Harris saves the climate – Trump kills us.

President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

As vice president, Harris cast the tiebreaking vote in the passage of the Biden administration’s signature achievement on climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act.

As Yale Climate Connections contributor Barbara Grady previously reported, “The most far-reaching climate law in history, the Inflation Reduction Act is catalyzing a transition in the U.S. economy toward cleaner energy and cleaner transportation – a shift the International Energy Agency, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and others say must happen for the world to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases to the levels scientists say would avert the most catastrophic and irreversible climate chaos.”

Harris has made clear throughout her career that she views climate change as a significant threat. Speaking at the 2023 United Nations climate summit in Dubai, she told leaders, “Across our world, communities are choked by drought, washed out by floods, and decimated by hurricanes. Wildfire smoke darkens our skies, and rising seas threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. The urgency of this moment is clear. The clock is no longer just ticking, it is banging. And we must make up for lost time.”

If elected president, Harris is “widely expected to try to protect the climate achievements of the Biden administration,” according to the New York Times.

In contrast, Trump has falsely called climate change a hoax. During his term as president, as Grady reported, “he overturned an estimated 100 environmental regulations and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. He shrank the EPA and required that the words ‘climate change’ be removed from its website. On the campaign trail this time, he has repeatedly said one of his top priorities is to boost oil and gas production and free up more public land to ‘Drill, baby, drill.’”

If Trump wins a second term as president, he and his allies say they aim to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and downsize the EPA.

On July 22, Harris received endorsements from several large environmental organizations, including the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, the NRDC Action Fund, the Sierra Club Political Committee, and Clean Energy for American Action.

“The last three and a half years of the Biden-Harris administration could not contrast more starkly with Trump and other extreme MAGA Republicans, and the stakes for this election could not be higher,” the organizations wrote in a joint statement. “A second term would be far worse for our climate and our democracy.”

What is Project 2025? Trump, climate, and a second term

Project 2025, a 992-page conservative plan for a second Trump term, calls for elimination of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, gutting of the National Weather Service, repeal of Biden’s clean energy subsidies, and axing the National Flood Insurance Program.

It also calls for drilling in the Arctic and cuts to climate change work by government agencies. That includes the U.S. Agency for International Development, which, the authors write, “should cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world and support the responsible management of oil and gas reserves as the quickest way to end wrenching poverty and the need for open-ended foreign aid.”