What’s at stake on Tuesday? Planet.

CNN
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“Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it,” Mark Twain joked back when people first started extracting fossil fuels from the earth and burning them for energy.

It was a borrowed joke, which is good for Twain because it hasn’t aged well. Nearly a century and a half after the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, humanity’s fossil fuel pollution is changing almost everything about our weather, and American voters are making stark choices about what to do about it during early voting.

Thousand-year floods destroy communities with staggering regularity; hurricanes become stronger and hit coastlines with fiercer winds and waves; The heat is so intense that rescue workers are filling body bags with ice as a last-ditch effort to save people from heatstroke.

Scientists predict that at the current rate of ecosystem destruction 1.2 billion people will become climate refugees by 2050, while more than a million species of plants and animals are on the verge of extinction.

Even for constituents not affected by a flood, fire or drought, the crisis is making food, insurance and supply chains more expensive for everyone. Their tax dollars are now pouring into billions of dollars aimed at keeping the Earth we know from overheating, while other businesses strive to adapt our built environment to harsher physics. Property values, insurance rates and building codes are changing, and experts warn that natural disasters like Hurricane Helen are just the first signs of an existential threat.

In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine a more significant or significant gap between the candidates on any one issue. If Lincoln had lost in 1860 or Reagan had rejected the Soviet threat, the American experiment might have ended without much of life on Earth noticing.

Now scientists are warning that humanity has little time left to cope with an existential global threat. One candidate wants to do something about it. Another said the man-made climate crisis is a “hoax.”

“The science is clear,” Vice President Kamala Harris said. at the event in 2022. “Extreme weather conditions will only get worse and the climate crisis will only get worse.”

She voted in the Senate for the most ambitious climate legislation in the nation’s history, designed to accelerate the transition to clean energy and save Americans money on energy bills, new appliances and gas pumps. It included loans for appliances that lower energy costs and a large loan for solar panels so homeowners could start generating their own energy rather than paying rising prices to power companies.

In the three years since the Inflation Relief Act was passed, U.S. clean technology companies have attracted hundreds of billions in additional private investment, dozens of clean energy projects have been implemented, and number of Americans the use of federal incentives to purchase more efficient cars and appliances has exceeded expectations.

Harris plans to “work to lower household energy costs and create millions of new jobs while combating the climate crisis, protecting public lands and public health, and holding polluters accountable for providing clean air and clean water for all.” her campaign website says. She also intends to “protect America’s energy security.”

If elected to a second term, former President Donald Trump promises to reverse all of this on day one by methodically rolling back pollution limits. exhaust pipes, power plants And methane after the US pulled out of the Paris climate agreement for the second time. He could also go a step further – as some of his former aides have suggested he do – and withdraw the US from the entire global negotiating structure, ending formal US climate diplomacy.

Former Trump administration officials have outlined the speed at which they intend to undo the Biden administration’s progress on climate change.

“We wasted a lot of time early in the Trump administration because we weren’t as prepared as we could have been for the second round,” Mandy Gunasekara, former EPA chief of staff under Trump. told CNN’s Ella Nielsen this summer. His former Interior Secretary, David Bernhardt, told Nielsen that a climate rollback could happen “very quickly” and “in many cases within months.”

Gunasekara and Bernhardt are among the authors of Project 2025, a conservative playbook for a second Trump administration. Trump has publicly distanced himself from the ideological concept, but CNN found at least 140 the authors worked in the Trump administration.

But given the momentum of the clean energy train, some experts and analysts doubt Trump can completely derail it.

“I wish what would happen (in this election) wasn’t so unbearably uncertain,” former Vice President Al Gore said in May. “But if (Trump) had won, I think he would have a hard time repealing the Inflation Reduction Act.”

As the first person to run for president on a climate platform and win the popular vote, Gore believes one of the Biden administration’s best decisions was to spend over 75% of IRA money is in Republican counties.

Bill Gates is also confident in the direction of America’s action on climate change, but is concerned about the pace and message a second Trump presidency would send to the rest of the world.

“To stop and walk away when it comes to 20- or 30-year investments in factories just scares the entire industry away from a country that is inconsistent,” Gates told CNN. After founding Breakthrough Energy Ventures nearly a decade ago, the man who created Microsoft is now investing in hundreds of companies pursuing big climate solutions, some of which benefit from tax breaks built into Biden’s climate law.

While the green economy is now leading Republican states like Texas to lead the nation in clean energy installations, Germany, Japan and China are the first to do so. “So we hope that a lot of these federal incentives will continue,” Gates said, “and that these new industries will not be born in some other country.”

A Harris victory next week won’t freeze Greenland or ease hurricanes, but it will continue Democrats’ climate momentum at a time when scientists say the Earth’s most critical moment yet. Trump’s plan is to undo this progress, throw away billions of dollars in clean energy investments and instead give other countries economic opportunity.

Voters will determine the path America takes.

“Voting is (like) a gun,” Mark Twain also wrote. “You may rarely or never draw it, but when your life is in danger, you will see that it is a valuable thing.”