Senator Harris, be the Leader We’re Missing in the Fight to Save Our Planet

Ben Clemens
Jul 30, 2017 · 4 min read

We live in a time where telling the truth sounds alarmist and irresponsible. Reading the news brings a clear picture.

Climate science study shows that large parts of the earth inhabited by hundreds of millions of people will likely become too hot to live in by the end of this century, and major storms and droughts will become four times as likely each year. Rising seas won’t be the problem, instead it will be economic crises caused by the dislocation of people and distribution of food.

Current estimates about climate change predict a four degree rise in temperature by the end of the century. This is like the deadly heat wave in Europe in 2003, which was blamed for 2000 deaths a day, but everywhere, for the foreseeable future. Many cities in the Middle East and Asian subcontinent (Bahrain, Dubai, Kolkata, Sana’a) will become uninhabitable. At the same time, crop yields from major food producers would drop by half, and the distribution of food would be disrupted (in Brazil, the Russia, and American midwest heat waves in the past stopped export of food, because there wasn’t enough yield to ship).

All of these changes will not happen gradually, they will simply arrive one year, when heat spikes or storms surge. There is no current plan that handles the movement or starvation of hundreds of millions in response. With shocks like those, we will lose the ability to do anything other than respond to emergencies, and the current level of nationalism and xenophobia will look pretty quaint.

So, all of this sounds alarmist and dramatic, but it is not. The exact effects of climate change are unpredictable, but the overall change is almost certain. During your children’s lifetimes, a hotter earth will endanger their health and cause major economic crises. To embrace these facts is not to embrace despair. Despair about our climate looks like the current American attitudes held towards climate issues by Democrats, Republicans, and people from all parties. Most people in the US rate climate change somewhere below the federal budget deficit, crime, terrorism, or the price of gas in importance.

Treating our climate as a secondary issue is embracing despair. Despair is denying the reality of climate change.

Put aside the scary predictions and overwhelmed feelings. Our biggest struggle is to change our own and our friends’ perspectives, to get our priorities clear. We can change things. We can shift the course we’re on. Our government can reverse course. It doesn’t require everyone to become tree-hugging hippies to change attitudes. If you’re not the kind of person who would take money for kids so you could blow it on luxuries for yourself, then you should be speaking up right now. Every one of us has young people we care about or children we love, and we owe to them to think big, and do everything we can for them.

Senator Harris

Our state, California, is a global leader in the kinds of technologies and industries needed to make a substantial difference in overall carbon emissions. But no one in Congress (or the entire US government) is a leader on climate change now, because they do not perceive this global emergency as an issue that people vote on. We can change that. Our own US Senator, Kamala Harris, is sympathetic to the importance of this issue, and has a role to give advice and consent to the ruinous actions of the President’s administration, but could do much more.

  • Senator Harris is a member of the subcommittee overseeing EPA and should publicly call for hearings on climate change science.
  • Senator Harris should make a voting issue of the near-elimination of our ability to study climate change in the current US budget proposal coming up for a vote.
  • Senator Harris should publicly call for the US to rejoin the Paris climate accords, so that the US can coordinate with other countries.
  • Senator Harris should step up to lead our nation’s response to this world-historical crisis.

Our state and nation need her to lead.

Call her office and tell her.

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