With climate change fueling more extreme weather events around the world – from record-breaking wildfires to powerful hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and droughts – United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has issued a dire warning.
“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he told reporters on June 5th. “We need a freeway exit ramp into climate hell, and the truth is we have control of the steering wheel.”
However, in the United States, where Guterres made his comments, the climate crisis has largely been sidelined in the run-up to this year’s presidential elections.
Environmental advocates have warned, however, that the November confrontation between Democratic President Joe Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump will not only affect climate policy in the US, but across the world.
“The U.S. plays an outsized role in both international politics and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ariel Moger, director of government and political affairs at Friends of the Earth Action, a U.S.-based climate justice group.
“In many ways, I think the fate of our planet is in the hands of American voters,” she told Al Jazeera, “which may seem a little hyperbolic, but I think that’s the moment we live in.”
Voter priorities
The USA is the world second largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China, and produced an average of 12.9 million barrels of crude oil per day last year – breaking a previous global record from 2019.
But climate change has not been a major focus of the presidential election campaign so far, taking a backseat to economic issues, immigration and foreign policy.
Moger explained that these concerns may seem more concrete compared to an issue as large and pervasive as the climate crisis.
“Climate change is often seen as an overwhelming existential threat in a world where people are just trying to get through the day,” she said.
“A lot of issues like the economy, access to abortion — these are things that people deal with more regularly, or the threat seems more real to them.”
Still, recent surveys show that the majority of Americans want their political leaders to deal with the climate crisis and that many prefer candidates who adopt policies to that end.
A report released last week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication found that 62 percent of registered voters support candidates who pledge to take climate action.
“That’s overwhelmingly true among Democrats, but it’s also true among independents and even half of liberal-moderate Republicans, which represents about a third of the Republican Party,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the program at Yale University, to Al Jazeera.
About four in 10 voters also said a presidential candidate’s stance on global warming would be “very important” when deciding who to vote for in November, the report says (PDF) found.
Still, several surveys show that climate change is not at the top of most Americans’ priorities: it lags far behind the economy, inflation and other issues that voters consider more pressing.
A Gallup poll conducted in May, for example, found that just 2% of Americans said climate change was the most important problem facing the country, behind economic issues (36%), weak government and leadership (21%), and immigration (17%). .
Climate change “is on the list, but it’s not considered the most important issue,” explained Ashley Dancer, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) who has studied how opinions about climate change affected the 2020 elections.
“It’s replaced by things like the economy, health care, education and crime — those kitchen table issues.”
Effect on close racing
As the U.S. enters the summer season on Thursday, wildfires continue to ravage states like California and New Mexico, and a heat dome has descended over much of the country.
With extreme weather events expected to continue through the summer, Moger said he expects climate change to take up more space in election-related discussions.
“We’ve seen this as more people suffer from record heat, drought, wildfires [and] hurricanes, the harder it will be for candidates to ignore the reality of the crisis before us,” she said.
And in a close election – as the November contest is expected to be – climate change could also be a deciding factor, Dancer told Al Jazeera.
“We know that now the majority of voters – which is about two-thirds – are concerned about climate change and want something to be done about it, and that this is increasing over time. These voters strongly prefer Democrats, and this preference is also increasing over time,” she said.
This is because, in the US two-party system, Democrats are seen as more willing to recognize the dangers of climate change and address the problem, compared to their Republican counterparts.
Environmental advocates also note that the differences between Biden and Trump’s climate policies are stark.
While in office, Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, the international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. He also sought to open vast swathes of U.S. territory to oil and gas exploration.
Furthermore, he has regularly questioned whether climate change is real and has minimized its effects. And in a recent meeting with top US oil executives, Trump promised to roll back some of Biden’s environmental rules if he is re-elected, The Washington Post reported.
For his part, Biden has not gone as far as environmentalists would like in phasing out fossil fuels and was recently criticized for approving a controversial oil drilling project in Alaska last year.
Still, it has regularly warned about the threat posed by climate change and called for global cooperation.
He rejoined the Paris climate agreement in one of his first acts as president and enacted ambitious climate policies domestically, notably through the Inflation Reduction Act, which established emission reduction targets and allocated funds for the transition to clean energy.
In a study Released in January, Dancer and his colleagues found that the advantage climate change gave Democrats “was likely large enough in 2020 to change the outcome” of the presidential race. Biden defeated Trump in 2020 after winning by small margins in key swing states.
Had climate change not been such a major concern, the study predicted that Republicans could have enjoyed a 3 percent swing in the global popular vote — “a shift [that] would probably have been fundamental” in the results.
“In a close election, opinion on climate change matters,” Dancer said. “He played a role in the 2020 election, so he probably will in this [in November]. Whether or not the scales tip will be determined by how close the election ends up being.”
Political communication
According to Leiserowitz of Yale University, it is also up to politicians to effectively communicate their climate policies if they want to connect with potential voters.
As it stands, few Americans — including those who care about the issue and make up the base of the Democratic Party — know much about the Biden administration’s positions, he explained.
Nearly four in 10 registered voters said they had heard “absolutely nothing” about the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, according to last week’s report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
“This is an indication that, at least so far, [Democrats] they failed to adequately communicate their success to the American people,” Leiserowitz said.
“If you don’t communicate this, the vast majority of people will never hear about it and will never be able to connect the dots. It is simply not true that politics will sell itself and that we will then reap the political rewards.”
Moger also noted that while climate action “is extremely popular” and key constituencies – including young people and progressives – care deeply about the issue, voter turnout will be key.
“Biden still has time to…take some significant steps in terms of climate action,” Moger said. She called the Democratic president “far from perfect” but warned that another Trump term would spell climate disaster.
“We know that under a Trump presidency we would see more policies that would take us in the wrong direction and ultimately lead to an uninhabitable planet,” Moger told Al Jazeera.
“If [the US is] If we don’t lead by example, the entire world will suffer, not just in terms of policy, but in terms of the amount of emissions we continue to pollute.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
