Nobody wants to vote for climate change – right? | Opinion

The climate crisis is not coming. It’s here now. Look around us. Devastating back-to-back hurricanes in Florida and the Southeast. Huge fires in the west. Record inland flooding in places like Vermont and Tennessee. Even places once considered safe havens from climate disasters – like Asheville, North Carolina – are facing the devastating reality that none of us are safe from the climate crisis.

It affects everything from our lives and livelihoods to food systems and national security. Now it must influence our vote in this election.

As the events of recent weeks have shown, we have no time to waste. We must elect leaders who will address the crisis on the scale and scope necessary. If we don’t do this, recent climate disasters will only be a harbinger of much worse to come.

And when it comes to the climate crisis, the choice before voters in this election could not be starker.

The Biden-Harris administration has done more to address the climate crisis than any administration in history — and its leadership has often been taken by Vice President Kamala Harris. She helped increase the administration’s commitment to reducing the impact of fossil fuels both at home and abroad. As president of the Senate, Harris cast the deciding vote in favor of legislation that represents the largest-ever investment in the fight against climate change. She also played a leading role in getting nearly 200 countries to take the historic step of agreeing to a global pact to phase out fossil fuels – a first in nearly 30 years of global efforts to address the climate crisis.

Harris knows the climate crisis is real, understands the need for urgent action, and has put fighting the crisis at the heart of her campaign. As she stated on the debate stage with former President Donald Trump: “Climate change is very real. Ask anyone living in the state who has experienced these extreme weather events and is now either denied or upped for home insurance; ask anyone who has been a victim what this means in terms of losing their home and having nowhere to go.”

And the vice president is not new to this fight. She has advocated for climate justice at every stage of her career. As district attorney in San Francisco, she founded the nation’s first environmental justice unit. As California’s attorney general, she proudly prosecuted oil companies and polluters, including multinational Goliath Chevron.

The vice president’s experiences and vision for solving the climate crisis contrast dramatically with Trump’s. As president, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies, setting back our efforts to combat the climate crisis for decades while making it much easier to pollute our air, water and land. If he is elected to a second term, he told us to expect all of this to happen again, and even worse. We have to believe him.

Trump recently called climate change a hoax to a room full of oil executives that he wants them to raise more than $1 billion for his campaign. He effectively gave them carte blanche to set a climate agenda for his second term.

These oil and gas executives will work hand-in-hand to set energy policy with allies who have already set the political agenda for a second term in their Project 2025 plan. This plan calls for the United States to withdraw again from the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act. It would gut the Environmental Protection Agency and cause deep cuts to the Department of Energy. This would undermine climate science. It would increase both subsidies to oil companies and the profits of Trump’s oil friends, while increasing energy costs by hundreds of dollars for hard-working American families in states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Trump has made it clear that if re-elected, he will not only reverse the progress we have made over the last three years in tackling the climate crisis, but he will seek to undo the successes we have achieved over the last three decades.

And we simply can’t afford it. Month after month and year after year we are setting new weather records, and this is a direct result of the climate crisis.

The truth is that we are running out of time to act. And we certainly cannot afford to go backwards. Just ask people in Florida, Georgia or North Carolina. The climate crisis has affected everything in their lives. This is having an increasing impact on everyone, everywhere.

Now it must have an impact on all our voices too.

Michelle Deatrick is the founder and chair of the DNC Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.