eningly what they tell us is if we don’t get our act together and make
massive changes away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sus-
tainable energy within the next eleven years, the damage done to
our country and the rest of the world will be irreparable.” Elizabeth
Warren said, “How have we gotten ourselves into this mess? How
has it gone this long when the climate science year after year after
year has told us it’s getting more and more dangerous out there, it’s
getting worse and worse for life on this earth?”
Pete Buttigieg said, “This is the hardest thing we will have done cer-
tainly in my lifetime as a country. This is on par with winning World
War II, perhaps even more challenging than that.” Beto O’Rourke
said, “We can convene the ingenuity, the innovation of the private
sector. We can lead from the public sector through those parameters
and mandates that we set. We can perform to that, and we can lead the
world on the greatest challenge that we’ve ever had.” And Cory Book-
er said, “I’ve watched presidential campaigns [and never] have we ev-
er had a forum like this discussing
what it is for humanity, as has been
said by every single candidate, the
most existential crisis to our coun-
try and to the planet Earth.”
It was a remarkable chorus of
warnings and of determination,
and it was completely appropriate
to the crisis at hand. Unfortunate-
ly, it also was a campaign event in
the presidential race of 2020. One
of these people would have to run
against an incumbent who forges
weather maps to make himself
look less ridiculous, and who once
blamed the climate crisis on clev-
er Chinese scientists, a president
who brags about pulling the United
States out of the Paris climate ac-
cord. And in the difference between
that forum and this president lies
an existential question just as pro-
found as the one that the climate
crisis poses to the world at large:
Are the political system and insti-
tutions of the United States strong
enough to confront the kind of chal-
lenge that the climate crisis pres-
ents? Can we work existential ques-
tions into what has become a spavined national political dialogue?
On the day before the town hall, Politico, the Beltway’s most suc-
cessful tip sheet, ran a long story about how the climate crisis could
cause problems for the Democrats in the upcoming election. It wedged
the climate crisis into the procrustean context of both interparty and
intraparty conflict. How far is too far? Is the vaunted Green New Deal
too far? Is it the equivalent on the Democratic side of the climate de-
nial championed by the White House and supported by the Repub-
lican party? The Politico piece was a judicious evaluation as far as it
went, but it left out one important element:
The oceans don’t care who wins the election. It doesn’t matter to
a hurricane whether a Democratic member of Congress represent-
ing a “red” district is troubled by what his constituents might see
as extremist policies to meet the emergencies. You can’t spin them.
The parking lot will fall into the lake even if your plan polls well in
Iowa, where the droughts will ruin the crops whether or not you
carry Mahaska County.
What we have is a monumental election aimed at prying the gov-
ernment out of the hands of grifters and con men and profiteers. That
would be hard enough all on its own. But it is being conducted with
this enormous rolling catastrophe going on barely offstage. Just as it
can be argued that this election may be a turning point in our com-
mitment to republican self-government—as reelecting the current
president would mean endorsing everything he’s done to destroy the
delicate checks and balances built into the system and, therefore, to
admit to ourselves that we don’t believe anymore not only in their
ability to secure the promises of the Constitution but also in our ca-
pacity to govern ourselves at all—so it can be said that it also is a turn-
ing point in our commitment to a livable planet. We are running out
of chances in both of these.
Washington governor Jay Inslee talked about all of this. Inslee ran
for president specifically to address the climate crisis head-on. He
since has dropped out, but his brief effort had a major effect on the
race. Several of his erstwhile opponents, most notably Warren and
Castro, took the time to discuss his ideas for confronting the crisis.
Several months earlier, he’d sat at a picnic table overlooking the
Cedar River at a park outside Ce-
dar Rapids and someone asked him
if he thought that, in their present
state, America’s democratic insti-
tutions were capable of producing
a response equal to the magnitude
of a planetary crisis. At the time,
Inslee was pushing hard for a de-
bate among the Democratic can-
didates devoted entirely to the
climate crisis. That debate nev-
er happened, but the movement
for it produced the CNN town
hall as well as a later one, hosted
by MSNBC.
“When you have a threat to the
very survival of the nation, and
when the ability to surmount that
threat requires massive new tech-
nology, significant changes in vir-
tually everything we do, to expect
the public to be able to distin-
guish between candidates based on
sixty-second answers is just ludi-
crous,” Inslee said.
“It’s easy to hide in sixty sec-
onds....It’s very difficult to see
anything close to the meaningful
progress that you need. If you get
to the tipping point that I believe we’re at, then these profound chang-
es are possible. And I do believe in the theory that tipping points—
it’s happened on marriage equality, it’s happened on marijuana.
“There are moments where you get a tectonic shift, and I believe
we’re close to that. There’s the wave of urgency and the wave of prom-
ise. Both are spiking at the same time. The objective evidence [is]
there’s been a twelve-point rise in Americans who say we have to
do something about it. That’s significant. It’s the number-one issue
among Iowa primary voters now. Americans are coming to grasp it,
and it’s because of the visual imagery that they’re seeing. They’ve
seen it now on TV and in their neighborhood. ”
Every issue in this campaign is in some way about the climate cri-
sis. It doesn’t matter how good your health-care system is if epidemic
disease runs rampant. Your immigration policy could be the most ju-
dicious and humane ever devised and it’s stillTHE
OCEANS
DON’ T CARE
WHO WINS
THE ELECTION.
(continued on page 114)YOU CAN’T
SPIN
THEM.