Excerpt:
Across the country, voters elected new members to Congress who have promoted climate action at the state level and could prevent environmental laws from being weakened under Republican leadership.
The 2024 election will likely result in a major setback for climate action, with President-elect Donald Trump retaking the White House and Republicans taking back control of the Senate. Climate advocates in Congress now must work to ward off the worst attempts to weaken the country’s bedrock environmental laws and gut recently passed climate actions from the Biden administration.
Trump and the Republican Party won elections up and down the ballot by focusing on pocketbook issues, with promises to solve the economic woes many Americans face. Key to that was the promotion of fossil fuels to lower energy costs, with the Trump campaign promising to “drill, baby, drill,” on U.S. soil to boost the domestic production of oil and gas. The fossil fuel industry has heralded Trump’s victory, citing his promises to boost production and roll back recent environmental rules made since he last held office.
Though Democrats, the party that has taken the most action to address climate change and has not cast doubt on its legitimacy as an issue, lost control of the Senate and the fate of the House of Representatives is yet to be determined, climate advocacy groups said those in Congress who have made climate a top issue will be a critical backstop to the potential actions taken to roll back regulations.
“Members of Congress, even in the minority, have the power to push things and make things less bad, to use their bully pulpit to speak out and continue building public awareness” on climate issues, said Craig Auster, vice president of political affairs at the League of Conservation Voters.
Down the ballot, new environmental champions with histories of taking action to address the climate crisis were elected to the House and Senate. There’s a high school science teacher, state lawmakers who have consistently fought for climate action in their states and a former United Nations policy adviser on climate issues. Others, like an environmental attorney and professor, are still locked in tight races to enter Congress.
That work to raise awareness will continue in the coming years, even if significant legislation to address climate change is lacking.
The Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law and the nation’s largest single investment in reducing climate-warming pollution, remains popular, and so far has resulted in thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars of investment. Climate advocates say defending that law—and making it clear that attacking it will not only hurt efforts to address climate change but also kill good-paying jobs—will be crucial.
“What these moments call out for is real leadership,” David Kieve, the president of EDF Action, the Environmental Defense Fund’s advocacy partner, told Inside Climate News in an interview. “What we’re going to see is there won’t be a vulnerability or a penalty for leaning in on and defending the good-paying clean energy jobs that are coming, and I think there will be a penalty to those that want to try to rip them away…”
