Does Our Climate Crisis Make the 2020 Election Our Most Crucial One Ever? | History New... - 0 views
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Although historians differ on our most crucial presidential elections, four of them seem especially significant: those of 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1940. In 2007, Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote that the 1800 election pitting John Adams against Thomas Jefferson “is the most important election in American history.” In 2012, another scholar, David Mayhew of Yale, considering various criteria, selected the election of 1860 as the most important one, followed by that of 1932. Finally, FDR scholar Paul Sparrow considers the 1940 election our most important: “If you step back and look at its impact on the world, no election was more important.”
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But why these four? Regarding 1800, Lepore notes that the election “marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. . . . It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College.” Mayhew concurs that 1800 “settled the point that the incumbent party would accept a loss and hand power over to the opposition--thus ensuring that we would continue to have elections
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Lincoln’s 1860 election was followed by the Civil War and the end of slavery. If any of Lincoln’s three main opponentshad won, secession, the civil war, and the abolition of slavery would likely not have immediately followed
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Thus, it is largely due to the uncertainty of what would have happened if Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR had not been elected that it is difficult to compare and contrast the elections of 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1940 to the upcoming one in 2020
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In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) was elected in the midst of the Great Depression and thereafter created New Deal Policies to counter its effects
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And “likely” primarily because of our present climate condition. The environmental harm Trump has heretofore done is incalculable (valuable efforts to keep track of this appalling record can be found here and here), and a continuation of such policies in a second term would be highly likely
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Of essence then is the vital importance of our climate crisis. To describe it adequately in a brief essay is almost impossible. But the opening words of David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth (2019) are a start: “It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale.
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the recent words of writer Jonathan Franzenare alarmist, but not improbable: “If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.”
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Even the business-friendly Forbes Magazine opines thatTrump’s climate-change policies have been nightmarish—see its essay “Trump Ignores The Impacts of Climate Change at His Peril—And Ours.”
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In April 2017, Bill McKibben--founder of 350.org, which has become a leading voice in the environmental movement--predicted that the effects of Trump’s policies “will be felt . . . over decades and centuries and millenniums. More ice will melt, and that will cut the planet’s reflectivity, amplifying the warming; more permafrost will thaw, and that will push more methane into the atmosphere, trapping yet more heat. The species that go extinct as a result of the warming won’t mostly die in the next four years, but they will die. The nations that will be submerged won’t sink beneath the waves on his watch, but they will sink.”
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The next major battle, and perhaps the most important one of our lifetime, will be the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. Its results could mark a major turning point in our climate struggle.