By Kirk Kirkland

In a recent story in the Washington Post, Donald Trump offered a glimpse of his view of climate change and his desire to set the world on fire. In a meeting with oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago, he told the executives that they should contribute to his campaign, that his policies would be much better for oil and gas than President Biden’s and that he’d do much of what they wanted “on Day 1.”

If he is elected, on the first day in office, he will remove the opportunity for keeping the climate crisis from spiraling out of control. In fact, it could very well be slammed shut, according to author Stephen Markley, a novelist who wrote about climate change in 2010: “Global emissions must peak this decade and begin a rapid decline for the world to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic warming.”

“When I began writing my novel about global warming in 2010, we had something like 20 years to accomplish that task. After the election, we will have 62 months.”

This makes the 2024 election a singular event in the climate crisis. Despite a number of 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. The risks of the crisis are growing rapidly, but so is our capacity to confront this challenge at the speed and scale necessary. “We must accelerate that momentum at all costs,” said Markley.

Despite a one-vote margin in the Senate, Biden and the Democrats managed to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate legislation the country has ever seen. It is an even more important achievement than the Paris Climate Accord. In just two years, the bill 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 economy. These investments are expected to break records in clean energy production with a 40 percent increase in investments in clean energy and transportation over the last quarter of 2022.

As voters watch the criminal trails unfold as Trump is charged with various crimes that influenced the 2016 election, it becomes clear that this election will be historic and a turning point for life on Earth.  Last year alone, the warning signs of global warming were evident in soaring ocean temperatures, a record loss of Antarctic Sea ice, and the highest global average temperature in recorded human history.

Wildfires, droughts, floods and extreme weather of every variety are more severe than even leading climate scientists ever expected. The stakes of the climate crisis render the cliché “This is the most important election of our lifetimes” to be increasingly true as each year new average temperatures topple previous records.

Recently, the Heritage Foundation printed their Conservative Promise called Project 2025, a 900-plus-page road map for a second Trump administration. It calls for major repeal of the Biden Administration’s progress toward meeting the goals of United Nations Climate Conference, which recommends rapid reductions of fossil fuel use by the end of the decade.

• The Project 2025 report recommends repeal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which would shred the tax credits that have led to hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in clean energy, the jump-starting of factory openings and the creation of jobs in virtually every corner of the country. As for electric cars, which are critical to meeting the nation’s climate goals, the report recommends an end to all federal mandates and subsidies.
• It calls for granting permits for fossil fuel drilling and pipelines almost anywhere. It would also scrap the methane fee on oil and gas producers and dismantle new pollution limits on cars, trucks and power plants.
• Project 2025 proposes dismantling and privatizing parts of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency that studies and monitors the climate, and recommends using an executive order to “reshape” the Global Change Research Program. Without this annual assessment of the pace of climate change and the potential impact, society will not have the government-funded research or even the ability to assess the scientific reality of our situation.
• Trump is at heart a billionaire doing favors for other billionaires by cutting their taxes and eliminating or not enforcing rules that protect the rest of us from asthma and cancer.
• What Project 2025 demonstrates is that an enormous amount of thinking has gone into how to destroy the government’s capacity to enforce environmental protections. Of course, the worst-case scenario, a full or partial repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, will depend on the composition of Congress after the November election.

While it’s true the United States continues to produce record amounts of fossil fuels and near-record amounts of oil, these numbers reflect the previous energy policies of the past 15 years. The Inflation Reduction Act and several critical regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency will drive the decarbonization that should put us within striking distance of the Paris Accord target by 2030, something that seemed unfathomable four years ago.

Passing the Inflation Reduction Act would not have been possible without the stunning victory by Stacey Abrams and her allies in Georgia to flip two U.S. Senate seats in 2020, giving President Biden a Senate majority he can work with.

Progress is also underway on the state and local levels. In the last four years, Democrats have led efforts in Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Michigan to pass ambitious climate laws when voters demanded it. Washington’s Governor Inslee and the Legislature passed a cap-and-trade bill that raised over $1 billion to be used for sequestering carbon and reducing carbon emissions.

What we have seen in the first quarter of this year is that democracy is working at every level to achieve climate change goals. To continue this effort, it calls for an “all hands on deck” effort to elect environmentally-engaged public officials at every level of government, from cities and counties to statewide and federal offices.

“We must look at this election and understand that it’s now or never — that we can create the opportunity for the United States to smash past its emission reduction goals and spur the rest of the world to follow,” said Markley. “The choice for the planet begins with either supporting Mr. Biden’s re-election or watching as Mr. Trump and his allies set fire to the planet.”

It is time to recognize that this election is the crisis that will define this century. Our fossil fuel system is driving the planet to a set of conditions that humanity has never before experienced. Yet, this climate crisis is also an opportunity. If Congress and the President are able to work together, we can continue the momentum of the last four years and create an equitable and prosperous world. The November election will also be a crucial historic decision that could save human habitation as we know it.

Here at the Environmental Coalition of Pierce County, in the coming months we will provide articles and endorsements of candidates in Congress, our state Legislature, and Pierce County. These elected officials can work together to create a more sustainable and equitable future.

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Information for this story comes from novelist Stephen Markley from the Heritage Foundation, and other stories published in the New York Times and Washington Post in April 2024.  

In 2010, Markley wrote a novel about the climate crisis called the “The Deluge” in which he depicted chaotic weather, record temperatures and human existence at a tipping point when the damage becomes irreversible and the foundations of human society begin to crack.