This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Here is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: The Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90 percent chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-clichéd run of disasters: Open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars through streets somewhere. It is starting to make life on this planet very difficult, and in some places impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.

Here’s the second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: Finally, finally, renewable energy, mostly from the sun and wind, seems to be reaching some sort of takeoff point. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day. In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer they supplied more than 100 percent of the state’s electric needs for long stretches; there are now enough batteries on the grid that they become the biggest source of power after dark. In China it looks as if carbon emissions may have peaked—they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out renewables.

And here’s the third biggest thing in the months ahead: the American presidential election, which looks as if it is going down to the wire—and which may have the power to determine how high the temperature goes and how fast we turn to clean power.

Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out his understanding of climate change:

You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said—it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming…These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.

I’ve quoted this at length because this could again be the most important man on the planet, talking about the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And he’s gotten every word of it wrong. It’s gibberish.

But it’s gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition, in America and around the world. His friends at Project 2025 have laid out in considerable detail how you translate that gibberish into policy. It lays out in loving detail many of the steps his administration would use to bolster oil, gas, and coal while sidetracking sun and wind. These include ending the effort to spur EV production in Detroit; ending support for renewables (Trump has promised to “kill wind,” whatever that means); and reversing a crucial 2009 finding from the EPA that carbon dioxide causes harm, a position that undergirds much of the federal effort to rein in climate pollution.

He has also—chef’s kiss—promised to close down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, otherwise known as the people who measure how much the temperature is rising. That’s on the grounds that those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

In return for this endless largesse (beginning on day one, Trump said, he would become a dictator in order to “drill, baby, drill”), he has asked the industry for only (Austin Powers moment here) “one billion dollars” in campaign contributions. Big Oil is doing its best. As the Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago, Harold Hamm, one of the country’s most prominent frackers, is working the phones to come up with as much cash as possible. Hamm is working “incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector,” said a Trump campaign aide. “We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.”

Can Trump reverse the tide towards renewable energy? No, not entirely—it’s too strong, based on the ever-falling cost of sun, wind and batteries. Even in Texas, HQ of the hydrocarbon cartel where the state legislature has tried to pass laws limiting renewables, the undeniable economics of clean power continue to surge. The Lone Star state is now leading the nation in installing batteries on its grid, a good thing given the ongoing spate of climate disasters that strain and stress the state’s system.

But he can slow it down considerably. America’s buildout of renewables is dependent, among other things, on overcoming the bewildering array of permitting requirements that make every transmission line a harrowing bureaucratic battle. At the moment, the Biden-Harris White House has a dedicated team at work, with senior officials assigned to senior projects, constantly bird-dogging them to make sure that they get built on schedule. That would disappear, replaced with a new set of bureaucrats deeply invested in making sure these projects didn’t happen.

If a Trump administration was merely going to be a four-year interregnum, it would be annoying. But it comes at precisely the moment when we need, desperately, acceleration.

At least as bad would be the effect around the world. Last time, Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accords, badly denting the momentum those talks had produced. This time he’d do the same and more—he’s promised, for instance, to end Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas export terminals. These are designed to take huge volumes of US gas and ship it to Asia, where it will undercut the move to renewables. It is the last real growth strategy the oil industry has, and it is the biggest greenhouse gas bomb on the planet.

In essence, Trump would give every other oligarch in the world—Vladimir Putin, the king of Saudi Arabia, and on down the list—license to keep pumping away. If the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases is not going to play a role, why should anyone else feel any pressure? As Project 2025 quite clearly declares, Trump would “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and “cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world.” (Though Trump has claimed not to know anything about Project 2025.) The global climate talks in Brazil next year and the 2026 version in Australia—currently shaping up to be the last huge chance for global cooperation—would be turned on their heads.

There are ways to calculate the meaning of all this. The UK-based NGO Carbon Brief, for instance, said earlier this year that “a victory for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election could lead to an additional 4 billion metric tons of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s plans.” Just for perspective, that’s a lot: “This extra 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900 billion, based on the latest US government valuations. For context, 4 GtCO2e is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.” It’s like finding an extra continent full of greenhouse gases.

But worse than the totals is the timing. If a Trump administration was merely going to be a four-year interregnum, it would be annoying. But in fact it comes at precisely the moment when we need, desperately, acceleration. We’re on the edge of breaking the planet’s climate system—we can see it cracking in the poles (the Thwaites glacier now undermined by warm seawater), in the Atlantic (the great currents now starting to slow), and in the Amazon (where savannafication seems to be gathering speed). The earth’s hydrological system—how water moves around the Earth—has already gone kaflooey, as warm air holds far more water vapor than cold.

The world’s climate scientists have done their best to set out a timetable: Cut emissions in half by 2030 or see the possibilities of anything like the Paris pathway, holding temperature increases to about 2.7 degrees above preindustrial levels, disappear. That cut is on the bleeding edge of the technically possible, but only if everyone is acting in good faith. And the next presidential term will end in January 2029, which is 11 months before 2030.

If we elect Donald Trump, we may feel the effects not for years, and not for a generation. We may read our mistake in the geological record a million years hence. This one really counts.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Following the release of a major climate report last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the “climate time bomb” was ticking. Standing behind a podium emblazoned with the United Nations symbol of a globe encircled by olive branches, Guterres declared, “Our world needs climate action on all fronts—everything, everywhere, all at once.”

That call to action (possibly inspired by the movie of the same name) turns out to be a decent summary of what it takes to tackle rising carbon emissions. According to a new study out Thursday in the journal Science, countries have managed to slash emissions by putting a price on carbon, but the biggest cuts came from adopting a combination of policies. Seventy percent of the instances where countries saw big results were tied to multiple actions that generated “synergy.”

“There really isn’t a silver bullet,” said Felix Pretis, a co-author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. “That goes a bit against the conventional wisdom that economists have been saying that carbon pricing is the one thing we should push for.”

“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress.”

Pretis and researchers in Germany, France, and the UK looked for big drops in countries’ emissions and compared those results against the policies that had been adopted. Using machine learning, they analyzed 1,500 policies across 41 countries between 1998 and 2022, and found just 63 instances in which countries substantially slashed emissions. In total, these cuts added up to between 600 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. 

“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress,” Pretis said.

Part of the reason that the study only found 63 success stories is because it set a high bar in terms of emissions reductions, Pretis said. “But at the same time, we also see lots of policies having been implemented that don’t really bite.”

Governments are falling short of their climate targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement by about 23 billion metric tons of CO2. The problem isn’t just caused by a lack of ambition, the study says, but a lack of knowledge in terms of what policies work in practice.

Carbon pricing, whether through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, was “a notable exception” in that it sometimes led to large emissions cuts on its own, the study says, and worked particularly well for emissions from industry and electricity. However, “it works even better if you complement and package it up as a policy mix,” Pretis said.

The study doesn’t capture policies “that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.” 

For example, the United Kingdom saw a 19 percent drop in emissions from the electricity sector between 2012 and 2018 after the European Union introduced a carbon price for power producers. Around the same time, the UK had implemented a host of other steps, including stricter air pollution standards, incentives for building solar and wind farms, and a plan to phase out coal plants. Similarly, China cut its industrial emissions by 20 percent from 2013 to 2019 through a pilot emissions-trading program, but also by reducing fossil fuel subsidies and strengthening financing for energy-efficiency investments.

To cut emissions from transportation and buildings, the study shows that it’s an even better idea to pair together multiple tools. Regulation is the most powerful policy for reducing emissions from transportation, and it can work well alongside carbon pricing or subsidies. The study also stresses that different policies might be effective in different contexts. The researchers found that carbon pricing was less effective in developing economies, places where regulations to limit pollution and investments in green technologies might be a better fit.

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said the study shows what measures to curb carbon emissions have been politically possible, but it shouldn’t necessarily serve as a guide for future policymaking. “It doesn’t capture policies that never passed—including those that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.” 

Because of the bounds of the study, it also missed some of the most significant climate policies, Wagner said, pointing to the carbon taxes Sweden’s government passed in the early 1990s and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022. The United States’ landmark climate law invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and tax credits toward low-carbon technologies like heat pumps. The law is estimated to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this exercise gets repeated five, 10 years from now, the Inflation Reduction Act would show up” as causing a big drop in emissions, Wagner said.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed exactly two years ago, was pitched as a policy that puts the “middle class first.” But the spending bill’s residential tax credits have so far disproportionately benefited wealthy families, new data indicates.

That’s a major challenge for the efforts to decarbonize the US economy in time to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. “If going green is just a niche lifestyle choice for the upper middle class, it won’t move the needle on emissions at a societal level,” said Matt Huber, a geography and environment professor at Syracuse University and the author of the 2022 book Climate Change is Class War.

A Treasury Department report published this month shines a light on the use of two IRA renewable energy tax credits: one that helped Americans boost the energy efficiency of their homes by installing heat pumps, electric water heaters, efficient windows and doors, or other upgrades; and another that helped households install small-scale renewable energy production—most commonly rooftop solar panels.

Households living paycheck to paycheck “do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so.”

In 2023, about 3.4 million households, representing 2.5 percent of all tax filers, took advantage of at least one of these two subsidies, both of which were expansions of pre-existing incentive programs. That represents a 30 percent rise in the use of efficiency and clean energy tax credits over 2021 levels.

Nearly half of those who claimed at least one of these credits last year had incomes lower than $100,000. Yet roughly 75 percent of tax filers had incomes lower than $100,000 in 2023, and a closer look at the use of the credits by households within that bracket shows that wealthier Americans more frequently adopted both tax credits.

Of all filers making less than $100,000, just 0.7 percent claimed the clean energy tax credit, and just 0.9 percent claimed the efficiency incentive. In the over-$100,000 bracket, those percentages rose to 1.6 percent and a stunningly high 4.0 percent.

This dynamic, said Huber, was predictable. Tax credit programs can be difficult to navigate, especially for families who can’t afford to hire tax accountants, he said.

Further, though tax credits can make upgrades more affordable, they may not bring them into reach for Americans with lower incomes, especially because the programs come with spending caps for each household. “Most working-class Americans, living paycheck to paycheck, do not have the savings or credit to buy a new heating/cooling system…even with a complicated incentive to do so,” he said.

The tax incentives also favor those with higher tax burdens. If an upgrade is eligible for up to $2,000 in credits, for instance, filers must owe that amount or more in taxes to receive the full incentive amount.

This marked a substantial change from earlier proposals, which would have made the incentives available even for those with no tax burden. Lew Daly, a senior fellow with the climate justice group Just Solutions, said this was “a tragic political error” that should be changed by Congress.

“Without refundability, most of our country’s millions of moderate- and low-income homeowners are intentionally being excluded from the clean energy transition and its benefits in their everyday life, even as we are giving a massive fortune of tax dollars to big corporations and affluent households through the energy credits program as codified,” he said.

Instead of creating individual incentives, “why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free.”

The two credits also require Americans to pay the up-front cost of home upgrades and wait until tax season to recoup costs—an option some households cannot afford.

It’s a major problem for lower-income Americans who are grappling with rising utility bills and a “threadbare social safety net,” said Daly. “The exclusionary design of the energy credits program is just piling on to create a future of worsening inequity.”

Despite these issues, when compared with similar tax incentives that pre-dated the IRA, the distribution of these credits has been more even, said James Sallee, energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley. One study showed 60 percent of benefits went to the top 20 percent of households from 2006 to 2020.

“But, the benefits are still regressive,” Sallee said. “In every income category, the more money you make, the more money on average people are claiming per tax return.”

The IRA does include provisions aimed at promoting equal distribution. The renewable energy tax credit, for instance, can be used to enroll in community solar—a helpful arrangement for renters and apartment dwellers who tend to have lower incomes than house-owners.

The bill also includes point-of-sale rebates for efficient appliances and upgrades, though their rollout has been slow because they are being distributed locally. Only two states have yet to offer rebates, though others could launch their programs within months.

Other changes could help change the distribution of tax credits, said Sallee. One of them: placing income caps on eligibility.

But ultimately, said Huber, to create green benefits that are easier for all Americans to access, they should be universal rather than means-tested.

“Instead of putting out incentives for individual households, why not work with utilities on a program that would aim to install heat pumps in every household for free,” he asked. “That might sound outlandish, but if we see solving climate change [as] critical to the public good, there’s no reason why decarbonization shouldn’t be seen as a core public service like healthcare or education.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Leticia Carvalho is clear what the problem is with the body she hopes to be elected to run: “Trust is broken and leadership is missing.” Today, at the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica, nations negotiating rules governing deep-sea mining face a critical vote that could impact the nascent industry for years: Who should be the next leader of the regulatory body?

Carvalho, sponsored by Brazil, is in the running against the current secretary general, Michael Lodge, a British lawyer, who is being sponsored by Kiribati, a small Pacific state.

The battle for leadership might sound to the average person like a remote, technical concern. But the election of the authority’s secretary general comes at a pivotal moment for deep-sea mining and therefore for the future of the world’s oceans.

Calls for a pause on exploitation of the seabed are intensifying, with 27 nations now arguing that there is not enough data to begin mining.

“There is a problem with being seen to be too close to a company that is driven by results for its investors.”

If deep-sea mining goes ahead, scientists warn of large-scale, severe and irreversible harm to global ocean ecosystems that are already threatened by the climate and biodiversity crises.

The ISA is governed by 168 member states, plus the EU, and has a dual mandate: to authorise and control mining “for the common heritage of all mankind” and to protect the marine environment from harmful impacts.

During his eight-year tenure, Lodge has been accused of closeness to the mining industry, overstepping his neutral role, and of presiding over an authority that lacks transparency. A New York Times piece published earlier this month also accused him of pushing countries to accelerate the start of deep-sea mining. He denies these claims.

Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer and international diplomat, says it is time for “meaningful transformation” at the seabed authority. “The current deep divide of views among the state parties in the council is heavily due to the lack of trust and leadership, on top of whatever scientific gaps we may have or asymmetry of knowledge between the members.”

So far, the authority has issued 31 exploration contracts, sponsored by 14 nations, in an area covering more than 579,000 square miles of the world’s seabed, mostly in the equatorial Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico. These contracts, with countries including China, Russia, South Korea, India, Britain, France, Poland, Brazil, Japan, Jamaica, and Belgium, allow exploration of the seabed but not commercial mining.

No exploitation contracts, which would permit mining to go ahead, have yet been issued, but efforts by industry and some states have accelerated the race to mine.

One firm, The Metals Company (TMC), based in Canada, and partnered with the Pacific states of Nauru, Tonga, and Kiribati, has said it will apply for permission to mine later this year, before rules and regulations are likely to be in place.

Carvalho claims it is Lodge’s alleged close relationship with this company that is the problem. Trust, she claims, began to ebb away in 2018 after the secretary general appeared in a video wearing a hard hat with a “DeepGreen” logo on it. DeepGreen is the former name of TMC.

“What is intriguing is the leadership of a multilateral organization embracing one company’s demands, pushing it into the ISA council’s process to develop a mining code,” she says. “There is a problem with being seen to be too close to a company that is driven by results for its investors. ISA is a regulatory body with a dual mandate: determining the rules and procedures for deep-sea mining while protecting the deep-sea ecosystems.”

“The secretary general categorically denies any insinuations of inappropriate relationships with contractors.”

Carvalho, who worked as a regulator in Brazil’s oil industry, believes the rules governing deep-sea mining will take time and that no mining application should be approved before they are completed. “ISA has to find ways to compromise and reach consensus. Scientific evidence, broader participation and inclusive knowledge are the key basis of consensual decisions.”

The New York Times investigation featured an admission from the ambassador of Kiribati, Teburoro Tito, who confirmed to the newspaper that he attempted to persuade Carvalho to drop out of the race by offering her a possible high-level staff job at the agency.

Lodge told the Times he was not involved in discussion nor was he party to Tito’s alleged proposal.

The paper also claimed supporters of each candidate accused the other of attempting to influence the election outcome by paying travel and other costs of delegates who might otherwise not vote.

Carvalho, who took leave from her position as the head of the UN environment protection agency’s marine and freshwater branch in order to campaign for secretary general, describes the allegations against her as “mindblowing” and “absolute nonsense.”

“There is no flow of money different from the official budget,” she says.

Lodge, who declined to be interviewed by the Guardian, provided a statement from the secretariat in response to allegations that he was too close to TMC: “The secretary general categorically denies any insinuations of inappropriate relationships with contractors, which represent an unacceptable attempt to degrade the integrity of ISA and its dedicated staff without credible evidence.”

In regard to the claims that Lodge attempted to influence the election outcome, the statement said: “The secretariat will not comment on allegations and assertions based on hearsay.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The day after President Joe Biden said he would not seek reelection, his White House announced more than $4.3 billion in grants from the Environmental Protection Agency to communities to curb climate change, cut pollution, and seek environmental justice.

It’s a big announcement, but easily lost amid the thunderous presidential campaign news.

The grants will fund projects across the country that include decarbonizing freight, installing geothermal systems, and capturing fugitive methane emissions. According to the EPA, these grantees will cut US greenhouse gas emissions up to 971 million metric tons by 2050. That’s equal to the emissions of five million average homes over 25 years.

Amid all the political pandemonium, it’s remarkable that the administration is continuing to pump out new environmental initiatives. Climate has consistently been a high priority for the Biden administration, and this announcement proves a genuine commitment. Biden has the distinction of introducing the earliest bill in the Senate to address climate change, the 1986 Global Climate Protection Act. Humanity, though, has more than doubled its greenhouse gas pollution since then. As president, Biden has made dealing with global warming an even higher priority than it was during his last turn in the White House as vice president.

The United States is the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses and is currently second in annual output, behind China and ahead of India. So on the world stage, the US has a significant role, and activists say a responsibility, to nudge the global warming trajectory downward.

When he leaves office in January 2025, Biden will be able to credibly claim that he has done more on climate change than any other president and has been one of the most consequential decision-makers in the world for the future of the planet.

But while he’s done the most, it’s still not enough to get the US in line with Biden’s own climate change goals. Many of Biden’s environmental initiatives are still struggling to get rolling, and some activist groups are not satisfied with what he’s done.

And if Donald Trump wins in November, that progress will stall.

When Biden was one of nearly two dozen Democrats running for the top job in 2019, he proposed an extensive climate plan released in two installments that emphasized cutting greenhouse gas emissions by building up a robust US clean energy sector with $2 trillion in investment. He also laid out a legislative strategy and a list of executive actions he would take on his own, such as imposing tough methane leak restrictions on new oil and gas facilities, requiring federal government operations to procure clean energy, and imposing new efficiency regulations on appliances.

At the same time, Biden’s plan was seen as less ambitious than those of his competitors—Bernie Sanders called for $16.3 trillion in total—and he was criticized for declining to support a ban on fracking and for attending a fundraiser hosted by a natural gas company founder.

But since taking office in January 2021, Biden has demonstrated that at least part of his plan was realistic: He managed to tick many of the items on his to-do list that are directly under the president’s purview or from cabinet agencies.

He brought the US back into the 2015 Paris climate agreement, personally attended international climate talks, and committed the country to a more ambitious goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions in half from 2005 levels by 2030 while achieving net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050.

His administration enacted new fuel economy regulations for cars and trucks to encourage electrification. It set stringent caps on air pollution and carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power plants. It raised efficiency standards for stoves, refrigerators, and shower heads. It set zero-emissions targets for federal buildings, energy suppliers, and vehicle fleets, including placing orders for at least 45,000 electric mail trucks. It vastly expanded federal protections for public lands and established a Civilian Climate Corps to train workers to maintain them.

Perhaps Biden’s single most impactful climate action was signing the Kigali Amendment, an international treaty to phase out some of the most powerful greenhouse gasses. On its own, the Kigali Amendment would avert almost 1 degree Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century. On September 21, 2022, it cleared the Senate with bipartisan support, including 21 Republicans.

With Congress, Biden signed the trio of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. While climate change isn’t in their names, these laws mobilized billions of dollars in investments in clean energy, infrastructure, battery manufacturing, and building up supply chains. Together, they’re some of the largest investments in climate change mitigation in the world. Additionally, they’re structured as incentives, with no explicit penalties for carbon dioxide emissions.

Getting these laws passed was a bruising fight. Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act in its final form—with $370 billion for clean energy deployment—was a fraction of the size of the $1.75 trillion version that passed the House in 2021. The Democrats’ narrow majority in the Senate gave holdouts like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin leverage to chip away at its scope while securing more pot sweeteners for his own state. That in turn drew the ire of environmental activists who were anticipating a much more robust law.

Much of the IRA’s costs come in the form of tax breaks rather than new spending. “The IRA’s projected costs to the US federal budget are mostly reductions in taxes owed by US taxpayers or increases in federal payments to those taxpayers,” according to a Treasury Department analysis.

Still, the IRA remains the largest investment to deal with climate change in US history.

Biden has also had to navigate political rapids over the past four years and has ended up getting turned around on occasion.

For instance, Biden campaigned on banning new oil and gas development on public lands (on a page since deleted from his website), but in 2022, the Interior Department opened the door to new drilling lease sales. One example is the Willow project in northern Alaska, which the Biden administration greenlit last year, that could extract more than 600 million barrels of oil over 30 years.

Fossil fuel projects like this have led to some of Biden’s biggest climate contradictions.

On Biden’s watch, the US has become the largest oil and gas producer in history. US exports of natural gas hit a record high, especially after the administration stepped up deliveries to allies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even though the US is aiming to slash its domestic emissions, the country is on track to double liquid natural gas (LNG) exports by 2030. But Biden also imposed a pause on new liquefied natural gas export terminals 

When desperate to tamp down inflation and smooth over supply chain disruptions stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, the White House tapped the strategic petroleum reserve to help bring gasoline prices down. Biden has bragged about lowering gasoline prices. These lower prices tend to spur more driving, which in turn increases greenhouse gas emissions.

America’s fossil fuel bounties have put the Biden White House in the awkward position of taking credit for facilitating their production while simultaneously trying to curb their use.

Biden’s policies have also created friction within his climate goals.

His signature legislation, the IRA, has provisions mandating that cleantech companies build their products and supply chains in the US if they want to tap the money in the law. The provision has angered allies in places like Europe that want to sell products like solar panels and efficient appliances to US customers. Biden has also retained many of former President Donald Trump’s tariffs on foreign goods and is imposing new ones on cheap electric vehicles made in China by companies like BYD, currently vying with Tesla to be the largest pure EV maker in the world.

This protectionism for US companies raises prices for American buyers and means that the shift to clean energy is more expensive and slower than it needs to be. On the other hand, if cheaper cars and solar panels did enter the US market, they could get more Americans off of coal, oil, and natural gas at a faster pace.

The question now is whether US climate policies will continue to gain momentum, stall, or reverse. The main hinge point is who wins the next election.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, has her own history with tackling climate change as California’s attorney general. And with Biden’s endorsement, the Venn diagram of their climate policies will have a lot of overlap.

However, there are some big obstacles. Few Americans grasp how they can benefit from the programs in the IRA, and the money in the law has been slow to trickle out to build things like EV charging stations. Shortages of specialized labor and permitting issues have delayed big clean energy manufacturing projects. Energy demand is poised to grow as well, driven by population growth and technologies like artificial intelligence, and already fossil fuels are feeding some of that new appetite.

Biden’s policies are facing legal setbacks too. Republican state attorneys general are suing the White House to block new fuel efficiency regulations for cars and trucks. The Republican-led Supreme Court has also eroded the federal government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and with the recent reversal of the Chevron doctrine, agencies like the EPA will have much less leeway to craft environmental rules.

It’s also not clear voters will reward the effort. A majority of Americans support addressing climate change and deploying more clean energy, but it ranks as a much lower priority behind issues like crime and inflation. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in a survey conducted in April 2024, 37 percent of US voters consider climate change to be “very important.”

On the other hand, Trump, the Republican nominee, is openly disdainful of action on climate change. A key focus of his first turn in office was systematically undoing or blocking environmental regulations and promoting fossil fuels, going as far as removing the words “climate change” from government websites. Many of these rollbacks were stalled because they were poorly structured, blocked by courts, or undermined by bad staffing choices.

Conservative activists are working to ensure they don’t squander another opportunity in the White House to achieve their goals. The Heritage Foundation laid out a strategy for this in Project 2025, which aims to staff federal agencies with people who will reduce regulations and increase fossil fuel development. Though Trump has sought to distance himself from the plan, many alumni from his administration and campaign personnel were among the authors.

And there’s always the chance of another shock—a war, a pandemic, a depression—that could take the wind out of the sails of curbing climate change.

Despite this uncertainty, it’s increasingly clear that the turn toward cleaner energy is likely to endure. Worldwide, wind and solar are the cheapest sources of new electricity, and in some cases more cost-effective than existing fossil fuel sources. Market forces and climate policies are starting to have an effect, and according to some estimates, the world may be close to reaching peak greenhouse gas emissions, if it hasn’t already crossed this line.

Even with so many potential setbacks, some of the big changes Biden set in motion are likely to stick, as the cleaner, more efficient technologies become cheaper and more polluting sources of energy enter their final days. Even if Trump were to retake the White House, it’s likely that US emissions will continue to decline, albeit not as quickly as they would under a Democrat.

Changing this course took decades of persistent effort from scientists, engineers, leaders, and activists. Joe Biden deserves some credit for helping turn the rudder.