After a summer that was the hottest on record drifted into an autumn of destructive hurricanes that struck the U.S. mainland twice, it seemed probable that human-driven climate change would be an important issue to voters in the upcoming election. Yet according to most polls, it is not a top concern, which helps explain why the two major party campaigns have had little to say about the issue — particularly former president and GOP nominee Donald Trump. While Trump has, in the past, occasionally acknowledged that climate change is a problem, he has generally aligned himself with the Republican perspective on the issue, which is that climate change either doesn’t exist, isn’t caused by humans or is too expensive to combat using clean energy policies.
Downplaying climate change
During his 2024 campaign, Trump has stopped referring to climate change as a “hoax” and instead attacked various existing and proposed Democratic policies as wasteful, counterproductive or economically destructive. At his rallies, he frequently criticizes renewable energy technologies like wind and solar power, calling them inadequate or unreliable. He has also consistently expressed concern about the number of birds that he believes are being killed by windmills. “The wind, the wind it sounds so wonderful,” he said at an October rally in Pennsylvania. “It’s just too expensive; it doesn’t work.” Trump has in the past suggested that windmills cause cancer, and that they are harmful to various forms of wildlife on land and in the ocean. He has also speculated about how boats powered by electricity might sink because their motors are too heavy.
As president, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords, which he has promised to do again if he is re-elected in 2024. “President Trump will once again exit the horrendously unfair Paris Climate Accords,” said his campaign in a page titled “America Must Have the #1 Lowest Cost Energy and Electricity on Earth.” Trump also weakened fuel efficiency standards and rolled back some Obama-era regulations during his first term.
The campaign’s Agenda 47 policy agenda does not include any specific policies regarding climate change. Instead, the Trump campaign has positioned itself as a counterweight to Democratic overreach on the issue and has sought to link green energy policies to inflation. “Wherever electricity prices are high, American manufacturing recedes, high-tech innovation moves elsewhere, jobs are lost, and consumers suffer from higher inflation,” said his campaign.
Targeting Biden-era regulations and incentives
As a candidate in 2024, Trump has also focused his criticism on the Biden administration’s clean vehicle tax credit and other subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. If elected, Trump has pledged to “end Biden’s assault on the internal combustion engine and cancel his harmful April 2023 emission regulations for light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles,” said his campaign. He has pledged to repeal Biden administration regulations seeking to dramatically increase the percentage of new electric vehicles sold in the United States by 2032. “Kamala Harris wants to end all gas-powered cars,” said a recent ad running in the battleground state of Michigan. It argued that the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to boost production and adoption of electric vehicles has raised car prices and threatened the jobs of auto industry workers.
Trump has not kept secret his plans to roll back other Biden-era fossil fuel regulations as well. At a dinner with a number of oil executives in Mar-a-Lago this past May, Trump vowed to abolish environmental regulations and said that his guests should give him a billion dollars to win the election. His campaign promises a renewed push for domestic oil and natural gas production as a way to lower energy costs for consumers and to create jobs. That promise includes a plan to open up federal lands for leasing to oil and gas companies for exploration and extraction; oil and energy executives have reportedly already prepared a series of executive orders for Trump to sign if he is elected. “We’re going to have to write exactly what we want, actually spoon feeding the administration,” said one energy company lawyer, who is working on executive order language on gas exports ahead of a second Trump administration, to Politico.