Climate scientist Michael E. Mann warned it would essentially be “game over” for the fight against global warming should Donald Trump win back the White House in the 2024 election.
Mann, a presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said Trump would seek to finish the climate policy-gutting job he began during his first administration. The academic drew a sharp distinction between President Joe Biden’s record on tackling the climate crisis and that of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, who has repeatedly called climate change “bullshit” and dismissed it as a Chinese hoax.
“It’s night and day,” Mann told MSNBC’ Ali Velshi of the climate records of Trump and his successor.
Biden has “helped shepherd the most aggressive climate legislation in U.S. history” with the U.S. Inflation Act with its mission to lower carbon emissions by 40%, he said, noting significant GOP pushback to green initiatives.
Trump, however, is “a president who will basically be a rubber stamp for polluters and right-wing interests who are trying to dismantle not just U.S. climate policy but global climate policy so it really is about the future of the planet,” Mann warned.
“A second Trump presidency would be more or less game over for climate action,” he added. “It would be game over for domestic climate policy and as goes the U.S., goes the rest of the world when it comes to action on climate.
Watch the full interview here:
Mann issued a similar warning in a November essay for The Hill in which he cautioned of living in a “fragile moment” where “global climate action lies on a knife edge, hinging upon American leadership that is threatened by a prospective Trump second term and a radicalized GOP intent on undermining climate progress both here and abroad.”
The 2024 election is “unlike any other,” he said in the opinion piece. It will “determine not only the course of the American experiment but the path that civilization collectively follows. On the left is democracy and environmental stewardship. On the right is fascism and planetary devastation. Choose wisely.”
In 2017, one of Trump’s first acts as president was to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on fighting global warming.
His administration pursued an anti-environment agenda and he deleted climate change as a threat to national security.
In April, Trump reportedly asked oil and gas executives to donate $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for beneficial policies if he returns to office.
Biden’s campaign has repeatedly seized on Trump’s climate-denying rhetoric, releasing on this year’s Earth Day a video in which he calls it “one of the greatest con jobs ever” that will eventually reverse itself.