It was Election Day in America

I can’t bring myself to edit the darkness out

God it’s been a week hasn’t it.

I put my initial feelings about Election Day into this short piece I wrote for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I’m the climate editor, so it’s about climate change.

But obviously my fears about the next four years don’t begin and end with the climate crisis.

My editor has once again challenged the ideas expressed here, and asked if I’m really that nihilistic. I certainly feel so right now. In any case, I’ve indulged some of my bleakest thoughts in this post. I can’t bring myself to edit the darkness out, or to write something else. If that’s not what you want or need right now—fair—I suggest scrolling down to the links after the picture.

This week I’ve been turning over in my head an all-too-prescient phrase I read in an essay by David Klion last October: “They’re already dead.”

“They’re already dead,” I recall a campus antiwar activist saying to me on the night Bush announced that the US had begun bombing Iraq. He was right; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were about to die in Bush’s folly, their fates already decided. At the time I understood and somewhat appreciated what the activist was saying, but I also was parochial enough to wonder whether he even cared about the Americans at Ground Zero who were literally already dead (never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with what happened to them). Today, though, his words echo in my head as I think about the Palestinians in Gaza, and the agony of knowing that they’re already dead no matter what any of us feel or think or say.

Of course, that proved true. More than 43,000 Palestinians have died since October 2023. Nearly 350,000 are facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity. More will die, as an emboldened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks forward to “following through on his maximalist aims in the country’s multifront war,” as the Washington Post obliquely put it.

So I’m mourning the loss of more Palestinian lives. I’m also mourning those who will die over the coming decades in natural disasters that have been made more destructive and more deadly because of the warming climate, because I don’t see how the world can meet the necessary emissions reductions that scientists have said the world must meet to avert worst-case scenarios when the United States is led by Donald Trump. I’m mourning the lives of the people who will die because they cannot access the health care they need. I’m mourning the children who die because they don’t receive vaccines. I’m mourning the victims of gun violence and of police brutality. This is not an exhaustive list.

Some of that would have happened regardless of who was in charge, because climate crisis is already here, because police brutality has not been eradicated or even curtailed, because states have already cracked down on access to life-saving healthcare in the name of ‘pro-life,’ because the current administration is still sending bombs abroad.

As Rusty Foster wrote in his Election Day dispatch from the trail, “Every president kills people. It could be thousands of people, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, depending on their inclination. It could be millions, there’s really no limit. Killing people, choosing who will die both here in the U.S. and abroad, is a fundamental part of the job. It is the job. Whatever else the president does, they do on their own time.”

But I worry much more about the inclinations of Donald J. Trump than I do (did) of Kamala Harris. With Trump and his followers, as Adam Serwer put it during the first Trump presidency, “The cruelty is the point.”

Photo: Bob Dilworth

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Reading list

I have other links saved that I may eventually share, belatedly. But one thing I made myself do this week is read stories about local and state climate and environmental wins down ballot. I’ll offer some of those here, as a palliative:

• “Voters in Washington state on Tuesday upheld a groundbreaking law that is forcing companies to cut carbon emissions while raising billions of dollars for programs that include habitat restoration and preparing for climate change.”

• “California will spend $10 billion to fund water, climate, wildfire and natural resource projects after voters approved a bond measure in Tuesday’s election.”

• “Louisiana voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that requires any revenue received by the state from renewable energy production to be deposited into Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund.”

• “Minnesotans overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment question on the November ballot that renewed dedicated lottery funding for the outdoors, a system that has delivered more than $1 billion to environmental projects since it began 36 years ago.”

• “Coloradans voted Tuesday to approve Proposition JJ, a ballot measure that allows the state to keep all of the sports betting tax revenue it collects and use those dollars for water projects…the revenue will primarily help fund projects like improving canals and headgates that bring water to farms and ranches throughout the state, helping endangered fish habitat, supporting water-based recreation needs, and funding conservation projects and drought plans.”

• “Maine voters approve $30 million trails bond…the funding will be spent on motorized, non-motorized and multi use trails and will be matched with at least $3 million from public and private sources.”

• “The 2024 ballot question asking Rhode Islanders to support environmental spending passed with flying colors Tuesday…the state early next year will take out $53 million in bonds to spend on habitat restoration, farmland preservation, coastal resiliency, and, to the chagrin of any advocate with a hint of a green thumb, $15 million for industrial upgrades in the Port of Davisville in North Kingstown.”