The presidential debate only gave 120 seconds to climate change

It seems like climate always gets the short stick in presidential debates. It wasn’t that long ago (2012, to be exact) that we went an entire election cycle with no questions at all about the fact that our decades of wanton emissions are choking the atmosphere on the only planet in the known universe that can harbor life as we know it. Last night, yet again, viewers were made to wait until the final minutes—in the final question of the evening—to hear Donald Trump and Kamala Harris discuss arguably the most consequential issue of the 21st century. They were given one minute each. Harris’s response wasn’t bad (listen for yourself, it’ll take less time than a TikTok), but the short time allotted didn’t really allow her to actually answer the question: What would you do about climate change? In her 60 seconds to discuss this matter of existential importance, Harris drew a sharp contrast between her own reality-based views and Trump’s previous statements that the crisis is a hoax. “We know it is very real,” Harris said. “We can actually deal with this issue.” (Trump used his time to rant unintelligibly about how “crooked” Joe Biden is and didn’t attempt to answer the question at all.) Harris then shifted to the real and urgent cost that extreme weather is already having on families—particularly, that people are losing their homes and their life savings due to insurers pulling out of disaster-prone regions. Last year, the U.S. set the record for the most number of billion-dollar weather disasters in history. In Canada, more than seven times the typical amount of forest went up in a wild inferno of enormous proportions, bathing much of the Eastern United States in an eerie red glow for much of the summer—which really hammered home “the planet is dying” vibes. Harris’s message, if I can extrapolate just a bit, was evident: If you care about inflation, if you care about immigration, if you care about your kids, then you care about climate change. Unfortunately, her delivery wasn’t quite that clear. To be sure, Harris does have a track record of climate accomplishments. As vice president, she cast the deciding vote for the trillion-dollar Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest piece of climate legislation in world history. It’s true that no matter how she answered Tuesday night’s question, Harris probably already had single-issue climate voters in the bag.  Harris used that fact to her advantage. It was clear that her intended audience was swing voters—after all, if she wants to accomplish anything on climate, she first has to get elected.  After a 15-second review of her climate accomplishments, she pivoted to spend the rest of her short time directly addressing oil and gas workers in Pennsylvania and autoworkers in Michigan. But that still puts those of us obsessed with the fact that our planet is dying in a bit of a bind. Harris reversed her stance on banning fracking on public lands earlier this year, so debate watchers were right to wonder which version of climate-champion Harris they would ultimately be electing. Will it be 2020 primary candidate Harris, who put justice and equity at the core of her campaign, complete with a $10 trillion comprehensive climate plan? Or will it be a proponent of the “all of the above” energy strategy that has dominated Democratic presidencies since the Obama years and has transformed the U.S. into the world’s largest producer of oil and gas? Voters have a right to know. While she decides, it’s not like the climate will let her have a breather. After all, Harris took the reins of the Democratic Party during the hottest summer on record—a summer where New England roasted in the triple digits and Phoenix was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 100 days straight. This year, we’ve already had the earliest-ever Category 5 hurricane on record, and 2024 is on track to be the hottest year in recorded human history, perhaps the hottest year on planet Earth in more than 125,000 years. Quite literally, humanity doesn’t know an Earth like this. “Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement back in June. “This is inevitable, unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.” What Harris didn’t mention during her time-constrained response, and maybe should have, was her intent to prosecute polluters—one of her climate promises that polls the best. Greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S. have declined during the Biden administration but not fast enough to prevent climate change from accelerating. Perhaps she could thread the needle between hardcore climate voters and centrist union workers if she explained that, in America, if we continue to produce oil and gas, we’ll do so in a way that limits harm to the fullest extent of the law—and