In thinking about climate change, I often feel desperate, but in talking with others I try not to lead with despair. Like all human emotions, despair is contagious. Worse, it leads to immobility, and we have run out of time for hand-wringing. If ever we must resist the temptation to fall into despair, surely it is now, with the election polls so close and the future of the planet hanging on what happens Tuesday.
A lot of other things hang on what happens Tuesday, too, as The Times has deeply reported over the last weeks in a series called “What’s at Stake in the 2024 Election.” As president, Donald Trump could destroy the stability of our institutions, including American democracy itself. He could further trample women’s reproductive safety and autonomy, terrorize immigrant Americans, roll back hard-won rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people, imperil what’s left of the impartiality of the courts and weaponize government to prosecute anyone he perceives as an enemy, end all hopes for curtailing gun violence, close off access to affordable health care, threaten the free press, and fray the social safety net in all its forms. And that’s just the beginning of an almost limitless list of dangers he poses.
Of them all, the one that most often keeps me up at night is the way a second Trump presidency would imperil the planet. Climate change, which Mr. Trump calls “a scam,” is a threat multiplier: Every existing global conflict, every human vulnerability and every form of social instability is already being exacerbated by climate calamities. There is no issue on the political table that will not be made exponentially worse if we allow the living earth to enter its death throes, and yet climate has rarely been part of the political discourse during this election year.
So maybe it’s time to lead with despair. With so many voters still undecided in this election, and so many others planning to vote for neither of the major-party candidates, maybe it’s time to be explicit about just how bad things are right now and how much worse they stand to get if voters allow Mr. Trump to return to the White House. Where planetary survival is concerned, it is too late to sit out an election on principle, or to cast a vote for a third-party candidate.
“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” begins a report published last month in the journal BioScience. “Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled,” it continues. “We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”
What is happening right now — the heat waves, the extreme weather events, the melting sea ice, the human suffering and the suffering of other creatures — has been predicted by climate scientists for more than 50 years. The difference today is that we can see what’s happening with our own eyes. When a hurricane takes out a huge swath of Appalachia — a hurricane in Appalachia! — it ought to be abundantly clear that as a species we are in profound danger. Most people know this.
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