Climate Crisis Is the Defining Issue of Our Time. Where Was It at the Debate?

On one of the most consequential nights in the 2024 presidential race, the fate of our entire planet received all of 120 seconds.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump were each allotted one minute to discuss their plans for fighting the climate crisis during the September 10 presidential debate. Harris’s response to the question, which arrived in the final moments of the 90-minute event, did not put forward specific policy proposals to build upon the wins of the Inflation Reduction Act, such as laying out plans for how the U.S. would cut carbon emissions to meet Paris climate agreement targets. In fact, Harris several times praised the expansion of oil and gas development under President Joe Biden’s administration and doubled down on her promise not to ban fracking. Trump, on the other hand, gave a characteristically rambling response that neglected to answer the question at all, and, somehow, ended with him spouting a debunked claim about a Russian oligarch paying out Hunter Biden.

The climate crisis has long gotten the short end of the stick at presidential debates, despite posing a century-defining existential threat and galvanizing a worldwide youth movement. Four years ago was the first time that a presidential debate moderator asked a direct question about climate change since 2000. In other years, candidates made passing mention to the issue or, in 2012, failed to discuss it at all.

But 2020 seemed to mark a turning point. “We can get to net zero in terms of energy production by 2035,” Biden pledged during the September 29 debate. He noted that the United States contributes a disproportionate chunk to global greenhouse gas emissions and reiterated his commitment to rejoining the Paris Agreement — which the U.S. did in February 2021.

It is a failure of stunning magnitude that, nearly a quarter of a century after George W. Bush and Al Gore discussed climate change on the presidential debate stage in 2000, we only heard some brief and vague remarks during this year’s event.

“We have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” Harris boasted. “I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” she continued.

That Biden’s landmark climate spending passage included numerous provisions for the oil and gas industry is a massive flaw, not a victory. Biden had promised “no fracking and oil on federal land” during the 2020 presidential debates, but a year into his presidency, approvals for drilling permits on public lands had reached their highest since George W. Bush’s administration, rebounding after a temporary pause. Drilling then received a boost from the Inflation Reduction Act, which promised thousands of new leases for the oil and gas industry and mandated that the government auction at least 60 million federal acres for fossil fuel leases before auctioning the land for wind and solar power. While the move was pitched as essential for bringing down consumer prices at the gas tank, researchers found that fossil fuel companies were neglecting to produce oil or gas on more than half of the public lands already being leased — nearly 14 million acres.

As Kate Aronoff wrote for The New Republic, Harris could have put forward a number of facts about fracking’s failures, rather than wholeheartedly embracing it. Oil and gas companies depend on billions of dollars in annual tax subsidies, for instance, including a massive bailout during the pandemic in 2020. “Fossil fuel companies thought [fracking] was too expensive to be worth doing until the federal government poured billions of dollars’ worth of funding into basic research and tax breaks,” Aronoff wrote. “But leading Democrats, including Harris, seem incapable of talking about the downsides of fossil fuel production.”

And the downsides are many — especially given that prolonging oil and gas development will hinder us from reaching global climate goals. In order to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, staving off the most disastrous impacts of the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says the world needs to slash carbon pollution by nearly half from 2019 to 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. To do this, the IPCC recommends retiring existing coal plants and stopping new fossil fuel development.

This is not a situation in which everyone, including oil and gas companies, can get a slice of the climate solutions pie. Science shows that fossil fuels must be phased out expeditiously for the health of the planet. But the severity of this crisis — and the aggressive action necessary to abate it — is not adequately captured in Harris’s debate response. In fact, her embrace of fracking and her focus on boosting oil and gas development alongside clean energy production is emblematic of one way in which Democrats and past Republicans have historically overlapped on the climate issue.

“On energy, Governor Romney and I, we both agree that we’ve got to boost American energy production, and oil and natural gas production are higher than they’ve been in years,” Barack Obama told moderators during a debate on October 3, 2012. A week later, during another presidential debate, Mitt Romney told the moderator, “Look, I want to make sure we use our oil, our coal, our gas, our nuclear, our renewables. I believe very much in our renewable capabilities; ethanol, wind, solar will be an important part of our energy mix.”

John McCain also propped up both oil and clean energy during a presidential debate on September 26, 2008. “We have to have wind, tide, solar, natural gas, flex fuel cars and all that but we also have to have offshore drilling and we also have to have nuclear power,” he said.

This is not to say that the parties are identical on the climate crisis, nor that such references to boosting renewable energy production would have come to fruition under a Romney or McCain presidency. Of course, the GOP has long been the party of climate denialism. During his presidency, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental protections, withdrew the U.S. from the international Paris climate treaty, and packed the Environmental Protection Agency with officials tied to the fossil fuel industry. As far back as 2000, the year in which climate received about 14 minutes of airtime across the debates — more than double than any other year — Bush cast doubt on the science behind climate change.

“I don’t think we know the solution to global warming yet. And I don’t think we’ve got all the facts before we make decisions,” Bush said on October 11, 2000. “Global warming needs to be taken very seriously, and I take it seriously. But science, there’s a lot — there’s differing opinions.”

At that point, scientists had already reached a consensus that greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities were fueling a warming planet. Now, more than two decades later, carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase and sea levels have risen. Wildfires are starting earlier and hurricanes are getting stronger. We have continued to break global heat records, with 2011 to 2020 the warmest decade on record and 2024 on track to be the hottest year ever.

But for more than 20 years, the networks running the presidential debates — and the candidates on the debate stages — have decided that climate change is simply not critical enough to voters to warrant substantial attention. Never mind that more than a third of voters in the U.S. say that global warming is “very important” to their vote, or that an additional 25 percent say they would prefer a candidate who supports climate action — to pundits, climate change is an ancillary issue. Very soon, however, this will have to change. Polls show that climate change is a top issue for young voters in particular, and that 85 percent of young voters can be moved to vote based on climate issues. Recognizing that they will have to grapple with the consequences of previous generations’ ineffective policies, youth activists are turning out en masse to push for aggressive climate action. As more and more young people reach voting age and apply pressure via youth-led climate movements, politicians will be forced to put forward bold new plans — both on and off the debate stage.