An unrelentingly bitter US presidential race, defined by name-calling, attack ads and stunted campaigning, has so far left little space for discussion about climate change, despite the world experiencing unprecedented heat and disasters.
But with Donald Trump now facing Kamala Harris rather than Joe Biden, the Republican has used recent rallies to echo misinformation and memes on X, including fictional bans on red meat and gas stoves.
The aim? To undermine Harris.
“Kamala called for slashing consumption of red meat to fight climate change,” Trump said during a July 27 rally in the state of Minnesota.
The Democratic nominee would “get rid of all cows … and I guess that at some point, they’ll go after the humans,” the former president added, echoing “depopulation” conspiracy theories that have plagued Harris in right-wing spaces since she waded into the topic of “climate anxiety” among younger generations at a White House press conference last year.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, amplified the claims in an August 3 speech in Atlanta, saying Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves, she even wants to take away your ability to eat red meat.”
Such climate myths took on a life of their own on X, encouraged by conservative commentators in swing states and MAGA accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers.
However, Harris made no such campaign promise.
She has cooked with a gas stove herself and noted in a 2019 environmental panel that she “love(s) cheeseburgers from time to time,” although she has supported the idea of updating dietary guidelines.
“A tried-and-true tactic in politics is to misrepresent your opponent’s positions to make them sound extreme and unacceptable. Trump and Vance are doing exactly that with Vice-President Harris’s positions on climate action,” said Edward Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.
The false narratives add onto Trump and Vance’s criticism of the vice-president’s stance on issues such as fracking, a violently disruptive underground oil and gas extraction technique.
Harris initially advocated banning the practice in 2019 before becoming Biden’s running mate in 2020. She has more recently sought to avoid questions about it, particularly in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania where fracking is big business.
Still, climate activists have mostly saluted Harris, whose environmental stance has historically been to the left of the president — notably in going after oil companies as California attorney-general.
The Biden administration also pushed a renewable energy shift in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in reducing carbon pollution in US history.
Trump has vehemently opposed the legislation, adopting the slogan “drill, baby, drill” to sum up his fossil fuel-friendly approach.
The League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, told AFP the Trump campaign’s amplification of misinformation on “widespread bans” constitutes “ridiculous scare tactics” perpetrated to undermine recent “climate progress.”
Responding to AFP’s request for comment, Harris spokeswoman Lauren Hitt did not address specific claims from Trump and his running mate, but said the Democrat “is focused on a future where all Americans have clean air, clean water, and affordable, reliable energy.”
Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly dismissed the threats of climate change.
“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years,” he told Elon Musk on X in mid-August. Musk officially endorsed Trump in July.
More than a third of registered voters disagree, saying global warming is very important to their vote in the 2024 election, according to a recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
“I suspect the tactic will backfire with a relatively smaller number of uncommitted voters, most of whom are concerned about climate change,” Maibach said.
“Trump and Vance attacking VP Harris on her climate positions will hurt them more than help them.”