I’m often critical of the New York Times, but I’m grateful for today’s magnificent Opinion piece by Stephen Markley. He illuminates the choice we have in the 2024 election:
We must look at this election and understand that its now or never... The climate movement can either fight like hell for Mr. Bien’s re-election or watch a Mr. Trump and his allies set fire to the planet.
Markley lauds Biden for the breakthrough Inflation Reduction Act, “the most significant climate legislation the country has ever seen and a more important achievement than the Paris climate accord.” This is something Biden did with a razor-thin Senate majority.
These investments are expeted to create more than nine million jobs over the next decade. That growth in clean energy is not only breaking records by the year but also by the quarter, with the end of 2023 seeing a 40 percent increase in investments to clean energy and transportation over the last quarter of 2023.
So what happens to this progress if Donald “I Hate Wind” Trump is elected? Markley rightly notes that what saved us from utter calamity in 2016 — Trump’s tiny attention span, ignorance, and fecklessness in navigating the D.C. establishment — will not save us this time. This time, the hard-right Fascist cabal of ideologues and corporate plutocrats are locked and loaded to vaporize whatever progress Biden has made. They’re salivating over the opportunity to set the planet on fire to caffeinate their stock prices. Trump’s marching orders from the shovel-ready-on-Day-One Project 2025 begins with this table-setter: “The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” Trump is commanded to:
- Repeal the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act
- End all federal mandates and subsidies for electric vehicles
- Grant permits for fossil fuel drilling and pipelines anywhere it can
- Dismantle new pollution limits on cars, trucks, and power plants.
- Seek repeal of the Antiquities Act (used to protect endangered landscapes) and attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act
- Dismantle and privatize parts of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (that studies climate change.)
- Use an executive order to “re-shape the Global Change Research Program” to muddy its findings and cripple its impact
In other words, reverse all the progress we made, empower the worst polluters, and destroy the government’s ability to communicate an accurate picture of what’s going on. Trump will stock his administration on Day One with voracious, nihilistic scumbags who will rush us toward a calamity that will render this beautiful blue marble uninhabitable by humans. I’ll give the final word to the magnificent Mister Markley:
Climate is not just another issue. I do not deny that we live in a complex and precarious world or that our consciences are torn by a web of domestic challenges and geopolitical upheavals. But we are in denial if we do not recognize that this is the crisis that will define this century, and if we fail, the entire human future. Our fossil fuel system is driving the planet to a set of conditions that humanity has never experienced, where even the imagination of novelists will fail us.