By Annie Argento, Principal & Co-founder
Six of the 20 largest wildfires in recorded California history—including the largest ever. 500,000 people in Oregon—10 percent of the state’s population—facing fire-related evacuations. The Gulf Coast battered by one of the strongest hurricanes to hit the area 50 years—as the East Coast braces for a pipeline of massive storms queued up in the Atlantic. Ferocious windstorms and massive floods in the Midwest—devastating communities and denuding the farmland that sustains them. This is not the new normal. This is an acceleration of a longstanding destructive trend that will worsen without action. As Governor Gavin Newsom of California said in a recent Tweet: “CLIMATE. CHANGE. IS. REAL.”
This situation is not surprising to the sustainability community. We have been sounding the alarm on climate change and its impacts on our homes and families for decades. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence that extreme weather events are exacerbated by human emissions of greenhouse gasses, the federal government has moved us in exactly the wrong direction for nearly four years. Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, weakening emissions standards for cars, dismantling the Clean Power Plan, even rolling back lightbulb efficiency standards in place since 2007—this is the record of the Trump Administration. Another four years with a climate change denier heading an administration stuffed with fossil-fuel lobbyists and political hacks will cause irreparable harm.
It’s sad that this is the choice we face in 2020, with so little time left to turn the tide, yet here we are. At stake in 2020 are not only the future policies of Congress and the Executive Branch, but also the hearing those policies will receive from the Judiciary. With another four-year term, Trump will likely have three—perhaps even four—additional Supreme Court vacancies to fill. Given the general hostility of conservative jurisprudence to federal environmental legislation, aggressive action on climate change would be stymied by a Roberts Court with a 7-2 conservative majority. Our fate would be sealed.
But more and more Americans are rightly convinced that the dire situation we face from extreme weather is linked inextricably with climate change. This gives us one last chance. After totally ignoring the subject in 2016, the Committee on Presidential Debates is facing intense pressure from lawmakers and advocates to include a meaningful focus on the environment in the matchups between Trump and Joe Biden, who has proposed a plan to create a million clean-energy jobs and give America a healthier, more prosperous, and more sustainable future. The contrast will be clear and the choice will be obvious for the growing number of Americans who refuse to ignore the apocalyptic reality staring us in the face.