How will the candidates deal with climate change?

The Economist

How will the candidates deal with climate change?

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This week The Economist explains blog looks at the American presidential candidates' positions on major policy issues. For four days until Thursday this blog will publish a short explainer about one specific area A COMPARISON of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on environmental policy is not really possible. She has pragmatic suggestions; his are non-existent. Although fires, droughts and floods swept America in the past year, Mr Trump has called global warming a Chinese hoax to thwart business. Mrs Clinton acknowledges instead that climate change is real. But the issue has appeared little on the campaign trail. How do the candidates approach environmental policy? Attitudes to the environment split along party lines in America, but not as starkly as between the two presidential candidates. The majority of voters accept that climate change is happening. But Republicans and Democrats disagree about the causes, according to the Yale Programme on Climate Change Communication, a research group. Half of Mr Trumps supporters reckon natural causes explain it, whereas three in four of Mrs Clintons backers sayas do most climate scientiststhat man-made emissions are to blame. Mr Trump has promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the most robust deal yet on curbing global carbon emissions, which was adopted in 2015. The agreement aims to limit global warming to well below 2oC above pre-industrial temperatures. It will almost certainly take Mr Trump more than a single term to wrangle his way out of its many provisions. Moreover America is already more than halfway to meeting a target of lowering carbon-dioxide emissions by 26-28% by 2025 (measured against 2005 levels), which it promised in Paris. To manage this, the Obama administration unveiled the final version of the Clean Power Plan last year, which proposes the countrys first national standards to limit carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. Mr Trump opposes the Clean Power Plan, instead arguing for a top-down review of all anti-coal regulations. Mrs Clinton supports both the plan and more greenery in America. She wants to make the country a clean-energy superpower by installing half a billion solar panels in her first term. By 2027 she plans for a third of electricity to come from renewables. Mrs Clinton may struggle to get these and other bold measures past Congress. She would probably have to use her executive authority to enact policies, just as Barack Obama did to ratify the Paris deal. But what one president enacts, the next can tear up. Mr Obamas reliance on executive action leaves the door open for Mr Trump to stall and perhaps reverse environmental policies if he becomes president. Yet whoever wins will be at the mercy of the markets: a glut of fossil fuels means that coal production has declined by almost a quarter since the highs of 2008. And the cost of solar and wind power, and of the storage needed to smooth out their variations, will keep dropping. This could thwart Mr Trumps smoky plans, or give Mrs Clintons green ones a needed boost. Also in this series Fiscal policy The Supreme Court Foreign policy Over the past several weeks The Economist has run two-page briefs on major areas of American policy. Read the full brief on climate change here. A free pdf containing all seven briefs is available here