominate the global clean-energy supply chain, fueling serious economic and political strains that undermine incentives to cooperate. Rich countries have failed to keep their financial promises to help poor countries shift away from fossil fuels. A widening gyre of war — from Ukraine to Gaza and now, in Lebanon — has become an impediment to global climate consensus.”
“We have this really difficult moment,” Danny Cullenward, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, told The Wall Street Journal. “The election is a giant cliff.”