Get ready for a big choice on the climate crisis

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President Joe Biden is too busy for an international climate summit at the moment.

He is not expected to make a third annual trip to the Conference of the Parties, COP28, the annual United Nations-sponsored event at which countries consider collective action to mitigate the effects of a changing climate on the planet.

Although Biden’s absence could frustrate climate activists, it cannot objectively be viewed as a lack of concern about the issue – especially when compared with Donald Trump, the former president and current Republican primary front-runner.

The first nominating contest in the Republican primary calendar is January 15 in Iowa, less than 50 days away.

So it’s worthwhile to compare how Biden, Trump and other 2024 contenders view the climate crisis and how they would respond to it.

Releasing an every-five-years National Climate Assessment earlier in November, Biden referred to climate change as the “ultimate threat to humanity.”

Trump has built a screed against electric vehicles into his stump speech.

Biden has warned everyone that the changing climate threatens the entire country and every American.

Trump mocks the threat of sea levels rising and mangles facts, making it seem as if there is no threat at all.

“The environmentalists talk about all this nonsense,” Trump said on Fox News this year.

Biden’s signature legislative achievements as president are a pair of big spending bills – a bipartisan infrastructure law to update the country’s infrastructure with an eye to efficiency, and the passed-by-Democrats-only Inflation Reduction Act, which, among many other things, is spending hundreds of billions to encourage more affordable electric vehicles and ramp up clean energy production.

Biden also set a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to about half of 2005 levels by 2030. He wants to use Environmental Protection Agency regulations to ensure that two-thirds of new car sales in the US are EVs by 2032. The same week he released the National Climate Assessment, Biden met with the Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two promised to ramp up renewable energy with the goal of replacing fossil fuels.

Trump has a well-documented distaste of renewable energy, a distrust of wind energy in particular and has promised to roll back as much as he can of Biden’s climate agenda.

Climate scientists and activists will point to alarming data showing Earth warming faster than expected and argue the US is not doing nearly enough – although more drastic action would take direct bipartisan action by the House and Senate, something that seems unlikely given the power of Republicans representing coal and oil states in the House and Senate.

The utility of international agreements is also something to scrutinize. Biden and Xi grabbed headlines for their pledge to work on increasing renewable energy sources, but China continues to grow its reliance on coal power while the US is weaning itself off of coal.

In the US, greenhouse gas emissions are down from their 2007 peak. China’s goal is for its emissions to peak in 2030.

With COP28, it’s notable that this year’s summit, somehow, is being hosted by the oil-producing United Arab Emirates and presided over by the leader of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Sultan Al Jaber.

For more on Al Jaber, read this report from CNN’s Elizabeth Wells.

CNN’s climate team has a ton of content in the lead-up to the COP28 meeting. Read these:

A UAE company has secured African land the size of the UK for controversial carbon offset projects

Fake Twitter profiles, Wikipedia editing and PR battles: Inside the push to greenwash the COP28 climate summit

The most extreme position is from Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman and provocateur who said to boos at a Republican primary debate that the “climate change agenda” is a “hoax.”

Others are more willing to accept the scientific evidence.

“I do think that climate change is real. I think we have to acknowledge that it’s real,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told Bloomberg Talks in September, although she opposes Biden’s goal of cutting emissions. “I also don’t think we go so extreme that we say we have to do all these things by X year,” she said.

Haley said she would end renewable subsidies meant to spur innovation at energy companies. She noted she would let the government take a back seat to industry to tell government what it can accomplish in terms of innovating.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled his energy plan at an oil rig site in Texas in September, which tells you a lot about what’s inside the plan. As a presidential candidate, he has downplayed the threat of climate change.

Rather than an effort to mitigate the effects of climate change, which are already occurring, DeSantis suggested policies to cut down on climate change are a sinister form of government overreach.

“This is all part of an agenda to control you and to control your behavior,” DeSantis said.

The main focus of the DeSantis plan is to undo Biden’s effort to transition toward EVs and bring down gas prices to $2 per gallon by 2025.

CNN’s Laura Paddison and Ella Nilsen wrote about a “fevered culture war” in a recent story that mentions not only DeSantis but also recent developments in Germany and the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak decided to delay for five years a ban on the sale of new gas and diesel cars by 2030.

Americans’ views of how to address climate change are complicated. Strong majorities – roughly two-thirds in Pew polling from June – think the US should prioritize development of renewable energy and work to make the US carbon neutral by 2050.

But an equally strong majority said the country should not completely phase out the use of coal, oil and natural gas, but should rather use a mix of energy sources.

For example, among Republican and Republican-leaning adults ages 65 and older, three-quarters said the US should prioritize oil, coal and natural gas production. Two-thirds of Republican and Republican-leaning adults under 30 said the opposite, that the US should prioritize the development of renewables.

That makes some sense since the younger adults will generally be around to see the effects of climate change far more than the older generation.