Who or what will be left standing after all the election rubble is shoveled away? In the time of a global pandemic when the stock markets dig a hole into America’s economy, what can we rely on in certainty? Well, global warming isn’t going anywhere.
Both Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders agree on strong restrictions to limit the toll climate change is taking on our planet. The former wants to work on eliminating all greenhouse gases by 2050 while the latter proposes a $16.3 trillion plan to battle climate change. President Trump, however, has a different take. After being elected in 2016, he promptly removed the US from the Paris Agreement in 2017 stating that it would remove millions of jobs by 2025. Over 190 countries endorsed the Paris Agreement and over 180 signed it into practice. The US Energy Information Administration found that in 2017, the US emitted 5.1 billion of the global 32.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. The United States is the second largest producer of CO2 in the world, just behind China. Yet China signed the Paris Agreement to control their emissions whilst the US stepped out.
We need a bigger plan to fight the threat that no one wants to address. It is completely understandable that we are focusing on the other threats our world faces: COVID-19, country borders closing, endless wars, poverty. We as humans like to prioritize the short term happenings. Since we were children, it was ingrained in our brains to prioritize the closer objective and complete that first. The deadline due tomorrow takes precedence over the paper due next week. The reason climate change is not that blaring warning in our heads every day is because its effects are not as easily seen as the others’. Yes 750 billion tons of ice melt every year and add to the Earth’s oceans, but how many people can actually see that? The money disappearing from pockets due to the dropping stock markets or a beloved in isolation due to the contraction of an infectious disease is much more visible. This in no way means that climate change is any less a threat than the others: in fact, it might be even more essential. Since the Great Depression, every recession was followed by a hike in jobs and the economy. President Trump and his cabinet are attempting to sign a package into law that gives money to people who cannot work at this time due to COVID-19. The smartest brains across the globe are simultaneously rushing to find a vaccine/cure for this latest coronavirus strain. American scientists say that they have found an antimalarial vaccine that will soon be tested and available to the public.
Yet climate change charges on.
Another reason why climate change is not gaining enough prime time as the others is because of the multitude of people who refuse to believe in the phenomenon. Why don’t they believe in it? Because they can’t see it. It’s a cycle that just goes on and on with no end in sight. The President himself stated his position on climate change in numerous tweets:
Though there are many climate change deniers or people who believe it is not a serious threat, there still are those who fight for change. Countless celebrities use their wide fan audiences to spread valuable information on the global crisis. We cannot keep procrastinating over something that has the potential to destroy our world. Climate change waits for no one and it is our time to take back our Earth.
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