Op-Ed Why we MUST vote for Biden
Originally published 9/30, 2020
Do you remember the poster from the 60s :“War is not healthy for children and other living things?” Now we're faced with an existential threat to all living things and the planet they inhabit.
I needn’t tell you about all the disastrous climate events happening around the world right now—just see the news. BUT, it’s not too late to stop the progression of the climate crisis. The media’s finally saying, “Oh, this is climate change.” I’m sorry but this isn’t climate change—that horse already left the barn. Now we have a Climate Emergency, a Climate Crisis, and a Climate Catastrophe. Meanwhile the President of the United States recently said, “It’ll just start getting cooler, you just watch,” and “… I don’t think science knows, actually,” (about climate change).We’ve had over 32 years of science telling us what’s going to happen—and it’s no longer in the future. It’s HERE, it’s NOW.
We must do everything we can to slow this process; the most important thing we can do right now is to VOTE and we have to vote for Biden.
Climate Change: evidence from Nasa: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
I keep hearing all the reasons people don’t want to do that. They say Biden isn’t tough enough on the climate situation (I’m just going to focus on climate issues as that’s my beat—but there’re many more reasons to retire the current occupant of the White House, reasons many people also say Biden isn’t strong enough on). Yes, Biden isn’t as strong as I’d like on many issues, but by comparison, he’s terrific.
Four years ago I wrote an op-ed for this paper about why I, as a Bernie-crat, supported Secretary Clinton. I want to quote from that piece.
“[In the 2000 election,] I had a dear friend who supported Ralph Nader and the Green Party, telling me, ‘we have to stand on principal,’ when I pointed out he was helping elect George W. Bush. He didn’t believe me, but in fact Nader’s nearly 100,00 votes in Florida would’ve well offset the 537 votes by which Bush won there.”
Had Florida not gone for Bush, we’d have been spared eight years of an incredibly bad presidency. (Of course then, I didn’t realize how bad it could really get.)
From the perspective of climate change, the US and the world would have been much better off with Al Gore as president, as we would have been with Hilary Clinton as president.
At that time, I wrote, “There are so many reasons why even four years of [his] presidency would be disastrous, more than I can begin to deal with here. So I will focus just on the one issue that is always my most important one—climate change.
“The current Republican candidate has said climate change is a ‘hoax;’ in his own words, he’s ‘not a big believer in man-made climate change.’ He said, that over billions of years, ‘certainly climate has changed’ and it goes up, it goes down,…we’ll see what happens.”
Unfortunately, we really couldn’t afford to wait and “see what happens;” we see the results all around us.
In 2018 in Japan, more than 1,000 people died during an unprecedented heat wave. In 2019, scientists proved it would have been impossible without global warming.
The map shows that global warming has caused “a pronounced increase in extremely hot days in the populated areas of Japan”, including Tokyo, the authors say in their research paper. [ https://www.carbonbrief.org/japans-deadly-2018-heatwave-could-not-have-happened-without-climate-change ]
