Every election year, we hear the same things. We hear that the upcoming election will be “historic” or even “the most important election of our lifetime.”
I’ve been voting in presidential elections since 1968. There have been plenty of consequential ones in that time, but none as important as the 2024 presidential election – and not just for the reasons you might think.
It’s true that this time, Americans face a choice between a candidate who has spent her career upholding the rule of law and a man who praises dictators and says he’ll become one himself on his first day back in office. The stakes for our democracy could not be higher, but the same could be said for our climate.
Donald Trump has publicly promised the fossil fuel industry that if it commits $1 billion to get him reelected, he will use the power of the presidency to give them whatever they demand once he is in office. Publicly soliciting a bribe like that should disqualify Trump from office.
Pledging allegiance to industry shows Trump’s corrupt intent, but the fossil fuel industry is not the same as most others. Like tobacco and coal, it produces immense public harm in its pursuit of profits – and the cost of the destruction is borne by the society, not just the shareholders. In a recent speech at the United Nations, Secretary General António Guterres even dubbed fossil fuel companies the “godfathers of climate chaos” before calling on nations the world over to ban advertisements of petroleum products.
Not only do fossil fuel companies continue to market their products, but their marketing and misinformation are the only reasons we continue to rely so heavily on their fuels, especially in the electricity generation sector. Renewable energy is now less expensive than fossil fuels. But as Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University explained in The New York Times, the fossil fuel industry is manipulating the energy marketplace. At the same time, they’re influencing coverage about climate change and even school curricula and textbooks, all to keep the world addicted to carbon well after the damage it causes begins outweighing its usefulness.
Meanwhile, renewable energy has never been less of a partisan dividing line. It’s true that in the United States, one political party is more hostile toward renewables, at least in its rhetoric. Look at what’s going on in the states, however, and the old red-blue divide begins to break down. Columnist David Wallace-Wells surveyed them for his piece, Clean Energy Is Suddenly Less Polarizing Than You Think and found Texas is leading the country in green energy projects – and it’s not even close. He also points to research from the Rocky Mountain Institute showing that while Republican representatives didn’t vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, their states are making good use of the funds investing in green energy projects.
In other words, Americans (and especially American businesses) know that renewables are the future. It’s just the oil and gas giants that refuse to admit they’re becoming fossils themselves.
This summer could be the hottest ever recorded, but unless we change course and end our fossil fuel addiction fast, we may look back on this ungodly hot summer and talk about it like it was the good old days. That means this fall, we all need to choose wisely and reject the candidate who has already pledged to sell our democracy – and our climate! – to the fossil fuel industry.
Honoré is a former U.S. Army commander who led Task Force Katrina following the devastation of New Orleans. He is now leader of The Green Army, an organization dedicated to finding solutions to pollution. This commentary appears exclusively in the American-Statesman.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Donald Trump will dial up heat on climate change if he wins election
