A Period of Consequences

With the 2018 elections approaching, one national survey shows that Americans’ top concerns are health care (30%), immigration (25%), and the economy (24%), all issues that justifiably occupy much of our socio-political bandwidth. Farther down on the survey’s list, yet in my mind even more important, is the environment (11%). Given the perilous path we are on, with a recent report predicting a disastrous rise in global temperatures by 2100, we urgently need to make climate change more consequential for candidates and voters alike. If not, when that inevitable day of environmental reckoning comes, nothing else will matter.

Historically the United States has been a two-party system, but the hyper-polarized partisanship of the present means neither major party has the will or wherewithal to prioritize the environment. This benighted binary, with its inability to address the challenges we face, has contributed to a growth in independents (from 30% in 2004 to 40% in 2018). Allowing myself a moment of optimism, some of these voters may find their way to the Green Party, whose pillars include “ecological sustainability.” Were this to occur, Greens might gain in both size and relevance, and thereby migrate from the margins to the center of political discourse.

However, I fear the time is short and the stakes enormous. Eric Holtus, writing in the Washington Post, quoted a 1936 Winston Churchill speech as a way of analogizing responses to Nazi Germany then and climate change today: “Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger [….] The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of [….] delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” Indeed we are.