Senior editor covering cleantech and advanced mobility Nov 4, 2024, Getty Images for HBO Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania professor of earth & environmental science and head of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media, on what’s at stake in the U.S. election How significant is the outcome of the presidential election for the climate? I'll be blunt. This upcoming election is a critical juncture where Americans will choose one of two paths, and the difference between those two paths couldn't be more stark. One of those paths, represented by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, involves basically abandoning the efforts that we've already made here in the United States to tackle 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 that make the measurements fly, take their lives, put their lives at risk of flying into hurricanes to make critical measurements that are fed into our models so we can better predict the intensification and the paths of these dangerous storms. It 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 incentivize a shift away from fossil fuels, it would seek to, for example, deactivate the Inflation Reduction Act, which was landmark legislation passed by the Biden Administration, or signed by Joe Biden passed by Congress, the provisions of which have the potential to lower our carbon emissions here in the United States by 40% by 2030. It's not enough. We need to do even more. We need to build on that, but it puts us on the right path. What are the international implications? You have on the one hand a Republican party and their presidential nominee Donald Trump, who would in essence end any US leadership on climate. And in the absence of US leadership, we are the world's largest legacy carbon polluter. We have to display moral leadership if we can expect the rest of the world to come to the table, other industrializing nations, China, India, etcetera. And what we know is that when we do 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 avert catastrophic warming. We're at 1.2 [degrees] Celsius warming now. At 1.5 Celsius, 3 Fahrenheit, we will start to see far worse consequences than those that we're already seeing, and we're already seeing dangerous climate change. Just in the last month or so with Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, these are storms that were amplified. They were more intense. They produced greater amounts of flooding 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 prevent warming of 1.5 [degrees] Celsius, we're already at 1.2. There isn't a whole lot of wiggle room. What it basically means is we've got to ramp carbon emissions down dramatically over the next decade, and bring them down to zero mid-century. The only hope to do that would be to build on the policies that were put in place by the Biden administration. So that's where we stand. We have a monumental choice before us. It's not getting, in my view, as much coverage as it ought to in the US media because wow, there are so many crises. We face public health crises, international security, crises, wars, et cetera. If we don't act now on the climate crisis, there's no going back. We lock in truly dangerous and deadly consequences for decades to come. And so that's where we are at this very critical juncture. What Else We’re Reading