Tipping point
Can the US learn from the election in 2000 and vote for the future of our planet?
Getty
- Roger Harrabin
The Year We Lost the Climate is on Radio 4 on Saturday at 8pm. Add it to your collection.
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The 2000 US election was one of the most intense, contentious and bizarre in the country’s history – remembered for a result that was only decided after a furious court battle over “hanging chads” on Florida’s ballot papers. It was a consequential election for several reasons. The most significant being, as I explore in my Radio 4 documentary, the way its outcome pushed us further towards severe climate change.
At one point during the primaries, it did look as though that White House race would produce a champion of the environment with radical policies to cut planet-heating emissions.
The Democratic candidate, vice-president Al Gore, was a long-standing supporter of the need to reduce pollution. Normally you’d expect the candidate for the Republican party, with all its links to Big Oil, to be more lukewarm on the climate, but not that year. The Republican frontrunner in the primaries was John McCain and, unlike his party colleagues, he was passionate about the environment.
Hopes were raised round the world that whichever candidate won would lead a global charge to cut emissions. The stakes were very high, and the planet – as well as the USA – was the prize. In the end it was neither of the environmental champions who clawed their way to Washington, but Texan oil man George W Bush.
Al Gore must be haunted by what might have been
Scientists were dismayed. The former UK Chief Scientist, Professor Sir David King, says McCain or Gore would have boosted renewables, cut fossil fuels, shown international leader ship and made our current emissions targets much less daunting. “If McCain had got in, we’d be in a very different place. This was a tragedy.”
So how did McCain slip so fatefully in the primaries? Well, one crucial element of that story can be traced back to Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh. In 1991, McCain’s wife visited, brought home two sick girls, and later adopted one called Bridget. “She’s a wonderful child,” McCain said. “We love her.” That little girl grew up and in 2000 joined her adopted father on the Republican primaries campaign. Then the dirty tricks began.
Bush supporters harnessed a technique known as the push poll where campaigners phone voters to research levels of support. In this case they’re said Listen to have asked voters: “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain… if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” The Bush campaign denied involvement, but it seemed to influence some voters, and Bush forged on to become the Republican candidate – and later president – by a paper-thin margin.
Democratic candidate Al Gore in 2006. Getty
Bush pulled the US out of the climate treaty and boosted production of oil and gas. Gore, meanwhile, was criticised by green supporters for not having actively campaigned on climate, for fear of losing votes. His caution may have been misguided as an independent Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, captured green votes likely to have gone to Gore. The former VP must be haunted by what might have been.
With this year’s American election looming, this sounds all too familiar. Again, we see one candidate expressing concern about the heating climate, and another calling climate change a scam.
Look more closely and you’ll see Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is no green angel. To attract fossil fuel supporters, she reversed a plan to ban fracking, and she wants to continue seeking fossil fuels. But she favours investment in renewables and will surely keep the US within the global process to cut emissions.
Some of President Biden’s green policies are locked in, but former president Trump has promised to “Drill, baby, drill” in his first day if he gets into office. With Florida in the news once more following devastation from Hurricanes Helene and Milton, scientists warn the Earth can’t take more delay.
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Roger Harrabin is a freelance environment journalist and Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
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Roger Harrabin
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