One hour and 20 minutes into Thursday night’s high-stakes presidential debate, the moderator, NBC’s Kristen Welker, asked President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden an unprecedented question.
How, she asked, would the candidates remedy the oil and gas industry’s disproportionately harmful impacts on communities of color?
Trump’s response: “They’re employed heavily and they’re making more money than they’ve ever made.”
Biden’s response: “It doesn’t matter how much you’re paying them. It’s how you keep them safe.”
In 2012, climate change didn’t surface at all in the presidential debates. In 2016, it did, but barely. That the candidates faced substantial questions over the issue in this election cycle was remarkable and, many in the climate change community would say, long overdue. That Trump and Biden faced a question on a debate stage concerning the more nuanced, complex issues of climate change and race suggests how far the conversation has evolved in eight years.
The candidates’ discussion on climate change Thursday revealed, again, the significant gulf between a president who has spent the last four years rolling back climate regulations, placating the fossil fuel industry and mocking the climate threat, and a candidate who has called climate change “an existential crisis” and developed a plan to tackle the problem — though one that climate progressives say still falls short.
“This debate was historic: the first-ever general election Presidential debate with climate change as a pre-defined topic and the first debate where climate change was framed out of the gate by the moderator in terms of jobs, the economy, and what the candidates’ plans were — not if the existential crisis even exists,” said Evan Weber, political director of the Sunrise Movement, in a statement.
In the debate, the last before Election Day, Trump and Biden fielded questions about a range of topics, most prominently the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, though the biggest question lingering in viewers’ minds may have been whether Trump would adhere to the debate rules and focus on issues and policy.
Late into the hour-and-a-half debate, Welker asked the candidates how they would tackle climate change, while also supporting job growth.
Trump began by reprising what has been his stock response to questions about climate change, citing the “Trillion Trees Program” — in the previous debate he erroneously referred to the program as a plan to plant a “billion” trees — and adding, “I do love the environment.”
Striving to appear conversant with the topic, Trump said, “We have the lowest number in carbon emissions,” an apparent reference to emissions falling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump seemed pleased with his mastery of the term and taunted Biden about whether he was familiar with the concept.
“I’m not sure he knows what it means,” Trump said.
The Trillion Trees Program has been broadly embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, but scientists have said the plan is inadequate for addressing climate change, that it will only put a tiny dent in emissions and is a distraction from a necessary shift away from fossil fuels.
Emissions dropped during the pandemic, but are now on the rise again, continuing an upward trend that has continued since the beginning of the Trump presidency. The most recent full-year figures from the Environmental Protection Agency, for 2018, show that fossil fuel emissions drove a 3% rise in overall greenhouse gas emissions in that time period.