The Climate Change Cost of the Presidential Campaign
The carbon emissions from candidates’ extensive airline travel clashes with their ideals on the environment
Last month, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign made a minor splash when it announced it would offset all carbon emissions caused by traveling. “[W]e know we need to address our emissions through action, not just rhetoric,” campaign manager Faiz Shakir said in a statement. Carbon offsetting—the practice of investing in green technology or planting trees as a means of counterbalancing one’s carbon footprint—has been a popular climate mitigation strategy since the late ’90s. Leonardo DiCaprio does it. So does Jake Gyllenhaal. Al Gore too. It’s a trendy strategy, one that offers good optics and, yes, genuinely can help remove carbon from the atmosphere.
It also further highlights just how awful presidential campaigns are for the Earth in the first place.
In a country as large as the United States, the campaign trail can become Odyssean in scope. In a crude analysis of the 2016 presidential election, The Boston Globe estimated that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump traveled more than 200,000 miles from the start of their campaigns in 2015 to October 2016 (right before the election). That’s enough mileage to cross the…
