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- Biden and Trump diverge sharply on climate policy as the 2024 election nears.
- Republicans are emphasizing fossil fuels; Democrats push renewable energy.
- Despite rising climate concern, voters prioritize other issues, surveys show.
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump couldn't be farther apart when it comes to climate action.
Trump has said he'd "drill, baby, drill" for fossil fuels that are causing the climate crisis, an issue that isn't mentioned once in the platform adopted by the Republican National Convention this week in Milwaukee. Trump and his pick for vice president, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, are both climate deniers. By contrast, the Democrats unveiled a platform that said it would build on the Biden administration's unprecedented spending on renewable energy and the green workforce while cracking down on the oil-and-gas industry.
A lot is at stake for the planet this election. America emits more greenhouse gases than any country except China, and leading climate scientists say it needs to slash greenhouse-gas emissions in half this decade if there's any chance of keeping global temperatures below catastrophic levels. Meanwhile, 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record, fueling extreme heat that's killed dozens already this year as well as Hurricane Beryl in parts of the Caribbean and Texas.
But will it matter in November?
In a survey of 1,031 US adults, including 896 registered voters, taken from April 25 to May 4, about 62% of the registered voters said they would prefer a candidate who supports climate action. But when pollsters asked registered voters to indicate how important various issues were to them, global warming ranked 19th out of 28 issues Issues like free and fair elections, abortion, and healthcare were the top priorities for respondents. Plus, most respondents said they hadn't heard about Biden's signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.
The survey suggests that while concern about the climate crisis is on the rise in the US, other issues are top of mind for voters this year, Edward Maibach, the director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, told Business Insider. The center conducted the survey with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Maibach added that most Democrats, along with moderate and younger Republicans, want the US to do something about the climate crisis. But Republicans are very unlikely to factor the issue into their voting decisions, and the most conservative wing of the GOP has grown more opposed to renewable energy and electric vehicles over the past few years.
"Plenty of conservative Republicans in recent years have thought that moving the country towards a clean-energy future was a good idea for reasons totally unrelated to climate change," Maibach said. "Now they are increasingly moving away from that position, in large part because of what the elites and media pundits in their party are telling them."
The findings are similar to those of the Pew Research Center. A 2023 survey indicated that Republicans prioritized developing fossil fuels more than they did renewable sources like wind and solar. That's a change from 2020, when a majority of Republicans in a Pew poll said renewable energy should be prioritized over oil, gas, and coal.
There was one caveat: A majority of Republicans ages 18 to 29 in the 2023 survey said the country should focus on renewables. The findings are based on Pew's annual surveys of a nationally representative sample of more than 10,000 US adults.
Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly unlikely to say they would buy an electric vehicle. Pew, in a separate survey from May of more than 8,600 adults, found that 29% said they would consider purchasing an EV — down 9 percentage points over the past year. The share of Americans who said EVs are better for the environment than gas vehicles also dropped by 20 percentage points from 2021, largely due to Republicans.
The majority of Americans support climate action
Maibach said the shift among Republicans shouldn't distract from the fact that the majority of Americans support many of Biden's climate policies. These include implementing tax breaks for people who buy solar panels and energy-efficient vehicles and appliances; providing funding for transitioning the economy away from fossil fuels by 2050; cracking down on methane emissions from the oil-and-gas industry; and paying farmers to adopt practices that store more carbon in the soil.
Trump and GOP leaders, on the other hand, have said they would roll back many of those policies. Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign's national press secretary, argued that America was "caving to the radical demands of environmental extremists at home while begging" its adversaries to produce oil for us abroad, "creating the worst inflation crisis in generations."
While Biden has enacted the most sweeping climate policies in US history, the country has simultaneously become the world's largest exporter of natural gas, and crude-oil production has set records for six years in a row. American oil-and-gas companies also earned record profits in 2022 following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which scrambled global energy markets.
Maibach said it was distressing that conservative leaders and media pundits went negative on renewable energy and EVs, especially because investing in them is key to making America economically competitive with China, which dominates supply chains for green technology like solar panels, batteries, and critical minerals.
But Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew, told Business Insider that in such a polarized political climate, a candidate's stance on any one issue won't be enough to sway voters anyway.
"We saw no change in Biden's ratings on climate before and after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, including among Democrats," Tyson said. "What that suggests is in this polarized environment where many folks have strong feelings about either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, it's very hard to change attitudes based on a single policy or issue."