The Presidential Candidates Disagree on Climate Change (2016)

Thank you. Next, we turn to our periodic look at the major issues facing the country, and where the presidential candidates stand on them. Tonight, the focus is climate change. It is a subject that has gotten very little attention so far during the campaign. Even as it highlights one of the starkest differences between the candidates, William Brangham has our report. This past weekend, the US and China officially ratified the so-called Paris Climate Accords. They're the most substantial move by the world's nations to put some limits on the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global temperatures upwards, and upwards they keep going. 2016 is on pace to be the hottest year in recorded history, breaking the record set by 2015 and 2014 before that. As many climate models predicted, a warming planet has coincided with increased heat waves and droughts as well as more intense storms. Glaciers and ice sheets continue to shrink, sending sea levels upwards and threatening coastal communities all over the world with potentially catastrophic, costly flooding. Michael Oppenheimer is a climate scientist at Princeton University.

If we don't start with rapid emissions reductions and substantial emissions reductions that will pass a danger point beyond which the consequences for many people and countries on Earth will simply become unacceptable and eventually disastrous. But the Paris Accords only set voluntary caps on carbon emissions. So how seriously the United States follows through on these commitments, as well as its other efforts to curtail carbon, will fall largely on the next president. And while there are plenty of policies where Clinton and Trump have different views, there's probably no greater divergence between them than on the issue of climate change. One thinks it's real and poses a grave threat, the other thinks it's a fantasy. I think it's a big scam for a lot of people to make a lot of money. Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax. He claims the planet is freezing and that scientists are, quote, stuck in ice. Trump argues that environmental regulation is an enormous anti-competitive tax on US industry which also threatens American jobs, especially in the coal industry.

The federal government, the regulations that they have, they put the coal miners out of business. The coal mines are shut. He says a Trump administration will undo as many regulations as possible, starting with President Obama's Clean Power Plan, which has put limits on coal emissions. Trump has also promised to rip up or cancel the Paris Accords and block any funding for international climate change efforts. He supports the expansion of coal and oil and natural gas as main energy sources for the United States. Climate change is such a consequential crisis to everybody in the world. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has repeatedly called climate change an urgent threat and one that's driven in large part by human activity, namely the burning of fossil fuels. Clinton supports cutting carbon emissions, supports the goals of the Paris Accords, as well as President Obama's Clean Energy Plan. Clinton acknowledges these plans will cost coal industry jobs, and she's proposed a multi-billion dollar renewable energy plan that she says will attempt to replace some of those lost jobs. To help understand what a Clinton or Trump administration might mean with regards to climate change,

I'm joined now by Coral Davenport, who is an environmental reporter for The New York Times, and Chris Mooney, who covers science and the environment for The Washington Post. Thank you both very much for being here. Chris, I'd like to start with you. Before we get to the candidates, let's talk for a moment about what is the current science tell us about the current impacts of climate change? Well, 2016 is a very, very hot year. We're probably going to have three hottest year records in a row. 2014, 2015, 2016 topping them all. We've seen some really striking climate-related effects on the world. Most starkly this year, I think the bleaching of coral reefs. Big disaster at the Great Barrier Reef. It's something that climate science has been predicting for a long time. And now it's happening. But there's all kinds of impacts all around the world. We're losing more and more ice from the polar regions. Caesar rising. Of course, temperature records have been broken. Anything you would add to that, Coral? I would just say the specific sort of marker that a lot of scientists and scientific institutions have put forth is the warming of the atmosphere beyond 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit on average.

That's kind of the point at which a lot of scientists say we will be irrevocably locked into a future of these climate impacts. And we're at the point right now where scientists say a lot of that is already baked in. There was a point. There's no way we're going to stop hitting that marker. There was a point in the climate debate where it was about how do we keep from getting there? At this point, in terms of the emissions that are already out in the air, and already in the atmosphere and the rate of emissions now being produced today, scientists are saying we're probably set to go past that tipping point. And the debate is really about how do you keep it from getting far, far worse? How do you keep the planet inhabitable by humans? Okay, staying with you, I'm going to put the crystal ball in your hands now.