Climate scientists are in clear agreement that in order to avoid ever-worsening disasters and disruptions to our societies, the world must rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The policies put in place over the next few years will determine what the future climate looks like and what threats the world will face. The U.S. is crucial to this effort. And in the 2024 presidential election contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, voters have a choice between diametrically opposed visions of what the country must do. “When it comes to climate change, the contrast between Trump and Harris could not be more stark,” says Leah Stokes, a University of California, Santa Barbara, political scientist who focuses on energy and climate.
To provide a broad look at how potential policies under Harris or Trump would shape future U.S. emissions, Orvis’s team at EI used its Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model. The researchers compared current policies under the Biden-Harris administration with more ambitious policies that achieve a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and with the policies laid out in Project 2025. They found that the latter scenario “basically stops the progress that’s been made,” Orvis says. And even if current policies aren’t enough to meet international climate goals, any progress that can be made is crucial because “each tenth of a degree [of warming] is more damaging than the previous one.”
This is true even outside the US, western nations seem a hairs breadth away from deciding that they’ll vote in the best interests of the rich, the rich who benefit most from climate change, and who by and large caused the most recent price increases.
So the rich get richer at the expense of the typical folk, and the backlash from the greed only serves to further reward the rich, while the typical folk get climate misery.
We do it to ourselves.
No, the rich do this to the rest of us. Extremely wealthy people are the enemy of society they will destroy everything to earn a few more bucks
No, don’t take away the agency of voters, or their responsibility for what their vote does. People are choosing this, it’s not being imposed.
Yes the people choose but the wealthy decide what our options are
No, they don’t. I actually think the biggest harmful thought the wealthy have imposed is a sort of learned helplessness and apathy “it doesn’t matter because the rich control everything.”
They want you to think they’re untouchable because if nobody ever tries nobody will succeed.
In politics the rich absolutely decide what our “viable” options are. Campaigns take a lot of money and politicians spend most of their time on the phone with rich people making promises in exchange for money.
It is possible for the poor to overcome them but that takes a huge amount of cooperation and coordination. The rich do whatever they can to keep the poor from reaching this level of cooperation. Its not impossible but the scales have been tipped a long ways in the direction of the rich. I’m not interested in giving up I’m just saying they have almost all the power therefore they bear almost all of the responsibility for the way things are