No one would describe Saudi Arabia in the summer as chilly, but pilgrims at this year’s Hajj experienced something unusual even for this largely desert nation. According to the Saudi weather service, temperatures at the Grand Mosque in Mecca reached an astonishing 125 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday; 2,700 people reportedly were overcome by heat exhaustion, and dozens of pilgrims died from the temperatures.
Those deadly temperatures came less than a month after extreme heat killed 77 people in India — including poll workers — during the country’s elections. And this week, a heat dome has descended on much of the United States. Over the next few days, “temperatures could reach as high as 25 degrees above normal in many areas,” NBC News reported. The National Weather Service says 200 cities could see record highs.
The rising temperatures that scientists began warning about decades ago have become reality.
Which makes this the perfect time to consider what American efforts to combat climate change will look like in the four years that follow November’s presidential election. And there may be no policy area with a clearer divide between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
The rising temperatures that scientists began warning about decades ago have become reality. Last July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, dating back to 1880. The month before was the hottest June ever recorded, or at least it will be until this June is over. In fact, every one of the last 12 months was the hottest ever recorded: the hottest May ever, the hottest April ever, the hottest March ever, and so on.
Rising temperatures are becoming inescapable in a way some effects of climate change are not; depending on where you live, you might not be directly affected by more frequent hurricanes or rising sea levels, but you won’t be able to avoid a heat wave. They are three times more common now than in the 1960s, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “and individual heat waves are lasting longer and becoming more intense.” The consequences are fatal: 2,300 people died from extreme heat in the U.S. last year alone.
Yet for many politicians, climate change is perennially pushed down the agenda. In fact, inaction has become the position of many of those who used to be outright climate deniers. The idea that climate change is a “hoax” is seldom spoken out loud anymore, even by the staunchest supporters of the fossil fuel industry. Instead of denying the incontrovertible truth that the planet is warming, they leave that question aside and focus on condemning efforts to address it. Every solution is too difficult, too costly or too inconvenient; instead, we should just keep drilling and pretend the planet isn’t warming.
The result is that the Republican Party is now emphatically anti-anti-climate change (in the same way they’re anti-anti-racism). They don’t necessarily want climate change to worsen; they just oppose every means of confronting it.
Biden has been more aggressive on addressing climate change than any president before him.
At times, that opposition is positively vehement. Trump, the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee, has an intense hatred of electric vehicles. “They want to do this all electric nonsense where the cars don’t go far,” he complained at a recent rally, “they cost too much and they’re all made in China.” And don’t get him started on wind turbines, which he blames for everything from cancer to declining property values to bird and whale massacres.
As always with Trump, his dark impulses become much more dangerous when there are people around him who will put them into action. Should he become president again, the haphazard rollback of environmental progress that characterized his first term will be replaced by focused and furious action. You can see it in Project 2025, the 920-page governing blueprint written by his allies as they prepare an assault on the federal government. The document contains 150 references to climate — sometimes described as “climate extremism” — and proposes eliminating a range programs, offices and agencies devoted to addressing climate change. “The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” it says.
The authoritarian dreamers at Project 2025 are right about one thing: Biden has been more aggressive on addressing climate change than any president before him. The Inflation Reduction Act, which he signed into law in 2022, was the largest climate bill in history. It supports clean energy development, electric car adoption, energy efficiency upgrades, carbon capture, electrical grid improvements, sustainable agriculture and much more. In addition, according to The Washington Post’s tracker of Biden’s environmental policies, his administration has enacted over 100 new environmental policies and overturned an almost equal number of Trump-era policies. In a second term, Biden would build on what he has done so far, with the goal of the country reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
Trump might not reverse all of Biden’s climate policies; for instance, most of the IRA’s clean energy subsidies are going to red states, and Republicans there won’t want them withdrawn. But as Project 2025 shows, he’ll still do extraordinary damage. Meanwhile, even as they benefit from federal largesse, some state-level Republicans are working to prevent even the most modest efforts to deal with rising temperatures. Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill forbidding cities in Florida from requiring employers to give heat breaks to workers laboring outside in the sun; Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a similar law last year. On Tuesday it was 95 in St. Petersburg, Florida, and 106 in Presidio, Texas.
As time goes on, the effects of warming will become more concrete and visible, all year round but especially in the summer. The coming decades will likely see a huge wave of climate migration, as people leave areas where climate change has diminished their opportunities or even made life impossible. Just within the United States we could see millions of climate migrants. And as we know, large-scale migrations frequently produce backlashes.
Even under the most optimistic scenarios, warming is going to get worse before it gets better. The response we used to hear from climate deniers — “It’s summer, it’s hot, what’s the big deal?” — is no longer tenable. Now the voters have to decide whether they want to do anything about it.