This Is Not Complicated

It is almost done. After a truly absurd amount of time, Election Day nears, and while I refuse to believe there are more than a handful of detached weirdos out there still pondering which of the two presidential candidates to vote for, there are likely quite a few who might still be nudged out the door to bother.

And so: a small attempt at such a nudge. There are many, many reasons to vote for literally any sentient being who is opposing Donald Trump, but here I will stick with the one I know best: Trump’s explicit, stated climate policy plans are to make everything about the issue worse.

This is not hyperbole. He would likely pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, throwing international progress into chaos. He would rescind at least half a dozen Biden executive orders on emissions, drilling, and other issues, rolling back some of the current administration’s progress. He wants to repeal some or all of the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate bill in history that is on track to provide more than $1 trillion to green projects over this decade — or at very least make the law’s unspent dollars hard or impossible to access.

Because oil industry titans like him, he likes them back, and will pull any lever they whisper about in his ear in order to ramp up the already-record-setting production and exports. He will appoint various anti-regulation ghouls to run places like the EPA and Interior Department. Along with a friendly Congress, he would try and hamstring the agencies trying to study the changing climate, from NASA to NOAA and the US Geological Survey, pulling funding or just outright canceling projects and missions.

In short, there is no angle to climate policy that a second Trump term would not make worse. It won’t happen by neglect or as an ancillary effect of some other policy or plan, but by specific design — drill more, pollute more, emit more, warm more. There may be no issue with so sharp a contrast between him and Kamala Harris.

And so, the nudge. In many states, you could go vote today, if Tuesday doesn’t appeal. It is almost over; let’s keep this simple.