It’s been over 13 months since the American National Center for Medical Intelligence first became aware of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, China.
With the number of daily reported cases remaining high and its position as a global power now diminished, the United States enters a winter of transition: Trump’s out, Biden’s in.
The Biden administration will bring a renewed faith in medical expertise, a commitment to American allies and perhaps most importantly in the long term, an acknowledgement of climate change. Though the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will rightfully take precedent throughout the beginning of the Biden presidency, addressing the climate crisis must not be put on hold.
Our nation has seen over 400,000 COVID-19 deaths with no end in the near future. While the incompetence of the Trump administration is largely to blame for this, we as the American people are not without fault. Our collective actions have contributed to the death toll and the continuation of this pandemic.
If we are able to defeat this virus and return to the sense of normalcy we enjoyed in previous years, make no mistake we will still be staring down the barrel of the loaded gun that threatens our very existence: the ever-warming planet.
Successfully staving off environmental catastrophe requires not only the industry-wide mobilizations, which often garner the most media attention, it requires wholesale changes to the way we live our lives; a comprehensive rethinking of society. If COVID-19 were a test to see how we as a society can respond to existential threats, we have failed.
Such as COVID-19 has changed the way we live and interact via masks, social distancing and quarantining, combating the climate crisis will alter transportation, consumerism, the ways in which we get our food and American life itself.
The very ideals in which the quintessential American Dream is rooted will change. Our aspirations for American life must elevate beyond the inhabitation of suburbia, our dependence on automobiles and the reinforced capitalist dogma in our educational system which conflates economic value with societal worth.
Unless we as a nation are able to recalibrate our economic systems and feelings toward the environment, there is little hope for the continuation of our privileged existence. Will we be able to make the changes needed to reverse the trend of global warming?
We failed to make the needed changes in response to this pandemic, so I have little hope that we will correct the error of our ways amid this climate crisis.
There are many layers to climate change (and COVID-19) denial; some social (i.e., demographic shifts), some economic (i.e., rural America’s decline, globalization).
But, like COVID-19, the impending environmental disasters stemming from global warming will ravage our most-vulnerable communities. And so long as a substantial portion of the population denies the existence of a threat and powerful vested interests control the narrative, our collective ability to respond and adapt will be compromised.
So when we face the brutal truth that legislation alone will not be the end-all for the climate crisis, will we still be able to change?
A second Trump term would’ve assured future climate catastrophe, but unless systemic changes in both federal policy and the way in which the American people comprehend the issue are made during Biden’s first four years, irreversible damage may still be done. Limiting global warming to the internationally agreed-upon 2°C threshold may be impossible at this point, and even that would mean longer heat waves, more wildfires, wetter tropical storms and millions of preventable premature deaths.
COVID-19 proved that, at this point in history, we are incapable of adjusting our lives to match the needs of our reality and will refuse to act in an egalitarian manner.
J. Robert Oppenheimer famously said, “…now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” after the 1945 Trinity tests for the first atomic weapons. If we choose to maintain the status quo and refuse to change the way in which we live, we face the same fate.