The climate crisis isn’t coming. It is here now. Look all around us. Devastating back-to-back hurricanes in Florida and the Southeast. Massive wildfires out West. Record inland flooding in places like Vermont and Tennessee. Even places once thought of as safe havens from climate disasters—like Asheville, North Carolina—are facing the devastating reality that none of us are safe from the climate crisis.
It is impacting everything, from our lives and livelihoods to our food systems and national security. Now it needs to impact our vote in this election.
As the events of the last few weeks have shown, we have no time to spare. We must elect leaders who will tackle the crisis at the necessary scale and scope. Unless we do, the recent climate disasters will be only a preview of much worse to come.
Residents are rescued from an their second story apartment complex in Clearwater that was flooded from and overflowing creek due to Hurricane Milton on October 10, in Florida.
BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images
And when it comes to the climate crisis, the choice before voters this election could not be starker.
The Biden-Harris administration has done more to address the climate crisis than any administration in history—with Vice President Kamala Harris frequently taking the lead. She has helped advance the administration’s commitment to reducing the impact of fossil fuels both domestically and internationally. In her role as president of the Senate, it was Harris who cast the tie-breaking vote for legislation that was the largest-ever investment in fighting the climate change. And she played a leading role in getting nearly 200 countries to take the historic step of agreeing to a global pact to transition away from fossil fuels—a first in the nearly 30-year global effort to address the climate crisis.
Harris knows the climate crisis is real, understands the need for urgent action, and has placed fighting the crisis at the center of her campaign. As she stated on the debate stage with former President Donald Trump, “Climate change is very real. You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who now is either being denied home insurance or it’s being jacked up; you ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go.”
And the vice president is not new to this fight. She has been a champion of climate justice at every point in her career. As district attorney in San Francisco, she established the first environmental justice unit in the country. And as attorney general of California, she proudly prosecuted oil companies and polluters, including multinational Goliath Chevron.
The vice president’s record and vision for addressing the climate crisis stand in dramatic contrast to that of Trump. As president, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies, setting back our effort to fight the climate crisis for decades while making it far easier to pollute our air, water, and land. If he is elected to a second term, he has told us to expect a repeat of all that, and far worse. We need to believe him.
Recently, after calling climate change a hoax, Trump told a room full of oil executives that he wanted them to raise over $1 billion for his campaign. He effectively gave them carte blanche to set the climate agenda in his second term.
These very oil and gas executives would be working hand in glove to set energy policy with allies who have already laid out a second-term policy agenda in their Project 2025 plan. That plan advocates for the United States to once again withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, as well as for the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act. It would gut the Environmental Protection Agency and make deep cuts at the Department of Energy. It would undermine climate science. And it would boost both subsidies to oil companies and the profits of Trump’s oily friends, while increasing energy costs for hard-working American families in states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by hundreds of dollars every year.
Trump has made clear that if he is re-elected, he will not only roll back the progress we’ve made over the last three years in tackling the climate crisis but will seek to roll back the last three decades worth of successes.
And we simply cannot afford that. Month after month and year after year, we are setting new weather records, and it is the direct result of the climate crisis.
The plain truth is that we are running out of time to act. And we certainly can’t afford to go backward. Just ask the people in Florida, Georgia, or North Carolina. The climate crisis has had an impact on everything in their lives. And it is increasingly having an impact on everyone, everywhere.
Now, it has to impact all of our votes too.
Michelle Deatrick is the founder and chair of the DNC Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
