- Position‹3 of 3
- Neither candidate will do enough for the environment
- Argument1 of 5›
Neither candidate takes climate change seriously enough.
Neither candidate supports a Green New Deal.
The argument
Biden supports a carbon tax, and doesn't think a federal push to ban fracking is realistic. Trump's administration has completed 58 environmental policy roll backs, per the NYT, including lowering regulation requirements of major industrial polluters via the Clean Air Act and loosening offshore drilling safety regulations implemented after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Critics reply that this false equivalence flattens a large, real difference. Biden's platform extended well beyond a carbon tax — a roughly two-trillion-dollar clean-energy plan, a net-zero-by-2050 target, and rejoining the Paris Agreement — while the Trump administration actively rolled back 58 environmental protections and withdrew from Paris. Treating substantial proposed action as 'not serious enough' alongside active deregulation obscures that one candidate would advance climate policy and the other reverse it. 'Neither is enough' can become a counsel of despair that erases the marginal but decisive difference between the two.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] 'Serious' climate action need not require a fracking ban specifically; carbon pricing, clean-energy investment and re-regulation are substantive measures, so the bar set here is arbitrary. [Rejecting P2] Biden's platform went well past a carbon tax — a large clean-energy plan, a net-zero target and rejoining Paris — so describing it as merely a carbon tax understates it. [Rejecting P3] Rolling back 58 protections and advancing an ambitious climate plan are not equivalent shortfalls; equating them erases a decisive policy difference. [Rejecting C] A large asymmetry between the candidates means 'neither is serious enough' misrepresents the actual choice.