During the first presidential debate, Biden alluded to the Inflation Reduction Act while Trump went on an incoherent rant about “HPresident Joe Biden and former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump participate in the first presidential debate of the 2024 elections at CNN’s studios in Atlanta on June 27.
A little over halfway in, however, Bash asked whether the candidates would do anything as president to address the climate crisis. Neither candidate directly answered the question, but Biden pointed to policies his administration has implemented to encourage the development of clean energy technologies. Trump gave an incoherent nonanswer.
In combination with preexisting policies, the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by, almost within reach of the country’s commitment under the Paris Agreement to halve emissions compared to 2005 values by the end of the decade. Beyond the one question from Bash, the only other climate-related mentions during the debate came from Trump, who blamed the U.S.’s federal deficit on a failure to extract “the liquid gold right under our feet” — oil and gas — and referred to Biden’s climate policies as the “green new scam.” He also used the term “energy independent” to describe the nation on January 6, 2021, the day he told his supporters to launch an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.