Climate change is not a matter of opinion

In case you have been living under a rock since January 2020, or have deleted your social media out of sheer exhaustion (which I completely understand), the Trump administration continues to make the news spotlight with useless daily Twitter rants, televised misinformation briefings, the hijacking of U.S. democracy, belligerently blundering America’s tattered race relations and fanning the flames of political polarization unlike any recent election we have seen.

In short, the leader of the free world is a man who cares not for science or facts. American citizens have some reflection to do as well, because there is no better time to seriously consider how climate change has been addressed throughout four years of a Trump presidency than right before the election. More importantly, we need to be voting for a candidate whose policies will direct America towards a clean energy future and a 100% carbon-neutral economy within the end of the decade. Both Donald Trump and his administration have not produced any of the climate policy solutions that U.S. citizens or the world were looking for, and therefore the Trump administration no longer has business addressing science that has been consistently denied in the White House year after year.

What I fear most in the coming months is that the events from a tumultuous 2020 will overshadow one of the main reasons why Donald Trump should be voted out of office. The list of significant offenses would take up a separate article entirely, but one of the most reckless is the explicit denial of a science which supports that humans are causing our global climate to change at rates which are unsustainable for life on earth. Climate change denial is not a matter of opinion; it is dangerous thinking. Building more pipelines, leasing more stolen lands for oil and gas drilling and throwing environmental regulations out the window, all while continuing to use government funds to the tune of billions of dollars to subsidize a failing fossil fuel industry, is not the future of U.S. energy. There is no climate justice or environmental reparation from taking more oil out of the ground and continuing to do so is exacerbating the American addiction to fossil fuels.

During the most recent vice presidential debate, when asked if climate change is considered an existential threat to the Trump administration, Vice President Mike Pence responded with “the climate is changing, we [the Trump administration] will follow the science.” After experiencing the last four years of a president that willingly dropped out of the UN Paris Climate Accords to pursue oil and gas drilling while appointing a former coal lobbyist to the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, I would like to call bull, Mr. Pence.