climate

Remember when we had a likable president? Those were the days, right? I voted for Obama, twice. And there were many things that the populace and media glossed over during his presidency. However, I never got the feeling the executive branch didn’t have a handle on things. Now, we have something else entirely. These last two years have been very strange.

Politics, right? Lots of people want to ignore it all. It’s exhausting. As we spent a few days in Galicia recently, the importance or pointlessness of politics came up in conversation. I vacillate between these points of view. Some days, I feel like ignoring it all, like many people do. If we paid less attention to these big egos who so desperately seek attention, wouldn’t things change?

Other days, I get a sense that the only real way to solve these big problems is through politics. It’s the twenty-first century and our industrialized society has left us with the responsibility of uniting to save our planet than at any other point of human history. I’m thinking an Independence Day scenario, where instead of aliens it’s CO2 emissions.

But if I internalize the second stance today, I need to throw my voice into the ether. Can we not elect another Barack Obama?

Branko Marcetic points out in his article for Jacobin about why Beto O’Rourke shouldn’t run for president:

If the Democratic Party ever wants to actually wield national power, instead of simply enacting change through easily repealable executive orders, then it has to win governorships, congressional seats, statehouses, and more all over the country.

We can’t just elect a young, telegenic American. There needs to be a reawakening to ideology and big ideas like a Green New Deal, Medicaid for All, and free tuition. Kate Aronoff’s article in the Intercept on what a Green New Deal would be like really encapsulates this vision.

So, Bernie? Honestly, I don’t know. He’s older, but there aren’t many potential Democratic candidates that are so single-mindedly focused on economic issues concerning the country.

The United States can sink or swim after the rampant corruption of the Trump presidency. Let’s get ourselves ready for the future.

It’s 2018. We’ve seen enough extreme weather in just the last few years. But fundamentally changing the way our economy and society works to facilitate, you know, staying alive isn’t politically convenient. President Trump doesn’t believe the National Climate Assessment, which was released on Black Friday:

DAWSEY: You said yesterday when you were leaving that you were skeptical of a climate change report that the government had done. Can you just explain why you’re skeptical of that report? TRUMP: One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including — just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

Read that again. Oceans are small? Our air and water at a clean record? Almost 63 million people voted for this kind of nonsense.

Trump’s spokeswoman Sarah Sanders and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke both said the report was a “worst-case scenario”. One of the authors of the report responded on Twitter. Apparently, sixteen hundred pages of hard science need to be reduced to tweetstorms.

We will not wake up from his nightmare. It is here. Our grandchildren will be dealing with this. We can only keep talking about this. This is an Independence Day-level event, the one where we all need to work together to save the planet. Instead of aliens, it’s the pesky side effects of our globalization.

There are two movements I’ve seen in the US and U.K., The Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion. We need to disrupt the status quo.