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President Joe Biden is too busy for an international climate summit at the moment.
He is not expected to make a third annual trip to the Conference of the Parties, COP28, the annual United Nations-sponsored event at which countries consider collective action to mitigate the effects of a changing climate on the planet.
Although Biden’s absence could frustrate climate activists, it cannot objectively be viewed as a lack of concern about the issue – especially when compared with Donald Trump, the former president and current Republican primary front-runner.
The first nominating contest in the Republican primary calendar is January 15 in Iowa, less than 50 days away.
So it’s worthwhile to compare how Biden, Trump and other 2024 contenders view the climate crisis and how they would respond to it.
Releasing an every-five-years National Climate Assessment earlier in November, Biden referred to climate change as the “ultimate threat to humanity.”
Trump has built a screed against electric vehicles into his stump speech.
Biden has warned everyone that the changing climate threatens the entire country and every American.
Trump mocks the threat of sea levels rising and mangles facts, making it seem as if there is no threat at all.
“The environmentalists talk about all this nonsense,” Trump said on Fox News this year.
Biden’s signature legislative achievements as president are a pair of big spending bills – a bipartisan infrastructure law to update the country’s infrastructure with an eye to efficiency, and the passed-by-Democrats-only Inflation Reduction Act, which, among many other things, is spending hundreds of billions to encourage more…
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