Hell Is For Americans
Wildfire in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. This is not normal.
I don’t think I’m likely to ever forget the weather the day after the 2024 election. How could I when it was in the upper seventies? In November!
Even if much of my country doesn’t agree with me, I know that climate change is real. I know it’s caused by human activity. And I know that we have six years at best to cut all our emissions by fifty percent or face runaway climate catastrophe. The election was possibly the most important in the history of the world from that standpoint. And yet, the climate crisis was hardly ever brought up by either candidate.
Now, I’m 24 years old. I was not around for the original discovery that fossil fuel combustion was altering the world’s climate. Yes, fossil fuel companies knew since the 1950s and covered it up, and they should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Instead, they’ll be in the world’s most powerful Cabinet. But when it was first known to the general public, I’d have to imagine it was a pretty big news story! Now, crickets.
Drought conditions map of Massachusetts, taken from Telegram.com.
I live in Massachusetts, where a drought has been declared. There’s also a red flag fire warning due to the lack of rain. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and as much as I complain about the rain when we get a lot of it, we truly need rain now. And yet it isn’t supposed to rain for at least three more days. For all I know, the forecast might be wrong again, pulling the rain away like Lucy with the football. But this should not be happening!
However, Massachusetts was hardly the only part of the country to experience climate change this year. In September, Hurricane Helene devastated much of the Southeast, particularly the mountainous western part of North Carolina. Some people there still don’t have potable water almost two months later. That part of the state had once been seen as a “climate haven” that faced relatively few risks, but Hurricane Helene demonstrated that nowhere is safe from the fury of Mother Nature.
And then there was Hurricane Milton. It was one of numerous hurricanes to hit the state of Florida in recent years, and they’re only going to become more numerous now that the climate crisis will accelerate. Quite frankly, my sympathy for Florida as a whole is limited. They keep voting for climate deniers by ever-increasing margins, even as their state is ravaged by ever-increasing climate disaster.
Hurricane Milton aftermath, taken from the Florida Times-Union.
Remember when I mentioned that it was in the upper seventies Fahrenheit the day after the election? Well, it really felt like the weather was mocking us. Or maybe, as one poster on the Massachusetts subreddit stated, hell was descending upon us. Either way, while I’m not a religious person, I firmly believe that we were being punished for electing a climate denier as President. It does not matter that Harris won Massachusetts by nearly 25 percentage points. We’re guilty by association.
President-elect Donald Trump is going to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords on his first day in office. With his GOP trifecta, he’s likely going to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, I’ve repeatedly called Biden feckless for how much he’s normalized Trump’s attacks on democracy. But
I think it must be said that the IRA was the most significant renewable energy investment in American history. Yes, it could have been even bigger if Manchin and Sinema hadn’t blocked key parts of it. Yes, other countries are well ahead of us in decarbonizing their societies, even those with “right-wing” governments like the Netherlands. Yet it was still a major win. And now it’s as good as gone.
Lame-duck President Sleepy Joe Biden giving a speech near Manaus, Brazil. Taken from CNN.
The image above is of the first time that a sitting American President has visited the Amazon Rainforest. It should have been a momentous occasion, since Biden’s visit was mostly about climate change and the need to preserve the rainforest as an essential carbon sink. And to some extent, it was.
However, I watched the associated video on C-Span. While Biden makes a lot of great points in his speech, it’s also one of the most depressing videos I’ve ever seen when you consider the context. Biden probably knows as well as we do that everything he announces here is going to be stripped away in two months. That’s another exhibit in how American foreign policy does a total 180° every four years and why no country will ever trust us again. Which I might write about in the future. For now, just appreciate how sad it is that Biden must spend his twilight years defending the good parts of his legacy, and just how futile his efforts will be.
Over the next four years (and well beyond that), the world is going to experience more and more climate hell. No country is safe from Mother Nature’s wrath, even countries that have done far more to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis than we have. Perhaps other countries aren’t doing enough, particularly in the light of the GOP’s brazen environmental crimes, but at least they acknowledge that the problem exists.
The Republican Party is the only mainstream political faction on Earth that denies climate change altogether, and for that I’d consider them the world’s most dangerous organization. Indeed, they are terrorists. The American people really had no right to elect these people - maybe democracy isn’t the best system after all. At least, not when the electorate is this depraved and dumb.
To be clear, the whole world will suffer for our sins. But at least the rest of the world can take “comfort” in knowing they did the best they could. And they’ll perpetually blame the United States for the rest of human history - which, admittedly, might not be that long. We gleefully voted in the world’s biggest climate menace yet again, and for that, we deserve whatever sanctions the rest of the world gives us.
When the rest of the world acted responsibly in the face of the climate crisis, we willingly exacerbated that crisis. Every single Trump voter is guilty of ecocide, and if hell exists, there’s a special place in it for Americans. And I’ll leave you with a photo of a public service, courtesy of Just Stop Oil. It really exemplifies how I feel about my country right now.
The United States embassy in London, United Kingdom after Just Stop Oil protestors vandalized it with orange paint following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election.
