When Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic nomination for president tonight, she may not dwell long on climate change. Her running mate certainly didn't in his acceptance speech Wednesday night. But meeting climate targets will be one of Harris’ main challenges if she wins the White House in November, Benjamin Storrow writes. While recent analyses predict the U.S. will double its carbon cutting over the next five years, none of them expect the nation to meet its goal of halving planet-warming pollution by 2030. “The window is closing,” Robbie Orvis, an emissions analyst with the research group Energy Innovation, told Ben. As vice president, Harris has been part of an administration that has provided hundreds of billions of dollars to accelerate clean energy projects. But the early returns have been decidedly mixed, Ben writes. Wind and solar power are outproducing coal, but clean energy installations have been slowed by high interest rates, supply chain bottlenecks and transmission constraints. Electric vehicle sales are rising, but so is oil and natural gas production. And while new factories are churning out EVs, solar panels and power grid batteries, others face delays or are at risk of being altogether canceled. While the U.S. could reduce emissions further if the next president continues the Biden administration’s policies — and enacts planned ones, such as new pollution controls on existing natural gas plants — some climate gains could also be quickly lost. If former President Donald Trump retakes the White House and implements the proposals included in the conservative blueprint Project 2025, the next decade could see greenhouse gas emissions rise 18 percent higher than under current policies, Energy Innovation’s modeling found. Trump has sought to distance himself from the 900-page blueprint written by conservative activists and former Trump aides. But he has also called for some of the same policies at his rallies, such as repealing parts of Biden’s signature climate law and easing regulations on fossil fuel production. Still, some analysts say the country’s emissions trajectory is more influenced by trends outside a president’s control. Clean energy continued to grow under Trump, for example, as Democratic-controlled states adopted increasingly ambitious targets for wind and solar. Corporate climate commitments slowed under Biden, and investors are showing renewed willingness to finance natural gas projects amid concerns about the reliability of the electric grid. David Cherney, who tracks the power industry at PA Consulting, told Ben that carbon pollution has steadily declined under Democratic and Republican administrations. And despite it being an election year, he said, companies have continued to close deals for new wind, solar or gas projects.
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