Photon-based political graffiti: one of my favorite innovations to come out of the Trump era. Thanks Vox.

Any attempt to catalog the failures of the Trump administration risks an unceremonious burial under the sheer quantity, banality, and stupidity of the available examples. However, there’s one that cries out for immediate remedy - aside from the obvious COVID-19 effort.

The US effort against climate change has, for the last four years, gone in the opposite direction from where our global allies and rivals are heading. Even in the absence of any federal guidance, there are major US companies in carbon-intensive sectors getting in front of the transition - for example, automakers are making huge commitments to electric vehicles. As if the risk of losing the biosphere that nurtured human civilization were not enough, our policy malfeasance creates additional risks that apply specifically to the US. To name just two: we continue to lose global influence to players that are in a position to take rapid climate action (hello China!) and remain vulnerable economically to the sector’s volatility the longer we continue to rely on fossil fuels.

The Biden climate agenda is the most ambitious propounded by any incoming administration. Even without control of the Senate, there are a number of executive actions he will likely take. However, even his complete package of policies is completely insufficient to actually solve the problem. There’s a vast difference between what scientists are saying is necessary and how mainstream news sources report on the issue. This NYT article, for example, is an excellent overview of the political obstacles to Biden’s climate actions, but it never properly establishes what’s at stake should they fail.

We should simply accept at this point that there will be no major climate legislation during the first half of Biden’s term in office. There will be no crossover support from Republican senators under McConnell’s leadership, and while I certainly hope to be proven wrong, I can’t imagine that both of the available Senate seats in Georgia will go to Democrats. I also suspect that the deference of the federal judiciary to the power of the executive will vanish on January 20.

What remains, then? Perhaps the most influential means Biden will have to move in the right direction is foreign policy: he can reenter the Paris accords, and negotiate for additional commitments from other nations - who, after all, represent over 80% of all carbon emissions. I hope there will also be a concerted effort to extract voluntary commitments from the most carbon-intensive industries to make a rapid transition, an effort where cooperation between governments could be especially powerful. Most of all, I want the Biden administration to be steadfast in confronting their opposition with the planetary scale of this ongoing tragedy. Perhaps the words of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, spoken from within America’s golden age of leadership in science and exploration, might help:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

I feel compelled to close on a hopeful note, so here are the Biden administration’s first ten executive actions on climate, as compiled by Vox. It’s already worlds better than what we’ve witnessed over the last four years.

What would you add to this list?

Facebook made me do it.

I saw people that I knew and admired dropping off the platform, mostly out of sheer self-preservation, and I wondered: How will I keep in touch with these delightful homo sapiens? If you’re here, you likely saw my proposal to start a blog, and perhaps you even encouraged me to follow through…in which case, you are now implicated in what comes next (I mean this in a good way!).

This is perhaps the first cracking-open of a chrysalis containing my life to date. I’ve titled it Hyphenated, because this is a term that celebrates those who have more than one identity, professional, avocational, or otherwise, all of which are essential parts of their whole. I’d love for all my visitors not to feel forced to choose a specialization, but to bring their whole selves here to enrich one another.

In the shapelessness of this COVID-marked interregnum, I feel more relief than excitement. This election of 2020 was a reminder, just the latest in a long series of warning signs, that the normative “American way of life” is irreversibly changing, and that there is a very real chance of turning toward ignorance and darkness. When same-sex marriage was still in dispute here in the US, I recall seeing the lever that moved those few Republicans who turned on their party’s bigotry. They did so, without exception, because real people that worked with them or shared family connections would continue to be harmed if they stayed the course - and eventually they decided that they could not look these human beings in the face and tell them that they did not deserve to have marriage built on the truth of their love. To me, this suggests that what we really need is to bring more different people into meaningful contact with one another. People as hardened in their perspective as the Parler-dwelling trolls won’t respond to argumentation nor appeals to emotion; they’ll only be convinced that there’s a larger truth when they convince themselves, based on their own personal experiences.

How can we do this without further burdening the people who have had to stand at the focus of this relentless hatred? What else should we be doing? What does it look like when this effort succeeds?