The Climate


In the 1990s, I asked an atmospheric scientist why the scientific community had settled upon the term “global warming” to describe what was going on with the climate, instead of calling it “climate change.” There had been major blizzards in the Great Lakes areas, especially in the immediate vicinity of Buffalo, New York, and these blizzards had encouraged people to scoff “Global warming? I don’t think so,” since how could the earth be going through a dangerous warming if there were blizzards? The scientist’s response to me was, “That was a real mistake.” That was also before the startling increase in tornados across the Midwest, the hurricanes striking the eastern seaboard, the massive droughts leading to uncontainable wildfires in the western forests. And while these same weather-related events have occurred throughout my lifetime, never have they occurred with the frequency or the intensity of the present time.

Because of the wide-ranging devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene and now with the approach of yet another hurricane, I wanted to do a little digging to see what each political party’s platform proposes to meet the challenge of climate change. I learned a great deal.

First, I was surprised to learn that the current administration’s Inflation Reduction Act—which passed due to a tie-breaking vote by the Vice President—contained many elements that actually address the causes of global warming or climate change. As of this moment, those elements are:

1. Launching the American Climate Corps, which is a new workforce training and service initiative putting more than 20,000 young people to work on clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience projects nationwide

2. Creating an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Climate, modeled on the defense research agency that was behind technologies like GPS and the internet

3. Establishing a new national lab for climate research and innovation affiliated with an HBCU, Hispanic, or other minority-serving institution to ensure jobs and other opportunities for marginalized communities.

4. Continuing to invest in climate research across NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation to ensure more clean energy innovation.

5. Attracting over $400 billion in private sector commitments to develop and manufacture solar, wind, battery, and other clean technologies

6. Creating over 300,000 jobs in clean energy, including in factories to make batteries, electrical vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines

7. Funding farmers to adopt climate-smart practices, improve soil health, and restore water cycles (over 80,000 farms covering 75 million acres have so far adopted these practices)

8. Helping to quadruple the sales of electric vehicles by offering tax credits; doubling the funding to repair and expand active transportation and public transit

I found all of that fairly impressive, and I wondered why—amid all the noise of an election year—these gains ended up buried beneath all the social media posting and corporate-controlled cable news reporting that have been inundating us for months. I also wondered what, if anything at all, the Democrats had in mind to add to what the current administration has accomplished.

From my digging into the various offerings online, it appears that the Democrats’ plan is to build on the foundation laid down by the current President. There are billions of dollars available to implement the various projects, tax credits, and financial incentives to reduce radically the carbon emissions that are plaguing the planet. Clean energy is the ultimate goal, and creating clean energy jobs is one of the means to attain that goal. As of this writing, 585 new clean energy manufacturing projects are underway in 47 states and 81% of them are going into counties with below-average weekly wages. If past is prologue, perhaps it’s not irresponsible to look at what the Vice President did as Attorney General in the state of California to predict that she intends to hold Big Oil accountable for their part in polluting the planet. With her emphasis on more housing, perhaps we can also assume a commitment to clean building practices and energy efficient homes and apartments. Other than those prognostications on my part, we are still waiting to learn more about the candidate’s climate policies.

The GOP platform does not address climate change at all, aside from canceling the “electric vehicle mandate.” I admit to ignorance on what the mandate is. Exploring for a definition, I did discover that the current administration is committed to making 50% of all vehicles sold in the US emissions free by 2030. This could be the mandate to which the GOP Platform is referring.
Project 2025 offers a more specific plan to deal with climate change. Before I go into it, I would like to address the belief held by some people that the GOP candidate for President knows nothing about Project 2025 and had nothing to do with it. I would just note that 140 people from the previous GOP administration contributed to Project 2025 and that the name Donald Trump is mentioned 312 times in its pages.

Having said that, the following proposals are offered

1. Eliminating federal restrictions on drilling for fossil fuels on public lands

2. Curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies

3. Easing environmental permitting restrictions for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants

4. Within the Department of Energy, eliminating offices dedicated to clean energy research, scrapping energy efficiency requirements for household appliances; curbing or eliminating agencies that track methane emissions, manage environmental pollutants and chemicals, or conduct climate change research

5. Eliminating that Endangerment Finding, the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants; eliminating government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon or the damage each ton of emitted carbon causes.

6. Eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

7. Eliminating the National Weather Service, from which the National Hurricane Center pulls much of its data

8. Eliminating public weather data access

9. Eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program

All of this is, I expect, pretty dry material to read through. Indeed, there are many times when it just seems simpler to ignore everything and especially to ignore bad news. I’ve taken to watching competition cooking shows on television to take my mind off the elections, the candidates, what they’re saying and doing, who’s endorsing them, who is refusing to endorse anyone, etc. But at the end of the day we do have a choice when it comes to the issue of climate change or any other issue. We can hide our heads in the sand or take to drink or refuse to be drawn into political debate one way or the other. Only…all of this matters. The planet matters. The future of our children and grandchildren matters. Denying the truths that confront us daily is very easy because denying them means that we don’t have to do anything about them. Looking squarely at the truths in front of us and admitting they exist mean we’re going to have to act.

Elizabeth George
Seattle, Washington
October 8, 2024