Voters Under 30 Say They Are Taking This Very Seriously
Harvard’s Youth Poll shows that voters between 19 and 29 prefer Kamala over Señor T, 64-32%— a massive 31-pont lead for Kamala. Democrats are also more enthusiastic about voting than Republicans with only 14% of Republicans having a favorable impression of Project 2025. Even among young male voters Kamala leads Trump (53-36%). And of all the issues important to young voters, Kamala’s lead over Trump when it comes to Climate Change is the biggest (32%)— even more than on abortion (31%), education (28%), healthcare (26%), gun violence (25%) and protecting democracy (23%). How much will this Climate disparity turn out the youth vote for her?
Reporting from the Wall Street Journal yesterday on the new Lancet survey leads me to believe the answer is “a lot.” Claire Brown wrote that “More than four in five young Americans are worried about the impact of climate change on people and the planet… Most respondents do not believe governments are doing enough to reduce emissions… As this group of 16- to 25-year-olds enters the workforce, there’s some indication those feelings will affect big life decisions such as where to live, whether to have kids and what to do for work: 64% of respondents said they ‘strongly agree,’ ‘agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’ that climate change will impact their plans for the future.”
And the distress goes right across the political spectrum. Those worried about the impact of Climate Change:
Democrats- 96%
Independents- 86%
Republicans- 74%
The Lancet respondents say it’s an issue that’ll drive their vote next month. 72.8% indicated they would vote for political candidates who support aggressive climate policy.
I’m so old that I remember when Trump invited a gaggle of oil executives and lobbyists to Mar-a-Lago and offered to sell them the ability to decide on oil policy for a billion dollar bribe (which is illegal).
They have their plan ready to go if Trump manages to worm his way back into the White House. Evan Halper and Josh Dawsey reported that “An influential oil and gas industry group whose members were aggressively pursued for campaign cash by Donald Trump has drafted detailed plans for dismantling landmark Biden administration climate rules after the presidential election, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Post. The plans were drawn up by the American Exploration and Production Council, or AXPC, a group of 30 mostly independent oil and gas producers, including several major oil companies. They reveal a comprehensive industry effort to reverse climate initiatives advanced during nearly four years of Democratic leadership. At the same time, the documents contain confidential data showing that industry’s voluntary initiatives to cut emissions have fallen short… Taken together, the group’s goals amount to a monumental rollback of some of the most aggressive federal tools to cut emissions.”
At a donor roundtable in Houston in the summer, according to a person who was in attendance, oil executives told Trump that he needed to push for the IEA to replace its leader with one who would be less focused on climate change and more supportive of fossil fuel development.
AXPC says its road map is still in development and will be given to the next president.
Trump “promised to grant their wishes,” said David Doniger, senior adviser to the NRDC Action Fund, the political arm of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the large environmental advocacy group. “And this is their wish list,” he said of the AXPC policy road map, which he reviewed at the request of The Post.
…The Trump campaign responded to a request for comment with a statement accusing Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, of being “controlled by environmental extremists.” The statement did not address the AXPC agenda.
…Outlined in the documents is more than a half-million dollars in political spending by AXPC to support Republicans in the U.S. Senate races in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which could help push the chamber to GOP control. A small share of AXPC’s political spending goes to Democrats, mostly House members in oil- and gas-producing swing districts.
Under the AXPC plan, executive orders central to the Biden administration’s climate effort would be revoked or rewritten. One, titled “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” is an expansive initiative that reoriented the entire federal government toward confronting climate change, including making the nation’s power grid carbon emissions-free by 2035, eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels, and limiting drilling on federal land.
Another of President Joe Biden’s executive order targeted by AXPC calls on companies to disclose climate-related financial risks. It could require oil and gas companies to be more transparent about their role in driving warming. AXPC is also fighting a Securities and Exchange Commission rule to force such disclosure.
Under the group’s plans, Biden climate measures would be replaced by new executive orders that promote fossil fuel production and lift a federal pause on the construction of massive infrastructure to export liquefied natural gas. Federal rules that require climate considerations to be taken into account for major infrastructure projects would be rewritten. That includes eliminating the Public Lands Rule, which reshuffled priorities involving federal land away from drilling and toward landscape and habitat protection.
“They want to take climate out of the policy process entirely,” said Paasha Mahdavi, director of the Energy Governance and Political Economy Lab at University of California at Santa Barbara, who also reviewed the plans at the request of The Post. “They want government to stop regulating climate issues and stop thinking about climate risks.”
Mahdavi said AXPC’s road map directly contradicts the climate pledges some of its biggest members are making publicly.
“They talk a lot about climate ambitions while doing something different inside their companies,” he said. “If you are aligned with the Paris agreement, you cannot be part of a trade association trying to roll back these emissions regulations. Those two things are inconsistent.”
The United States was a key architect of the 2016 Paris agreement. Trump withdrew U.S. support for it while in office, but the United States recommitted to it after Biden was elected. Most of the major oil and gas companies publicly welcomed the United States rejoining the global agreement.
ExxonMobil said at the time that “the long-term nature of the climate change challenge requires that we all work together, and we look forward to working with the new Administration to put the U.S. on a path of achieving the goals of Paris.”
ConocoPhillips says on its website that it accepts the scientific findings underpinning the Paris agreement, which it calls “a welcomed global policy response” to climate change. A Hess climate disclosure starts with the company’s support of the Paris agreement’s goals.
Independent monitoring groups say the companies are not living up to their pledges. The think tank Carbon Tracker published a report card in March that found all the major oil and gas companies were far off track in meeting the Paris targets. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips received among the worst grades. Hess was not included in the report.
Smart congressional candidates are campaigning on Climate. Thomas Witkop is running in a tough purple district along Florida’s Treasure Coast, just north of Mar-A-Lago. This morning he told us that his opponent, “Brian Mast believes in climate change. He even knows that it's man-made. But last year he voted against every piece of legislation that works to reduce carbon emissions. In my opinion, this makes him even worse than the ignorant folks that think climate change doesn't exist and continue to act as puppets for the fossil fuel industry. Brian Mast knows that his votes are harming our future, especially for Floridians where we feel climate change at its worst, but he continues to represent dirty energy because he listens to the orders of his special interests and his party demagogue.”
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