270 Reasons: Because Now Is the Time to Fight for Our Planet
Our friends at 270 Reasons are gathering a polyphonic orchestra of brilliant writers, teachers, doctors, filmmakers, artists, and citizens of all kinds to weigh in about their plans to vote this November. These opinion essays run the gamut from advocacy for basic human rights to acutely personal mini-manifestoes. Read the rest over at 270 Reasons.
Because Now Is the Time to Fight for Our Planet
The last eighteen months have seen the hottest temperatures in at least the last 125,000 years on our planet. That’s come with fire, flood, storm, drought, and death.
The last eighteen months have also seen—finally—the onset of the renewable energy revolution. We’re now installing a gigawatt of solar panels (about a nuclear power plant’s worth) on this earth every day.
November 5 will play a huge role in which of these trends accelerates fastest.
If Kamala Harris wins, she and Tim Walz will continue the work begun under Joe Biden to build out sun and wind power across the US; the IRA law is already translating into battery factories and offshore wind farms, and that can and should develop unstoppable momentum over the next four years. We live on a planet where pointing a sheet of glass at the sun is now the cheapest way to produce power—those economics, combined with a continuing political shove, would mean that by decade’s end we could break the back of Big Oil’s political power. We won’t stop global warming, but we will at least be able to slow it down.
Or we could choose Donald Trump, who has promised on day one to “stop wind” and “drill, drill, drill.” In fact, he’s said he’ll rule as a “dictator” to make sure that happens. Project 2025 is the playbook for his first year in office, and it involves thwarting every effort in the federal government to deal with climate—including shutting down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which maintains the thermometers that measure the ever-rising temperature. After that, there’ll be no problem…
The last time he had power, Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris Agreement—suddenly, the country that has put the most carbon into the atmosphere was the only government on Earth not involved in the effort to slow down the climate crisis. That’s clearly his plan again, and when he succeeds, it will provide cover for every other oligarch on the earth, his buddies in Russia and Riyadh chief among them. And all the while he’ll chortle, as he did with Elon Musk, about how climate change will “create more oceanfront property.”
Eventually, the sun and wind will win out—they’re all but free. But “eventually” doesn’t do us much good. The world’s climate scientists have declared we have to cut emissions in half by 2030 to have any chance of staying on the path we set in Paris just eight years ago. The next presidential inauguration will be in 2029. That means this is the election that matters for our future; we won’t get another try.
Bill McKibben wrote the first book about climate change, way back in 1989; he’s the founder of Third Act, which organizes Americans over sixty for action on climate and democracy.
Read more essays (with new ones added every day) at 270reasons.com.
The arguments here represent the opinion of the authors and not necessarily those of the McSweeney’s Literary Arts Fund.