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The climate choice of elections

Sakege November 4, 2024

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tthere are many clear options here at stake in tomorrow’s presidential elections. One of the most serious is the climate and comes at a time when the planet is moving towards catastrophic levels of warming.

Vice President Kamala Harris has called climate change an “existential threat.” While he has not detailed a climate plan, he is expected to continue federal support for clean energy and electric vehicles in a continued effort to shift the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels. In 2022, he cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Inflation Reduction Act and pledged to fully implement it.

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump has called climate change “one of the biggest scams of all time” and promised to end federal support for the clean energy transition, while increasing oil and gas extraction, including in the Arctic. He withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement during his first term and, after President Joe Biden quickly rejoined, said he would do so again.

Data released by the United Nations last week showed that Greenhouse gases will reach record levels in 2023. CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere at a faster rate than at any other time in human existence. It is an important reminder, if needed at a time when hurricanes and extreme heat were getting worse, that now is a critical time to establish policies to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. As Peter Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, said, he told the New York Times last week on the choice this election: “The stakes when it comes to climate change literally couldn’t be higher.”

The great read

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Elon Musk’s incessant trolling of Democrats is tarnishing Tesla

Elon Musk took a break from campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to join Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call. News of better-than-expected earnings from the electric car maker sent shares higher, erasing a slide that persisted for much of the year. Answering soft-spoken questions from Tesla fans and analysts, the billionaire CEO appeared noticeably more impassive than in his jerky, jump-filled campaign appearances. Not once during the meandering 72-minute call was Tesla’s volatile leader asked the most obvious question: Should he take strident public stances on political and social issues that are at odds with Tesla’s core buyers who largely agree? identify as democrats?

“Teslas are the best cars, so they still have this advantage. But over time it will be more difficult for Tesla to get new customers because of its policy,” said investor and former Musk fan Ross Gerber, chief executive of Los Angeles-based wealth manager Gerber Kawasaki, which still owns a stake. 52 million dollars in the company. “Most CEOs wisely stay out of politics for good reason. “Elon doesn’t care how his right-wing (ironically anti-environmental) support hurts Tesla.”

Multiple consumer surveys support this. About 46% of people shopping for an electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle identify as Democrats, while only 21% and 25% of buyers of those vehicles say they are Republicans, according to data from Strategic Vision, a San Francisco organization. Diego-based research firm that surveys tens of thousands of consumers weekly. Auto researcher Edmunds found in its most recent survey data that 31% of car buyers say they are now less likely to consider purchasing a Tesla as their next vehicle, specifically because of Musk.

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Michael Mann, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and Media, on what’s at stake in the US election

How important is the result of the presidential election for the climate?

I’ll be frank. The upcoming election is a critical moment in which Americans will choose one of two paths, and the difference between those two paths could not be starker. One of those paths, represented by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, basically involves abandoning the efforts we have already made here in the United States to address the climate crisis. That includes dismantling the EPA, getting rid of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which of course runs the National Hurricane Center, and the hurricane hunters who blow up measurements, take their own lives, put their lives at risk by flying into the hurricanes to take critical measures. measurements that feed into our models so we can better predict the intensification and tracks of these dangerous storms. I would abandon all that.

But fundamentally, it would abandon our commitment to the rest of the world to lead on this issue, to reduce our carbon emissions, to encourage a shift away from fossil fuels; would seek, for example, to disable the Inflation Reduction Act, which was landmark legislation passed by the Biden Administration, or signed by Joe Biden and approved by Congress, whose provisions have the potential to reduce our carbon emissions here in the States United by 40% by 2030. It is not enough. We need to do even more. We need to take advantage of that, but that puts us on the right path.

What are the international implications?

On the one hand, we have a Republican party and its presidential candidate Donald Trump, who would essentially end any American leadership on climate. And in the absence of American leadership, we are the world’s largest legacy carbon polluter. We have to show moral leadership if we can expect the rest of the world to come to the table, other industrialized nations, China, India, etc. And what we know is that when we take leadership, as we did during the Obama administration and again during the Biden administration, then those other countries come to the table and we begin to forge a path forward to truly take the actions necessary to prevent catastrophic warming.

We are at 1.2 (degrees) Celsius warming now. At 1.5 degrees Celsius, 3 Fahrenheit, we will start to see much worse consequences than we are already seeing, and we are already seeing dangerous climate change. Just in the last month, with Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, these storms have been amplified. They were more intense. They produced greater amounts of torrential rains that in one case killed hundreds of people. We are witnessing the devastating consequences of human-caused climate change. And if we don’t take action now and avoid a warming of 1.5 (degrees) Celsius, we will already be at 1.2. There is not much room for maneuver. What it basically means is that we have to dramatically reduce carbon emissions over the next decade and reduce them to zero by mid-century. The only hope of achieving this would be to take advantage of the policies implemented by the Biden administration.

So that’s where we find ourselves. We have before us a monumental decision. In my opinion, it’s not getting as much coverage as it should in the American media because, wow, there are so many crises. We are facing public health crises, international security crises, wars, etc. If we do not act now on the climate crisis, there is no turning back. We are in for truly dangerous and deadly consequences for decades to come. And that is where we find ourselves at this very critical juncture.