In 1986, Biden introduced the Global Climate Protection Act, which was the first climate change bill in the Senate. Signed into law by President Reagan, the admittedly limited bill directed the government to research and develop a strategy to deal with global warming. Later, as President Obama’s Vice President, Biden was deputized to oversee the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The law created new investment vehicles for clean energy, and the $90 billion allocated was characterized by the Obama White House as “the single largest investment in clean energy in history.” Biden has called fighting climate change, “the single most important thing” he and Obama could do in the White House, and was a strong public supporter of the former President’s use of Executive Orders to achieve climate policy including rolling out the Clean Power Plan and signing the Paris Agreement.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has actively reversed climate and environmental policies and regulations enacted during former President Obama’s eight years in office, and even before. According to the New York Times, the Trump administration has completed rollbacks of 66 environmental regulations, and is in the process of rolling back 34 more. Beyond those, he’s taken 29 major actions that undermine climate action and environmental protection in his first 875 days in office. Among those include defunding clean energy programs and nominating individuals with ties to the fossil fuel industry to top positions in the administration.

Biden’s record on climate science generally comes from co-achievements with the Obama administration. These include implementing or starting a number of programs and projects overturned, rolled back, or targeted by Trump. Among them include creation of ARPA-E, an agency that promotes and funds research and development of advanced energy technologies. It also includes nominating supporters of climate science to head the EPA, funding studies of coal risks, supporting scientific research at the EPA, and programs like NASA monitoring of emissions.

President Trump’s record while in office is generally one of undermining climate science. In 2017, Trump overturned an Obama-era executive order requiring construction using federal funds to take into account climate change and sea level rise data. This despite a report from the GAO of climate costs as high as $23 billion by 2050. Starting in early 2017, the EPA began removing climate change information from US government websites, including the EPA webpage that explained climate change. At the time, the administration also halted a study of the health risks to individuals living near coal mines. 

Trump’s administration has also directly targeted Federal climate scientists, reassigning EPA staff focusing on climate adaptation in 2017, and a month later dismissing half of the members of its Board of Scientific Counselors, which reviews EPA scientific research. In 2018, the Trump administration suddenly disbanded a 20-member panel of scientists charged with advising the EPA on safe levels of pollution in the air. This was foreshadowed by a similar move in 2017, when the administration dismissed a panel charged with providing technical assistance to states in implementing the National Climate Assessment. And in May 2019, the administration quietly cut a NASA program which monitored greenhouse gases like carbon-dioxide and methane, which undermines effective reporting of emissions from global actors as well.

As Vice President, Biden oversaw Obama’s implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The law allocated over $90 billion via loans, loan guarantees, tax credits, and grants for projects from developing better batteries and weatherizing homes. He has also been a proponent of clean energy for many years as a US Senator.

Early on, parts of Trump’s administration had enthusiastically supported new Federal leases intended to be used for offshore wind farms. Yet this enthusiasm hasn’t translated into renewed federal incentives for offshore wind, which sunsetted during the current administration, driving up wind turbine costs. Administrative support for offshore wind has also been weakened by false claims from President Trump himself that wind turbines “cause cancer,” and other false statements by the administration. In 2018, Trump introduced a tariff on all solar panels manufactured abroad, meant to protect American manufacturing jobs, which has been estimated to cost 62,000 American jobs. 

Additionally, Trump has targeted the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have promoted clean energy construction over dirty energy sources like oil and gas. The administration has also cut federal funding that incentivizes clean energy development in almost every proposed budget, proposing cuts to the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy of up to 87%. Trump has also proposed the elimination of an array of electric vehicle tax credits, as well as closing down the federal clean energy R&D shop known as ARPA-E.

Biden has taken the “No Fossil Fuel Money” campaign pledge that all of the Democratic presidential candidates took. Yet, he has faced questions over fundraisers co-hosted with former aides who now work in the fossil fuel industry. According to GQ, his presidential campaign has a murky track record when it comes to trying to balance fossil fuel interests and climate action, including an advisor who is a board member of a natural gas company. 

In 2014, Biden spearheaded a $50 million aid package that included support for developing Ukraine’s shale gas infrastructure, for national security reasons, at a time when countries were agreeing to restrict carbon emissions. Also under the Obama administration, which Biden was part of, national fossil fuel production soared. In the past, Biden has also supported the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” away from dirtier fuels like coal and gasoline.

Since taking office, Trump has overseen or directed efforts to promote fossil fuel use, especially coal. He’s selected fossil fuel industry insiders and lobbyists for key federal posts, including EPA Administrator, Interior Department Secretary, and Secretary of State. He’s allowed multiple federal lands to open up for new mining and oil drilling leases. In 2017, the Trump administration approved construction permits for the controversial expansion of the Keystone XL gas pipeline. In early 2018, the administration announced a plan to develop leases in 26 offshore areas, making up some 90% of the nation’s outer continental shelf. And in 2018, the administration greenlighted gas and oil drilling in federal waters in the Arctic, issuing permits to some companies for drilling in the area.

While Vice President, Biden publicly supported the Waxxman-Markey carbon pricing bill, which passed in the US House ultimately failed to gain Senate approval. He’s also previously supported carbon pricing while a US Senator from Delaware for 36 years.

Although public stances for or against carbon pricing are not available for President Trump, he has advocated for what some economists have characterized as ‘essentially the opposite of a carbon price’ by proposing to subsidize carbon emissions, rather than tax them. This comes in spite of some in Trump’s cabinet voicing favor of carbon pricing during his tenure.

Biden has often touted his effort to help make the Paris Agreement a reality. Although claiming to have brought China to the table, according to GQ, it’s hard to be sure since it’s not actually clear that Biden was involved at all in the Paris Agreement, with some reports claiming that Biden was not involved at all. What is certain is his public support for the pact; Biden gave several speeches highlighting US progress in fighting climate change and calling for more aggressive action on the international stage.

As soon as taking office in 2017, Trump announced his intention to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris climate accord, making America one of only three countries to refuse the landmark international agreement. Negotiated under President Obama, the Paris climate agreement seeks to reduce global emissions, and marked the first time nearly every country agreed on sweeping climate goals. He’s also refused to substantially participate in global emissions reductions talks, and has refused to sign some international documents unless they are stripped of any references to climate change.

Biden has offered a very detailed plan to combat climate change and decarbonize the economy. According to InsideClimate News, Biden’s proposed $1.7 trillion climate plan includes 30 times the clean energy commitment in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 platform. Despite this, it was initially characterized as being lower in scope, size, and clarity when compared to the plans put forth by his opponents for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Part of this is because Biden’s campaign sought early on to represent “a middle ground” approach to the climate crisis, that would include allowing natural gas to act as a bridge fuel alongside clean and renewable energy. But as the campaign progressed, Biden adopted stronger positions originally embraced by more progressive opponents like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

It should be noted that after becoming the presumptive nominee in Spring 2020, Biden has taken steps to strengthen his climate plan, and signaled he will expand it in the coming months. Recently, Biden announced the addition of Green New Deal champions to prominent positions on his climate task force including Green New Deal author and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement’s Founder and Executive Director Varshini Prakash. His campaign has also added the following language to his platform, “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.”

Biden’s “vision” section on his website includes 37 plans to achieve various policy goals and objectives, 16 of those include subsections on how that specific plan relates to climate change, and often includes additional actions Biden pledges to perform to deal with this. Sub-sections referring to climate change are found across a diverse range of Biden plans, including “plan for black american, agenda for women, plan for housing, agenda for students, commitment to indian country,” and is even included in his “agenda for the catholic community.”

President Trump’s re-election campaign website does not include any sections that support action to stop climate change, decarbonize the economy, or promote renewable energy development over fossil fuels. Publicly, Trump has been vehemently opposed to the concept of a Green New Deal, and has vowed to run his reelection campaign as a referendum against the progressive program.

Many of Biden’s plans include subsections on promoting clean energy use, including his “plan encouraging unions and empowering workers” and his “plan for infrastructure.” Within his primary climate plan, Biden continuously references his desire to see a “clean energy revolution,” and pledges to get the US to 100% clean energy by 2050. Biden also pledges to “make a federal investment of $1.7 trillion over the next ten years,” which he says will then leverage “additional private sector and state and local investments to total to more than $5 trillion” for clean energy.

There is no reference to this on Trump’s website.

Biden’s platform does include strong language on the fossil fuel industry. It says, “the Biden Administration will take action against fossil fuel companies and other polluters who put profit over people and knowingly harm our environment and poison our communities’ air, land, and water, or conceal information regarding potential environmental and health risks.” He also pledges, in multiple locations in his climate plan, to end subsidies to fossil fuel companies. 

It should be noted that throughout the campaign, Biden had resisted calling for a ban on fracking, a controversial method of natural gas extraction. He has said he would approve no new permits on federal lands, but that current permits would be evaluated case-by-case. Biden’s platform is consistent with his reluctance to outright ban fossil fuel use, saying things like “there is much more work to be done to identify affordable solutions.”

On the platform section of Trump’s website he references his victory against the “war on coal,” and touts his administration’s opening of the “largest oil and gas lease of over 78 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico.” There are also multiple references to his administration acting “aggressively to increase exports” of energy resources like oil and gas to the global market. 

There are no references to reducing the use of oil, gas, coal, or other fossil fuel products on his website.

During his campaign, Biden has come out in favor of carbon pricing policy. Biden has publicly favored passing Federal carbon pricing legislation by 2025. Although Biden’s platform doesn’t explicitly mention carbon pricing, he does allude to the creation of an “enforcement mechanism [which] will be based on the principles that polluters must bear the full cost of the carbon pollution they are emitting.” Additionally his plan includes so-called ‘carbon tariffs,’ which would only be possible if the US also had its own carbon price. Carbon tariffs work by placing a charge on imported goods from countries with a lower carbon price than the US, therefore accounting for the price difference and allowing American goods to remain competitive.

There is no reference to this on Trump’s website.

His larger climate plan includes multiple references to ‘environmental justice,’ with the plan’s subtitle being called “Joe’s Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.” Within this plan’s primary environmental justice section, Biden calls out the “disproportionate harm” of pollution on communities of color and low-income neighborhoods.

There is no reference to this on Trump’s website.

Within Biden’s “restoring american leadership” plan, he includes a section outlining his goal to “rally the world to address the existential climate crisis.” This includes rejoining the Paris Agreement, but also includes a pledge to “lock in enforceable commitments that will reduce emissions in global shipping and aviation.” Within his primary climate plan, Biden also pledges to “embrace the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, adding momentum to curbing hydrofluorocarbons, an especially potent greenhouse gas.” In this plan he also pledges to “make future bilateral U.S.–China agreements on carbon mitigation,” “demand a worldwide ban on fossil fuel subsidies”, and “seek a G20 commitment to end all export finance subsidies of high-carbon projects.”

According to the Verge, Biden’s broad 2050 target falls in line with the recommendations of a leading authority on climate science, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for which several of the scientists recently endorsing Biden have authored reports.

The only reference on his website to global climate cooperation is Trump’s record of withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement.