Climate Triage
How do we stop climate havoc? First, stop the bleeding. Here’s how.
“But,” you ask, with a nod of the head and a pursing of the lips. “With respect to dealing with climate havoc, what is correct action?” In response, a thousand experts also nod their heads and purse their lips. “Well,” they begin, and they give a thousand different answers.
We can sift and sort those thousand answers in a thousand different ways. We can make lists, we can alphabetize, we can divvy them up metaphorically or logistically or locally. Or we can take a dart, and fling it thunk! at our Practical Action dartboard.
Thunk. Pull the needle, and an answer is revealed:
Vote. (Vote?) Vote.
Think of it as triage: first you must stop the bleeding. And there is so much bleeding.
- The current administration began its assault on our shared environment after barely two weeks in office, by signing onto a Republican effort to overturn rules restricting the pollution of streams and waterways around coal plants. Republicans referred to the rules as the Obama administration’s “War on Coal,” and claimed that the rules were too restrictive and expensive for the coal industry.
- The EPA recently rolled back rules restricting methane emissions. Methane is a super-potent greenhouse gas that warms the planet by roughly 80 times as much as normal carbon. Industry groups had claimed the rules were too restrictive and expensive.
- The EPA also made it easier for companies to dispose of coal ash, the toxic sludge left over after coal has been burned. Coal ash contains concentrated levels of lead, chromium and arsenic, and is the same stuff that Hurricane Florence recently sent streaming toward Wilmington, North Carolina. Industry groups had claimed the rules were too restrictive and expensive.
- The EPA, the busy little toxic bee of the current administration, has also made it easier for companies to pollute the air, by striking down a Clinton-era provision that designated limits on major polluters. Industry groups; rules; restrictive and expensive etc.
- In a recent article celebrating the current administration’s disavowal of the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, acting EPA head Andrew Wheeler (a former lobbyist for the coal industry) wrote that “our proposal would permit states to make energy decisions based on what works best for them rather than what the federal government tells them to do. The era of top-down, one-size-fits-all federal mandates is over.” Yet that same federal agency wants to eliminate the right of several states, led by California, to set their own (lower) emissions standards. An executive with the National Association for Manufacturers said of this top-down federal mandate that “ultimately, manufacturers need a single national program that provides regulatory certainty and maintains vehicle affordability.”
And, and, and. Attacks on the Endangered Species Act; and the proposed elimination of scientific studies of climate change (as well as striking it from a list of national security hazards); and a substantial reduction of national monument lands; and the suspension of a research project studying health risks to people who live near mountaintop-removal coal mines. A much (much) longer list, updated regularly, can be found courtesy of National Geographic.
Scientists howled at each of these changes. They cited facts, and paled at the realization that facts have nothing to do with what is happening. (Industry groups; restrictive; expensive.) But most of the changes cited above are reversals or roll-backs from actions taken by the previous administration, which demonstrates that there is, constitutionally, one inescapable fact, one truth that must be observed: voting.
If you dislike what the current administration is doing, vote for different people next time. What’s remarkable about this solution is its simplicity: do this one thing, take this one action, and the ills listed above, most if not all of them, get set right again.
Certainly there are challenges to voting, as well. Gerrymandering, voter-roll purges, voter ID programs designed to restrict minorities from casting ballots, voting-machine hacking, foreign interference in elections, dark money, and so on. But what has been demonstrated over time is that these tactics are only effective, they only change the outcome of an election, when that election is already close. Bush/Gore in 2000 (the pre-election purge of voters in Florida accounts for Bush’s win), and Trump/Clinton in 2016 (107,000 votes in three key states made the difference). When the election is not close, as with Mr. Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012, the usual voter-suppression tactics had no appreciable effect.
We must vote in our numbers. The result must be too big to rig.
Failure to vote means more changes such as the ones listed above. More pollution in streams and rivers, more poisons in the air, more greenhouse gases, more severe storms, rising seas, displacement of masses of people, conflict and war and death.
First, triage. First, stop the bleeding. Just get out there and vote. Democracy is defined, created, and sustained by the active participation of we the people. If you don’t vote, you don’t believe in democracy and you don’t care about the welfare of your nation or the world. Simple as that, and just as simple to do.
Too big to rig. Remember that.
