One Huge Choice is Made - Now Come Innumerable Small Ones
Last night, walking over to our neighbors to watch the election returns, I looked up at the star-filled darkness of a Downeast night and was reminded that the Solar System and wider universe wouldn’t be anxiously trying to peak in at the big-screen TV to catch the tally over our shoulders.
Standing in the chill dark, I was reminded of Carl Sagan’s wisdom reflecting on the 1990 “pale blue dot” Voyager 1 image of Earth as pixel: “every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam….”
This morning, the gathering fleets of migrating bufflehead ducks congregating on our inlet busily sparred and fed, simillarly uninterested in the outcome. The day before the vote, I'd posted that this was a good time to have a mind like those of our wonderful newly adopted dogs - living in the moment, playing, eating, cuddling.
But this is not just any moment.
With the Senate and Supreme Court behind Trump, and the House conceivably as well depending on 20 or so vote countdowns [I’ll update this shortly], the range of possible consequences is profoundly wider and more unnerving than in his first term - from more women facing mortal peril in pregnancy to Ukraine succumbing to Russia to complete reversals of gains on a post-fossil-fuel energy future. (I'm actually least concerned about the last one given the established trajectories for energy systems.)
A populist proclamation
But this was clearly an election "of the people, by the people, for the people" - in Lincoln's terms - a populist proclamation if ever there was one. Trump didn’t win because of more money or better organization, that’s for sure, given the Harris-Walz campaign’s cash and ground game.
As surveys have shown, this election also wasn’t driven primarily by Trump’s qualities as a person. The majority of those supporting him dislike him. It was very much about what kind of nation people want, what kind of institutions, particularly. As my old friend
wrote this morning…What happened last night was that the cord that stretched back to FDR snapped. It had been badly frayed, especially in the Reagan years, but the Depression and World War II had been such deep and defining events that the formula that got us through them—a kind of solidarity at home and abroad—more or less held. No more.
Everything is up for grabs now, including the basic entitlement programs that defined the New Deal. (If you haven’t read Project 2025 this would be a good day to start).
Going forward, I’ll be trying to focus on the big issues more than Trump himself, even though I’m horrified personally to think that this spray-tanned huckster with nothing but a gilded mirror in the place normally occupied by a person’s moral compass is about to retake the Oval Office and nuclear codes.
There is crosstalk to have. There is cooperation to seek.
I know many conservatives who love clean energy and resilient, healthy communities while differing on how to pursue them and pay for them.
I’ll be doing what I can to convene solution seekers on key issues, as I did starting in the early days of the pandemic. In this case one absolutely critical one is figuring out how anyone - left or right or in between - can better utilize the gifts of online connectedness in a media and social media superstorm that is so dividing us.
For an example, watch my recent Sustain What show examining whether Bluesky might eventually fill the disaster-communication gaps created by Elon Musk’s disastrous transformation of Twitter into X.
As I type this, our dogs, Haley and Rosie, are nudging me to head over to the neighbors again - this time to romp with their labrador friend Nelly. So I’m thinking about how nice it would be to just chill, as Iggy Pop sang so long ago, to just “wanna be your dog….”
But unlike dogs, our human burden includes awareness of past, present and future. We spend much of our lives running away from this awareness. Netflix series are great for that. We’re doing Lincoln Lawyers at the moment.
Ultimately humans can of course just let the future unfold, or approach each day making choices, small and large, that can bend the curve of a community’s, or country’s journey toward being a less imperfect union.
I wrote a song about that long ago and just recorded a fresh, if rusty, version. The lyrics are in the YouTube text box.
Let’s keep at this.
, a longtime climate and sustainability writer and analyst based in the U.K. was up earlier than us and wrote a fine short analysis including this section:There have been lots of pronouncements about what Trump might mean for clean energy or the climate. I feel these are missing the point. Trump is only pro-fossil fuels because the elites are green, and renewables are woke. His acolyte Elon Musk made his name with Tesla after all, and certainly did more to advance the EV revolution than any environmental NGO, whatever he now seems to have become. The issue with Trump is something deeper and darker than merely his stance on the environment, and we need to understand what that is.
Yes Trump is a danger to the climate, but more importantly in the short term he is a danger to freedom….
But freedom depends on truth. How can you hold free elections if there is no truth and you don’t know who to believe? Trump has vowed to put anti-vaccine quack Robert Kennedy Jnr in charge of America’s health service. There could be no better emblem of what he represents than that. RFKJr opposes all evidence-based medicine. But remember where he came from – the environmental movement. With post-modernism and later wokery it was the Left that began the attack on institutional trust that the Right is now taking to a destructive extreme. We must look in the mirror too when we seek to analyse what Trump represents and where he came from.
There have been periods of darkness before in human history, sometimes very long ones. Absent a nuclear war – and Trump will, from 20 January next year, have sole launch authority over America’s nuclear missiles – there will be an end to this nightmare. Our task is not to despair, and not to give in to hopelessness or nihilist extremism of our own. We must keep the light burning. Objective reality cannot simply be wished out of existence, and sooner or later science will win out and truth will return.
When that day dawns is not up to Trump, it is up to us.
Finally, read
’s quick and valauble takeaways about the consequential nature of the shifts in the electorate behind Trump’s win:
Is there any comfort in the notion, based on plenty of evidence, that this wasn't an endorsement of Trumpist policy agendas as much as it was a hard and clear backlash against $7 cartons of eggs and being told "he's fine" long after Biden clearly wasn't fine? I'm not sure there isn't some comfort, and I'm not sure there is.
Andy,
I love your Dot.earth earlier work. your music and your substack, but I think that so many of the climate activists and maybe you, yourself, just don't get it. Here is a post I just made to Roger Pielke's substack that explains the hurting place, especailly after the election, that I am coming from-
Roger, you write- 'There is no such thing as a 'climate voter' ". I agree. Climate was usually listed last or next to last when voters were polled about their concerns. Related, however, as I'll explain, is feeling insulted and demonized by others. Or. in my case feeling both insulted and hurt. Clinton's reference to deplorables and Biden's reference to garbage are the best examples. Why would anyone vote for someone who called them deplorable or garbage? That's obviously a losing strategy. I think Hariis mostly avoided that strain of moral superiority that has infected so many Democrats. Ironically, Trump also uses similar abusive language, but usually more strategically, toward specific political rivals and enemies, not toward the electorate who voted for his rivals.
Several studies have shown that so-called climate "skeptics", whatever that means, are as, or more, climate science knowledgeable than the liberal promoters of a climate science "consensus" whatever that means. I have thought and written for years that the Democrats in 2016 lost enough votes among the a well educated professional class to lose the election. That loss includes many engineers and scientists, by including them as deplorables and "enemies of humanity".
I think you could document that loss. Here's a study that probably no one will do, using the "wayback machine" to study the political changes on "Hey What's That" and other popular skeptical climate sites. I well remember that first year of WUWT when Anthony Watts wrote that he usually voted Democratic, and many on WUWT were not only enthusiastic about climate science, but interested in exploring the climate change concern and possible threat. Over the years, skepticism as innocent as quoting the IPCC, became grounds for being called a climate and science denier, The WUWT tone gradually changed. Today, almost everyone posting at WUWT, including those very well educated who might otherwise vote Democratic, express their disdain and worse for the Democratic party and its candidates.
Some 10 years ago when I was teaching climate science and posted to my national UU church climate discussion group. One day, I posted an actual NOAA temperature graph that contradicted what was being promoted by many group members. I was called a climate denier and banned from the discussion group. I know what it feels like to be included in "the deplorables".
I voted for Harris (and Clinton and Obama earlier), but I'm very upset and angry that Trump has ruined the GOP, and possibly American democracy itself, whereas Democrats are becoming politically impotent by catering to elitist rhetoric and policies, and a type moral absolutism,, declaring more and more of us as deplorables. That is not a formula for winning.