On all fronts, Biden and Trump are more divided than ever on just about every important issue that comes to mind, so climate change is just one of many hot spots for the election. Despite political charades designed to keep the American public from focusing on any single issue for more than a day or two, we must discover and exploit the power that we have to at least keep climate risks in the rotation with the clear goal of stopping Mr. Trump’s return to the Oval Office.
Distraction is not the only challenge for socially motivated warriors. Damaging polarization is being amplified by Trump’s threatening to oversee a decline of democracy at home and abroad and fueled by deliberate campaigns of disinformation from his largest donors and most ardent supporters. It should surprise no one at this point that supporters of programs designed to promote their own “personal security” have been successful in implementing a decades-long strategy to prevent concerns about the “public good” from ever harming their own individual privilege.
When it comes to climate change, most Republicans fiercely believe that climate change is a hoax, and they support their dubious statements to that effect by citing biased scientists who work for apparently reputable but politically engaged consulting organizations; wolves in sheep’s clothing, they are.
Democrats usually accept the science as it stands and they understand that even the uncertainties that litter the state of our knowledge about the climate system cannot be used as an excuse for not acting. They support investment in climate actions that are, at their core, risk-reducing insurance policies: abatement (mitigation) efforts to lower the likelihood of extreme events, adaptation projects to ameliorate their consequences, and recovery programs to help citizens cope with the residual damages.
On state and local levels, investments in climate action may not change if either candidate were elected at the top of the ticket, but those investments are vulnerable to down-ticket results in state-wide elections all the way down to concentrations of local power like boards of education.
At the federal level, we know exactly what would happen almost overnight after a Trump inauguration next January. Trump would immediately pull us out of the Paris Accord, defund research and enforcement activity across every federal agency, fire everybody in all of the agencies who has been working on climate change (or has otherwise said bad things about his reactionary policies), defund the $600 million in clean energy and direct climate benefit that was included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, eliminate the Climate Policy Office and its position in the President’s Cabinet, and so on.
How do we know? Because these immediate actions would simply return the government in Washington to where it was at the end of his first four years in office. We have already tried that experiment, and so we know the result if we try it again. That gravity and taxes are the only certainties left in this world.
So, what could climate activists do to preserve and enlarge climate action if Trump were elected in November? My colleagues and I have tried to write something about that. We worked for months brainstorming inside and outside of our sandboxes, but we came up with nothing.
We have decided that we all have to act before election day, but we recognize that those efforts will be hamstrung by a media that never seems to focus on any one policy issue that Trump announces for any significant length of time. This makes it impossible for the public to focus on the depths and consequences of his proposals. The reason for that is simple: Trump regularly and persistently moves the media’s and thus the public’s attention from one shiny object to the next. His campaign thrives on creating chaos, delay, and distraction so that the electorate does not see clearly that his policies on Ukraine, NATO, Gaza, the economy, women’s rights to 21st-century medical care, democracy, immigration, social security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and climate change (to name a few) would all unnecessarily cause people to die across the country and around the world starting early in the four years of his second term and lasting well into the middle of this century.
In response to this ADHD-like public disorder, climate action activists must be savvy as they work to keep voters constantly aware of climate change and climate risk. But what specifically can they do alone? They can accept help from a higher power – Mother Nature. News media of all sorts will continue to report extreme climate-related events daily and those reports should always end with something like “This event, or course, is only the most recent of the litany of events that are all signature hallmarks of human-induced climate change”. That might work, but only if people are paying close attention.
Perhaps, though, climate activists and activists working on other “black and white” issues that are single-issue litmus tests for many voters could turn the Trump campaign strategy into a source of strength by effectively leveraging their collective voting blocks to amplify their individual efforts. Imagine a campaign season where the strategy of rapidly and persistently switching attention from one issue to the next highlights dozens of “I can never vote for Trump” for distinct blocks of voters. What if those blocks came to understand that Trump is just feeding his base what they want to hear by shooting glancing jabs at people whose narrow concerns are irrelevant to the candidate himself?
There are large blocks of these people who have coalesced around a single issue; they are concerned about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, women’s rights to 21st-century medical care, democracy, equity in the distribution of access to personal security, or even climate change. Creating a united “never Trump” front by tying those blocks together could be quite encouraging. What if “I could never vote for Trump” could be convinced not to stop halfway in their dissent? What if they decided that “I must vote for Biden”? Why? Because they see that well-informed and equally passionate voters across the widespread single-issue phenomenon have also decided that they cannot vote for Trump but for a different reason. If members of a single voting block were convinced that Trump is so wrong in his policies about so many issues, they would not be alone in taking a “never Trump” position. Then they might realize that it is not sufficient just to take their votes away from him. They have to vote for the only candidate who can actually beat Trump despite their secondary reservations about other things. They might decide, in short, that they “must vote for Biden” and work to make sure that their other single-issue compatriots do the same.
Were all of that to happen (and it won’t be easy), Trump’s numbers would fall and Biden’s numbers rise – a feasible opportunity for a powerful “twofer” that must be seized before it is too late. After all, what other choice do we have?