If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency this November, she will enter the Oval Office with an unprecedented challenge: the task of forging an American response to the climate crisis.
President Biden delivered on the most ambitious climate legislation in history when he pushed through the IRA. It still needs to be expanded and accelerated, but it’s a major win. Now we need to drive down the costs of clean energy, build up the grid, improve energy efficiency and storage, and electrify everything. This can be done, but speed is everything.
President Harris’s central task will be different, though, and more difficult: readying this nation for worsening climate discontinuities by rebuilding our economy and communities on a scale that’s still hard for many to grasp. Kamala Harris must ruggedize America.
We’re no longer capable of preventing a massive planetary crisis — we’re in one. And while it is critical that we take every measure we can to slash greenhouse gasses, cut toxic pollution and reverse ecological destruction, nothing we can now do will roll back the clock. A pathway to an orderly transition with minimal disruption and a return to continuity no longer exists. Climate is no longer an issue but the era in which the Harris presidency will play out.
Now, we need a national plan to ruggedize in the face of what’s coming. In this podcast I discuss why that’s so needed, what it might look like, why needed actions will divide the nation on a number of conflicts — and must happen anyway — and how preserving this democracy will require leadership for a lurching transformation like none we’ve seen before.
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