10 Tough Climate Questions for the Presidential Debate

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are set to debate on Tuesday night. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images and Melina Mara/The Washington Post

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump prepare for their debate on Tuesday night, those who care about U.S. action on climate change are bracing themselves for disappointment.

They know that at candidate forums and interviews—for presidential and down-ballot candidates alike—climate often doesn’t come up at all. Even worse, the few questions that do get asked are stuck on a controversy that science resolved long ago—is climate change real? As a result, debates provide little enlightenment on the difficult choices political leaders face as the costs of severe weather, heat and wildfire mount, and the clean energy future develops in a U.S. economy caught up in a fossil fuel surge. 

Since his first run for president in 2016, Trump has easily deflected the soft climate questions tossed his way. He declares himself an avid environmentalist—”I believe very strongly in very, very crystal clear clean water and clean air,” he once said—while minimizing the severity of climate change. Virtually all scrutiny of Harris’ climate policy has focused on her once-stated support for a fracking ban, even though there is no legal authority for a U.S. president to enact such a prohibition, and Harris abandoned the stand when she became President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.

Ahead of the debate, the Inside Climate News staff came up with questions that challenge the candidates’ past statements on energy policy and more accurately reflect the hard decisions the next president will face as the world’s leading oil and gas producer confronts its role in both aiding and addressing a planetary crisis.

Questions for Trump

1. Private companies have announced more than 300 major new clean energy projects and electric vehicle plants across the country based on the support they’re getting under the Inflation Reduction Act. This private investment is expected to create more than 100,000 jobs; Michigan, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina and North Carolina each have 20 projects or more underway. You’ve said you would end the IRA subsidies. What would you do about the projects in these states that would be put at risk?

The nonprofit group Environmental Entrepreneurs has tracked 334 new clean energy and vehicles project announcements in 40 states since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, totaling $125 billion in investment, expected to create 109,000 jobs. 

2. You take credit for making the United States energy independent during your presidency. But under the Biden/Harris administration, we are even more energy independent by any measure—our energy imports are lower now and our exports are higher; our energy consumption is lower now and production is higher. Aren’t you just promising more of the same? Would you lift the ban on oil imports from Russia, which rose dramatically during your presidency?

3. You have often said that wind energy is damaging to land, wildlife and even human health, while making energy more expensive. But wind electricity now provides 10 percent of U.S. electric power, with Texas far and away the leading state for wind farms. What is your plan for wind power as president and would you act to shut down the wind farms now operating?

Wind energy can have impacts on wildlife and the environment, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, and federal authorities require developers of projects on federal land and water to analyze potential impacts and minimize them. Oil, gas and coal development also have wildlife and environmental impacts, with one 2012 study showing that fossil fuel-generated electricity kills nearly 20 times more birds per gigawatt-hour than electricity generated by wind.

4. You have said rising sea levels would create more oceanfront property. But the changes already underway have meant flooding, erosion and damage to homes and businesses both on the coast and inland. With losses mounting and the federal flood insurance program more than $20 billion in debt to taxpayers, should the U.S. government continue to insure the properties most at risk? And if not, what do you think the federal government should do about homes and businesses that can’t get private flood insurance, especially in your home state of Florida?

In his Aug. 12 interview with Elon Musk, Trump asserted that sea level is expected to rise one inch every 400 years, but a comprehensive 2022 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that sea levels on the U.S. coast are on track to rise 10 inches in the next 30 years. NOAA projects the incidence of flooding in the U.S. will increase tenfold as a result.

5. When you first ran for president, you promised to bring back coal jobs. But eight coal companies went bankrupt during your presidency and the United States lost 12,700 coal jobs—a decline of 25 percent. What is your plan to help coal workers? 

The coal industry has been weakening steadily over more than a decade due to what most economists see as a sectoral decline in the industry due to competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. Eight U.S. coal companies went bankrupt between October 2018 and October 2019. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—the main vehicle for President Joe Biden’s climate policy—coal states like Wyoming and West Virginia have been given a competitive advantage in attracting clean energy development projects and associated federal funding in order to address displaced workers.

Questions for Harris

1. As California attorney general, you took legal action against oil companies over oil spills and other pollution, and as a presidential candidate in 2019, you talked about the federal and state litigation against tobacco companies as a model of how to address fossil fuel companies’ role in the climate crisis. Do you believe the Justice Department should join with states taking action against oil companies over climate damages?

In 1998, 52 state and territorial attorneys general signed a massive $200 billion agreement with the nation’s four largest tobacco companies to settle dozens of lawsuits they brought to recover their smoking-related health care costs. The next year, the Justice Department also filed suit against Big Tobacco and after years of legal wrangling and a nine-month trial, a federal judge in 2006 ruled that the manufacturers had violated the federal organized crime law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That litigation is ongoing 25 years later, as the industry continues to challenge remedies imposed by the court, which are designed to prohibit it from making false or deceptive claims about tobacco products. 

2. Despite the progress made on clean energy during the Biden administration, the U.S. isn’t on track to hit the Paris climate agreement targets for greenhouse gas reductions. This not only endangers lives and property, it undermines U.S. credibility in persuading other nations, especially China, to reduce their climate pollution. What would you do to change that? 

The Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit international research organization, projects that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are on track to be about one-third below 2005 levels by 2030, falling short of the Biden administration’s pledge to cut them in half. Another research organization, the Rhodium Group, reached a similar conclusion, calculating that to meet its Paris target, the United States would have to achieve a 6.9 percent emissions reduction every year from 2024 through 2030, more than triple the 1.9 percent drop seen in 2023. 

3. In 2019, you said that we “have to acknowledge the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.” As president, what would you do to protect the health and safety of communities who are exposed to air pollution and water contamination caused by the fracking process?

Almost 2,500 scientific papers have documented negative health impacts from fracking, according to the Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York. They include a 2022 Yale study showing Pennsylvania children who grew up within a mile of a natural gas well were twice as likely as other children to develop the most common form of juvenile leukemia, and a 2023 University of Pittsburgh study showing they were seven times as likely to suffer from lymphoma. The oil and gas industry has maintained high-pressure water fracturing for oil and gas production from underground shale formations is safe, but the industry has had to pay to provide new water supply for residents with contaminated wells. The issue is especially divisive in Pennsylvania, which became the nation’s second-largest natural gas producing state (after Texas) due to fracking, and is a key state in the presidential race.

4. Did you support President Biden’s move to pause further permitting of liquefied natural gas export facilities while the government assesses the potential climate impact? Now that a federal judge has ordered the administration to resume permitting, would you go forward with new LNG projects or seek to overturn the judge’s order?

Biden’s LNG permitting pause in January put into question the future of at least 17 terminals currently being considered along U.S. coastlines to export natural gas overseas. The move was challenged by a coalition of Republican-led states and in July, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the administration to resume permitting LNG terminals. Although the Biden administration is appealing that order, on Sept. 3, it approved a short-term expansion of one existing terminal’s permit to export from the Gulf of Mexico. 

5. Farmwork is among the nation’s most dangerous occupations and has become even deadlier due to more intense and frequent heat waves driven by climate change. Nearly half of farmworkers nationwide are undocumented and face even greater risks because they’re afraid to complain about unsafe working conditions. Will you give these workers some form of legal status and implement a federal heat standard that ensures the health and safety of those exposed to dangerous heat conditions at work?

Rising temperatures have prompted questions about whether employers should be required to provide shade, rest periods and cool water to workers who face health risks because of extreme heat, particularly those who must work outdoors, like farmworkers and construction workers. After the heat-related death of a 38-year-old farmworker in Oregon during the historic 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, that state put new heat-protection rules in place. But Florida’s legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis approved legislation early this year banning localities from establishing such rules. The Biden administration proposed the first federal worker heat protection standards in July, three years after the president first promised them. It will be up to the next president to decide whether to finalize that plan or abandon it in the face of certain legal challenges from business groups and their political allies.