And what the US election means for climate change.

Watch more 2020 election explainers at http://vox.com/ElectionVideos

All of recorded human history has happened during a period in which the average global temperature didn’t change by more than 1 degree Celsius. But the burning of fossil fuels has triggered a temperature rise projected to exceed 3 degrees by the end of the century. It will be catastrophic. But it can be avoided if we massively scale back the burning of fossil fuels.

The US isn’t the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, but it's emitted more carbon dioxide in total than any other country. So the US has an important role to play in global decarbonization; the world basically can’t get there without the US’s full participation. But the current US president doesn’t have any plans to do that. His Democratic challenger in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, does.

Biden’s plan is ambitious: Its goal is to completely transition the US to clean energy by 2050. But his plan doesn’t get into the details of exactly how that will happen. For that, we talked to physicist and engineer Saul Griffith, who took us through his incredibly detailed road map for how the US could actually walk away from fossil fuels in the next 30 years.

This was the first in our series of 2020 election explainers, all based on viewer suggestions. Watch the others, which cover the stakes of the election on:
1) Climate change:    • How America can leave fossil fuels be...  
2) Voting rights:    • What long voting lines in the US real...  
3) Reproductive health:    • How US abortion policy targets the po...  
4) Public schools:    • How US schools punish Black kids | 20...  
5) Police reform:    • How the next president could change p...  
6) America’s role in the world:    • How America could lose its allies | 2...  
7) Transportation:    • Why American public transit is so bad...  
8) LGBTQ rights:    • Why LGBTQ rights hinge on the definit...  
9) The eviction crisis:    • Millions of Americans can't pay rent ...  

You can check out Saul Griffith’s report on decarbonizing the US through electrification at Rewiring America:
https://www.rewiringamerica.org/handbook

And explore his Sankey diagram of the US energy economy in detail here: http://energyliteracy.com/

To read more about the fluctuations in Earth’s global average temperature and why the current spike is so dangerous, check these sources:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features...
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/gr...
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-...
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploa...

Read more about why carbon dioxide is so problematic for climate change here: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/why-...

You can dig into historic carbon emissions by country or region at Our World in Data:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/an...

The impact of the Trump administration on climate change is covered in more depth on our website:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-enviro...
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-enviro...

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