How much of a factor will the fossil fuel industry be in this Presidential election after having driven humanity to such unprecedented climate peril?
Will the next President of the United States be a climate crusader, invader or perhaps diplomatically somewhere in between?
First, I must tell you Mr. Trump I don’t always agree with you, but I like your energy, just wish it were a shade greener. I admire you for not pulling punches describing what you believe is happening to you. You call it as you see it, a witch hunt! Also, some of your friends are among my closest friends, like attorney Peter Ticktin.
I can remember back in the days before you were president, when you were just another charming, famous billionaire whom everyone wanted to meet. At parties at your Mar a Lago residence, despite your rock star status you couldn’t be friendlier.
You would tell PR guys like me to advise people we brought over to meet you that you’d prefer not shaking hands. Back then, I believe you had a bit of a Howard Hughs type germ phobia, but you were nowhere near reclusive or weird as was Hughs later in that billionaire’s eccentric life.
Today, I doubt a grand jury even in left-leaning Manhattan will vote unanimously to put you, a former president, in prison for just how you accounted for paying hush money. Why isn’t the word “understandable” in the legal dictionary?
But for climate change, I’m afraid we’re all accountable and we’d better not hush up, but speak loudly and clearly. Today we need “The Apprentice” in which you were the star, to corral a rampaging climate.
So, my dear former president, will you perform that climate highwire act? Sure, it’s risky, might cost you some fossil fuel friends, and you could fall, but I know you can do a brilliant balancing act, so everyone wins, including yourself.
Look at what we’re up against. In the 12 years it took Stephen Markley to write his climate crisis novel, “The Deluge,” chaotic weather, record high temperatures and shocking political events outpaced even his own vivid imagination.
His book depicts human tipping points, when the damage becomes irreversible and the foundations of our economy, politics and our world begin to splinter.
The plot Markley concocted in 2010 today has reached a steady drumbeat but how many candidates today are hearing it, let alone marching to it? How politically decisive or divisive will be our world approaching climate tipping points. What effect will it have on voter turnout, more importantly on the outcome?
Last year alone, the ocean temperature’s rising, the Antarctic Sea ice’s melting and the highest global average temperature in recorded human history became palpable warning signs we’re heading for unprecedented trouble.
Throw in the wildfires, droughts, floods and extreme weather, and there was enough to shock even the most stoic of scientists. How stoic is the electorate?
Climate’s role in politics
More of us are wondering if this global warming is the history we want to struggle to live through and we’ll just pity those who won’t make it. Soon those gears of history will grind together again as a presidential election meets climate chaos.
Will the high stakes of the climate crisis make the cliché “the most important election of our lifetimes” true?
According to Markley, “every four years those stakes climb precipitously alongside the toppling records of a radically new climatic regime.”
Therefore, Planetary Lifeguard™ says it’s incumbent upon the electorate to get up to speed on climate change and ask candidates where they stand, then consider carefully not only their respective positions, but their records.
There has been a great deal of reporting on Project 2025, a 900-plus-page road map for a second Trump administration assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation. On climate, the report is succinct: “The Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
The report recommends a repeal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act.
Would that shred the tax credits that have led to hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in clean energy, that helped jump-start factory openings and create jobs in virtually every corner of the country, wonders Planetary Lifeguard™?
Environmental justice
Could investments in environmental justice be lost, such as those measures that aim to reduce pollution in marginalized communities, provide affordable clean energy and create jobs in low-income neighborhoods? And what about electric cars so critical in meeting the nation’s climate goals. The report recommends an end to all such federal mandates and subsidies. Really?
Voters must ask if a second Trump administration would be more likely to grant permits for fossil fuel drilling and pipelines anywhere it can.
Would it scrap the methane fee on oil and gas producers and dismantle new pollution limits on cars, trucks and power plants?
Would it revoke California’s waiver to approve higher standards under the Clean Air Act?
Would Trump seek repeal of the Antiquities Act used to protect endangered landscapes and attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act?
And what about President Biden who sometimes looks like he needs to sit down. Yes, he’s all for electricity, but what about his own power? Is he losing steam?
Inflation Reduction Act
Will Biden relax his stand on the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate legislation the country has ever seen, greater than even the Paris climate accord?
Will Biden stay electrically energized and standing up behind the bill that has galvanized clean energy investment in the United States and set a pace for the rest of the world to compete in the growing clean energy economic revolution?
Will Biden stay active and awake enough to aggressively support and stay staunchly committed to investments expected to create more than nine million jobs over the next decade?
Planetary Lifeguard™ urges voters to ask if Biden will continue to support growth in clean energy that is stimulating dramatically increasing investments in both clean energy and transportation.
On the other side of the climate coin, voters need to ask if under a Trump presidency Project 2025 would dismantle and privatize parts of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency that studies and monitors the climate?
Would he issue an executive order to reshape the Global Change Research Program, to muddy its assessments of the pace of climate change and the potential impact?
Would any Presidential candidate ever want us to walk into this new dark era wearing a blindfold?
What to ask candidates
For the world to have a chance to avoid catastrophic warming, Planet Lifeguard™ says we should ask all candidates if global emissions must peak this decade and begin a rapid decline?
When Markley began writing his novel, we had something like 20 years to accomplish that task. After this election, we will have 62 months.
This makes the 2024 election a singular event in the climate crisis. Despite ever present headwinds, renewable energy capacity boomed last year, increasing 50 percent globally.
According to the International Energy Agency, global renewable capacity is on course to be at two and a half times current levels by 2030, which means the world is edging closer to achieving a key climate target of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030.
While the risks of climate crisis are growing rapidly, so is our capacity to confront this challenge at the speed and scale necessary.
Should we not accelerate that momentum at all costs, Mr. President, and continue re-industrialization through clean energy investment?
Investing in clean energy
As those industries of decarbonization spread to every state and to many congressional districts, are not people’s lives and livelihoods increasingly becoming intertwined and invested in clean energy?
Will not the increasing political and economic clout of those clean energy industries challenge the fossil fuel status quo?
Planetary Lifeguard™ sees the American economy on the threshold of a revolution where it will be driven more by green energy that will send manufacturing soaring and pollution plummeting.
Fellow Americans, would you vote for that?