On Tuesday night, as election results poured in, I sat on a rock on the coast of Rhode Island and watched the moon set. As a mother, grandmother, and climate activist, I felt despair and grief.
Climate change wasn’t on the ballot this election cycle. The subject barely made the debate stage, although one candidate once referred to it as a hoax while his newly designated most trusted advisor, who has made a fortune on electric vehicles, can’t go that far but says the impacts are highly exaggerated. The other candidate was busy reassuring a certain bloc of voters that we are pumping out more fossil fuels than ever before—and exporting them to countries to burn as well—even while her own president had made historic, transformative investments in clean energy and transportation. I know: politics. But the enormous job creation—in red and blue state—as a result of historic approaches to reining in climate pollution? Barely mentioned as a Democratic achievement. Addressing the urgent need to cut the sources of global warming was never made a defining issue for voters.
Except in one enormous and fundamental way: This was an election pervaded by dread. First, because click bait was weaponized as never before in the service of sowing hatred, fear, anger—those wild emotions we all have, regardless of political affiliation—and second, because this election took place in an envelope of extreme weather events, the likes of which we have also never before seen: massive flooding, record-breaking heat waves, devastating wildfires, catastrophic storms, considerable loss of life, home, and community.
Everything I and the millions of others who fought so hard to achieve in beginning to secure a healthy planet into the future is imperiled. Rather than wallow in defeat, though, I propose that we face our dread head-on and use it to galvanize our advocacy. Global warming’s negative impacts transcend parties and red-blue-purple state lines. It is very real, very powerful, and a fundamental part of the DNA of the fear we are all feeling. No, we did not vote for an administration that would deal with this problem. But equally, people did not vote to destroy the stability of our planetary climate.
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The urgency to address the problem is equally real and powerful. Consider that the National Centers for Environmental Information reports there have already been two dozen climate disasters costing more than $1 billion each and the loss of hundreds of lives this year alone. We know that these numbers, both financial and human, will continue to rise because climate change will continue to intensify extreme weather catastrophes, from stronger hurricanes to more prolonged droughts and wildfire seasons, searing heat waves, and continual flooding. As the devastation of Hurricanes Helene and Milton made agonizingly clear, climate change is literally shifting the ground we are standing on.
Global warming is also placing enormous pressures on migration patterns. People must leave places where they cannot farm, feed families, or have jobs. They must leave places where they are no longer able to share in what are dwindling resources and that have been degraded beyond salvaging, polluted, or poisoned by industrial and chemical processes.
All of this has a detrimental effect on all of us, across all aisles. Of great concern is the physical and mental health of our children and grandchildren and those of generations to come. We know that children who are exposed to air pollution, toxic chemicals, and other negative impacts of climate change are more likely to develop and have worse responses to respiratory, infectious, and neurological diseases. They are also subject to greater sadness, anxiety, depression, and even suicide ideation.
With this scenario as the backdrop, I’ve been thinking a great deal about why and when we turn to authoritarian figures. We think, magically, that they will have the answers and save us. And we think that because they express and manipulate our deepest fears.
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We will see how things unfold; we will see if this administration delivers any of its promises. But one thing for sure is that we should be very wary of thinking there is a single panacea. That’s magical thinking, too.
In the meantime, as a country and as human beings, we would be wise to find ways to cut the pollution that is warming the Earth; we must cut across the polluted politics that are distorting our ability to see this reality. As parents and grandparents who love and care for our children and grandchildren we must continue to fight, we cannot give up. Sure, we will be up against a president and an administration with exactly zero interest in a strong and protective Environmental Protection Agency—much less any interest in protecting our children from the assault on the stability and health of our world.
But sitting on that rock the other night, tiny twinkles of light at the horizon, breaking the deep endless darkness of the sea, caught my eye. It took me a moment to remember these were the lights of the newly installed wind turbines from the first offshore wind farm providing power to the state. And I felt hope.
