The Serenity of Being a Climate Voter
OK..I hate to talk politics….
No, wait….I love to talk politics, as everyone who knows me can attest to.
But when it comes down to it, it is not really politics but policy that excites me because of the way it can transfer ideas into practical applications that (usually) make things better.
That brings me to our imminent Presidential election. It is hard for me to believe that any of you who are reading this post are still undecided on your Presidential vote. But maybe you have not yet thought about it in any detail, or maybe you have friends and colleagues that are not sure about what to do who are looking to you for your thoughts.
In the two-party system we have in the U.S., we as voters sometimes find ourselves in the same situation as when we last looked at our cable TV options - it was all about the package. To get some things we had to accept getting other things. Same with voting. We accept the Democratic package or the Republican package. That makes the choice harder for some people.
Ah….but for the climate voter, it all depends on which package acknowledges, plans for, and mitigates climate change.
I am such a voter. I have firm positions on all of the things that normally show up on the “top 10” priority lists of issues. But I cannot think of any other issue that has the point-of-no-return implications as climate change does. I believe that if a policy mistake is made in other issue areas, it is not likely to be permanent and if things didn't work out as intended it can be changed to take things in a different direction.
What compares to climate change when you think of issues in those terms?
Climate change is for all practical purposes permanent. That’s right. There is no do-over. There is no rewriting of policies to allow a do-over.
Stop and think about it - have you ever heard anyone talk about reversing climate change? I haven't. The talk is about trying to slow it down, and deal with the impacts that are already occurring as well as those that will happen in the coming years.
Had we started to tackle climate change earlier, it would have been a different story. (Many of us actually did try to tackle it going back to the Clinton Administration but that is a different story for another day). But now concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are at around 416 ppm – the highest level in millions of years. And it keeps going up because it just continues to accumulate and not precipitate out.
If you understand nothing else about climate change, it must be that real data (not predictions) on concentrations shows a constant incline. The curve only goes one-way – up. The data depicts not pledges, announcements or commitments but the amount of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere that will not filter out for hundreds to thousands of years. This means that by beginning only now to get serious, we have given greenhouse gases so much of a head start that we will should not even be thinking about winning. The question is what place we will come in.
The last four years were not just any four years. In a climate change context, they represent four of the most important years that the history books will talk about when they record how we came to the brink of losing the climate fight.
During the last four years, we didn’t just hold our place, we fell backwards. Regulations and policies to address climate change were rolled back and no new ones were initiated.
And there is likely more to come if we don’t have a new Administration. For example, just today I read a piece in a respected journal saying that we should not consider acid rain to be a dead issue as an clean air threat.
When I give a speech or presentation about climate change, one of the things I start with is the question “How many of you remember acid rain?”. Most hands go in the air. I then explain how acid rain got started, what the damages were, how it was solved, how the pollutants precipitated out fairly quickly – and then how it was addressed such that no one ever hears about it anymore. I then go on to say that climate change is not like acid rain. The pollutants don’t precipitate out for a very, very, very long time.
So instead of focusing everything in our arsenal on greenhouse gases – we may need to worry about acid rain again?
It is not, however, all about who is President.
One of the most alarming moments for me over the past couple of weeks was the current candidate for the open Supreme Court seat saying, when asked about climate change, that she had read a few things about it, but really didn’t know that much about it or think it important to her impending job.
Say what?
I find it challenging at best to think how someone applying to be a lifetime judge on the highest court in the land could not have by now paid more attention to climate change, if not for the reason that it has already begun to show up in the courts and is actually scheduled to be heard by the Supremes in the not too distant future. A climate voter would not be in favor of such a Justice being promoted.
So there you have it - I am a climate voter. I vote based on science and I vote while thinking about my kids and my descendants that I will never know.
You may not have thought of yourself as a climate voter. But it makes things simple. If you are concerned/worried/alarmed about where we are on climate and where we are going and if you can’t find any other issue that has the permanence of climate change if we mishandle it, then you are actually a climate voter, even if you didn’t recognize it yet.
It goes without saying that climate voters don’t forget to vote. They certainly don’t skip it intentionally. Climate voters make sure their vote for the climate counts.
And they tell their friends to vote...
So cast your ballot accordingly, for President and in any other race where there is a difference between the candidates on climate change. But don’t stop there. Be prepared to be engaged after the election. Whoever wins, the fight to address climate will need all-hands on deck, whether we are all pulling in the same direction or whether we have to waste precious time in a further tug-of-war.
Vote! Like everything depended on it. It does.
Dan
PS – if anyone who made it through the post above has any questions about climate change relative to how they would vote on it, and you have time for a chat or email exchange, I will try to answer your questions to the extent that our schedules mesh. Just reply to the email with which you received this blog.
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