Amidst increas­ing­ly dire cli­mate pro­jec­tions and Hur­ri­cane Matthew’s glob­al warm­ing-fueled dev­as­ta­tion, the only men­tions of the envi­ron­ment in this week’s vice-pres­i­den­tial debate last­ed — gen­er­ous­ly — for all of five seconds.

"Trump's candidacy has set the bar on climate for Hillary Clinton so low she might trip on it."

“Yet again,” 350 Action Exec­u­tive Direc­tor May Boeve wrote in a state­ment Tues­day, ​“tonight’s debate mod­er­a­tor dropped the ball on cli­mate change. Silence is anoth­er form of denial and the TV net­works are doing the pub­lic a great dis­ser­vice by ignor­ing the issue, espe­cial­ly when there are such clear dif­fer­ences between the candidates.”

Giv­en those dif­fer­ences, the most pro­found impact of Don­ald Trump’s cam­paign in terms of the cli­mate may not be that he hopes to scrap the Paris Agree­ment, offi­cial­ly rat­i­fied by a crit­i­cal mass of world gov­ern­ments Wednes­day. It’s that his can­di­da­cy has set the bar on cli­mate for Hillary Clin­ton so low she might trip on it.

The Paris Agree­ment has now passed the thresh­old need­ed to trig­ger imple­men­ta­tion. Sev­en­ty-four coun­tries — account­ing for 58.8 per­cent of glob­al emis­sions — have rat­i­fied the agree­ment, mean­ing it will go into effect Novem­ber 4. Just before the U.S. elec­tion, then, world gov­ern­ments will offi­cial­ly endeav­or to keep warm­ing below 2 degrees Cel­sius while ​“pur­su­ing efforts to lim­it the tem­per­a­ture increase to 1.5 °C,” per the agreement’s text.

Should every nation that agreed to the pact last Decem­ber even­tu­al­ly rat­i­fy it, the best case sce­nario puts the plan­et on track to raise tem­per­a­tures by about 3 degrees Cel­sius above pre-indus­tri­al lev­els by 2100. That future is pre­dict­ed to leave 4.5 bil­lion peo­ple world­wide exposed to heat­waves and cre­ate a dev­as­tat­ing loss of arable land. Storms like Hur­ri­cane Matthew will become both more like­ly and more dev­as­tat­ing as sea lev­els rise. Coastal cities like New York will become vir­tu­al­ly unin­hab­it­able, and food will be scarcer — espe­cial­ly in parts of the world where it already is. The places hit hard­est by glob­al warm­ing now will bear the brunt of the pain.

That’s bad enough. What’s worse is that the cli­mate mod­els coun­tries are bas­ing their com­mit­ments off seem to exist in a fan­ta­sy land.

“There’s quite a gap,” says Glen Peters, ​“between where we are, what’s been pledged and where we need to be.”

Peters is a senior researcher at Norway’s Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Cli­mate and Envi­ron­men­tal Research (CICERO) and one of the world’s lead­ing experts on cli­mate mod­el­ing. Most of the warm­ing sce­nar­ios world lead­ers use to under­stand cli­mate change, he explains, rest on the assump­tion that there is already a pro­hib­i­tive glob­al price on car­bon as well as so-called neg­a­tive emis­sions tech­nolo­gies, like bioen­er­gy and car­bon cap­ture and stor­age, or BECCS.

As of now, nei­ther exists. In order to cap warm­ing at 1.5 with­out BECCS, Peters tells In These Times, ​“You would have to shut down every coal and gas plant in the U.S. in the next 10 years.” On the same time­line, ​“You couldn’t have a sin­gle petrol car in the U.S., and the same for India, for Chi­na and for every coun­try in the world. While you remove those, you have to build up new infra­struc­ture, wind tur­bines, solar pan­els … a com­plete­ly new car fleet, and so on,” all of which would require mas­sive pub­lic and pri­vate investment.

“Get­ting to zero emis­sions in a sin­gle coun­try in 10 years is over the top dif­fi­cult,” he said. ​“I don’t think it would be pos­si­ble with­out any car­bon diox­ide removal.”

Peters’ research shows that get­ting to the 1.5‑degree tar­get leaves the world with a strict man­date to emit no more than 200 bil­lion tons of car­bon diox­ide. That’s the same as about five years of emis­sions at cur­rent lev­els. Upping the tar­get to 2 degrees expands the allowance to 850 bil­lion tons. Giv­en today’s tech­no­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal con­straints, stay­ing with­in that lim­it is ​“pos­si­ble,” Peters argues, ​“but only in a model.”

Under­shoot­ing 2 degrees — assum­ing (opti­misti­cal­ly) that BECCS won’t be avail­able until mid­cen­tu­ry — means no new mines, pipelines, gas wells or oil rigs, accord­ing to a sober­ing new study from Oil Change Inter­na­tion­al. It also means shud­der­ing exist­ing ones as soon as possible.

“If the cur­rent mines and wells that are cur­rent­ly in pro­duc­tion are allowed to con­tin­ue into their full lifes­pan we’ll blow past the 1.5 and 2 degree needs,” says David Turn­bull, cam­paigns direc­tor at Oil Change USA. ​“We need to swift­ly tran­si­tion away and look at where it might be pos­si­ble to shut down mines early.”

“The biggest gap between sci­ence and pol­i­tics today,” he said, ​“is this feel­ing that we don’t need to stop dig­ging fos­sil fuels out of the ground.”

Trump’s eco­nom­ic plan is a love let­ter to coal, oil and nat­ur­al gas exec­u­tives, threat­en­ing to ema­ci­ate the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency and ramp up every form of extrac­tion imag­in­able. Clinton’s pro­pos­als for ener­gy and the envi­ron­ment are leagues bet­ter, but they remain dras­ti­cal­ly out of touch with science’s ever-bleak­er demands. Out­side of a hand­ful of new methane reg­u­la­tions, a com­mit­ment to cut sub­si­dies to the fos­sil fuel indus­try and a pledge to stand by the Clean Pow­er Plan, near­ly every pro­pos­al is on the con­sump­tion end of the car­bon bud­get — things like restrict­ing ener­gy waste in Amer­i­can homes and improv­ing ener­gy effi­cien­cy in cars and build­ings. Pro­duc­tion goes large­ly unquestioned.

There are promis­es to mend pipelines and build safer nat­ur­al gas wells, along with stip­u­la­tions for project labor agree­ments ​“to ensure new pipelines are built to the high­est stan­dards and sup­port broad-based local eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment.” Among the notice­able absences from Clinton’s plan are a mora­to­ri­um on frack­ing, an end to all fos­sil fuel explo­ration, a ban on extrac­tion on fed­er­al land and its rapid phase-out every­where else. Sim­i­lar­ly miss­ing is the change sci­en­tists are call­ing for most loud­ly: A car­bon budget.

Of course, there are gap­ing dif­fer­ences between what a Clin­ton and Trump admin­is­tra­tion would mean for cli­mate pol­i­cy in the Unit­ed States. Large­ly thanks to the cli­mate movement’s urg­ing, Clinton’s plan con­tains sev­er­al key steps to clamp­ing down on emis­sions. But there is also no sce­nario in which Clin­ton both keeps fos­sil fuel exec­u­tives hap­py and enacts a cli­mate plan that’s any­where in line with the planet’s own timeline.

Along with sev­er­al oth­er green groups, 350 Action and Oil Change USA have backed Clin­ton, although they are under no illu­sion about what she’s like­ly do in the Oval Office. As Boeve put it, ​“We’re not endors­ing Sec­re­tary Clin­ton — we’re endors­ing our move­ment … Novem­ber 8 is a vital day — but Novem­ber 9 is just as vital.”

Even before then, it seems cli­mate could occu­py a big­ger spot in the Clin­ton cam­paign than it has since the pri­maries. Focus groups for the cam­paign have iden­ti­fied the envi­ron­ment as a key wedge issue, some­thing that could set Clin­ton apart from Trump among vot­ers like­ly to tilt toward third par­ties with­out inspi­ra­tion from her on the issues that mat­ter to them. It’s espe­cial­ly key among young vot­ers, who are show­ing sur­pris­ing­ly high lev­els of sup­port for Gary John­son and Jill Stein.

To draw in mil­len­ni­als skep­ti­cal of the polit­i­cal sys­tem and pas­sion­ate about cli­mate change, Clin­ton staffers made the baf­fling move of tap­ping Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s 68-year old for­mer vice pres­i­dent. It’s a des­per­ate move but a telling one: Clin­ton needs cli­mate vot­ers, and she’ll be work­ing until the elec­tion to woo them. If it pays off, Clin­ton could be elect­ed with the strongest pop­u­lar man­date to take on cli­mate change of any pres­i­dent in U.S. history.

Asked about his post-elec­tion plans, Turn­bull says the first step ​“is to make it abun­dant­ly clear to whoever’s pres­i­dent that it’s not an either-or propo­si­tion. We can’t just invest in renew­ables. It’s imper­a­tive that we address lim­it­ing sup­plies of fos­sil fuels as well.”

“The good thing,” he adds, ​“is that there’s an incred­i­ble move­ment out there that gets that.”