In This Election, the Climate Should Trump Everything Else
No matter who becomes president, if we fail to make the environmental health of the planet the top issue, we will drive humanity over the precipice.
Mark Freeth / CC-BY-2.0
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Because so many rightly fear Trump, it’s assumed that voters must be the ones to swallow hard and accept Clinton’s energy-industry entanglements. But if and when Trump is defeated, this status quo would allow oil and gas companies to destroy the earth as a human habitat.
If we believe that politicians can be pushed, why not push them now, using our votes as leverage? Why not demand that in exchange for a vote for the Democratic candidate, the Democratic Party be responsive to its constituents rather than its donors? Since the presidential candidates nominally oppose the TPP, now would be the time for the Democratic nominee, along with all federal Democratic legislators, to call on the president to withdraw the TPP from a vote in the lame-duck session.
Margaret Flowers of Flush the TPP points out that “If the TPP is ratified this fall, it will supersede the Paris Climate Treaty and prevent us from taking the actions we need to transition rapidly to the clean energy economy by giving corporations power over our laws and our courts.”
By stopping the TPP, Americans would retain their sovereign rights to enact laws, regulations and bans that protect our communities and the environment. We would interrupt a massive global expansion of climate-destroying gas and oil development.
We Americans are divided and distracted by the threat of a Trump presidency, but the issue of climate change can and must unite us. For that to occur, climate change — not Donald Trump — must motivate people to push the Democratic party. And if the party and its leaders are too beholden to respond, it is best to know sooner rather than later. For as Bill McKibben says, when it comes to climate change, “winning slowly is the same as losing.”
Alison Rose Levy writes on health, food and the environment. Her website is healthjournalistblog.com
and her weekly radio program on Progressive Radio is “Connect the Dots.” Follow her on Twitter at @alisonroselevy.
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