From Nathan Dombeck

Janesville

To the Editor:

“We may read our mistake in the geological record a million years hence. This one really counts.”

So goes the final words of climate activist Bill McKibben’s piece penned for The Guardian newspaper on September 6. He is referencing the upcoming US election in November. Among a variety of policy disparities between the two candidates, they could not be further apart on the topic of climate.

Donald Trump has promised to ‘drill baby, drill’; he has promised to ‘kill wind’ (in reference to the renewable wind power industry); he’s the man who pulled us out of the Paris climate accord talks during his prior tenure as head of state.

The rapidly changing climate is all around you, from a summer that never seems to end to a winter where it barely snows. But that’s just the Midwest, a relatively ‘safe’ zone from some of the worst climate impacts. Look to our American West and Canadian neighbors, where the wildfire season is now year-round, burning homes and livelihoods; look to our (far) East in Pakistan, where unexpected floods killed an estimated 1,700 people in 2022; look to our south, where the lungs of our planet, the Amazon, is being slash-and-burned, turning into a grassland.

Now is the time to double down on a more climate-friendly candidate. Few policies will matter more in the long-term than how we continue our build-out of clean energy and do our best to conserve and restore what little we have left in the natural world. This one really counts.