Tilting Windmills

My friend says she’s sometimes not sure activism is worth it anymore, because the world is about to end. I don’t share that problem. My problem is I don’t know how to choose among the many possible forms of activism, when I believe they might all be fruitless anyway. Six of one one, half a dozen of doing not much. Also, sometimes I get so anxious I can’t do anything at all.

A few days ago, my friend posted to Facebook, attempting to start an “informal dialogue” about how to cope with climate change psychologically. How to deal with the often paralyzing and exhausting fear that awareness brings, especially when the surrounding society offers so often the tempting narcotic of pretending it’s not happening, or is happening only in a distant and mild way. As if we had fifty or a hundred years to sort all this out. As if climate change weren’t especially important. It’s lonely, as she said.

I thought I can help! I have a blog about this very thing! But, when I looked, I saw no entries that really suggested a solution. And when I searched online, while I found confirmation that the discipline of psychology is, indeed, tackling the issue, I saw nothing of particular immediate benefit to me.

Enter the Man of La Mancha

Coincidentally, into my doom and gloom, came an email from another friend about something totally different. Among other topics, he referred to some of his own environmental work as “tilting at windmills.” Of course, that’s a reference to Don Quixote, the classic figure of fiction who deluded himself into believing he was a heroic knight and who attacked windmills, believing them to be fairy-tale giants. My friend is doing nothing in any way similar–the giants he is attacking are all very real–but he has a self-deprecating sense of humor.

But what occurred to me when I read his email was the following:

From: https://xkcd.com/556/

 

If you can’t see the comic I’ve pasted for whatever reason, it starts out with a picturesque landscape of modern wind turbines silhouetted against a peach-colored background. In subsequent panels, two people (rendered as stick figures, this is XKCD, by Randall Monroe, and he mostly does stick figures) admit that the turbines look disturbingly like the tripodal monsters from certain sci-fi stories–and the turbines promptly grow legs and become exactly such monsters, ravaging the landscape. Their huge legs pound the ground with calamitous thunder. The terrified humans despair–but a voice calls “stand aside!” and there, on a hill, lance at the ready, stands DON QUIXOTE!

The “mouseover text” is “The moment their arms spun freely in our air, they were doomed–for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane.”

When my friend mentioned “tilting and windmills” I also thought of Quixote’s story from the character’s own perspective. To others, he seems simply to be having a mental health problem–and that is part of the truth, as the book makes clear. But the deeper, more complicated part is that Quixote is attempting to live by the rules of a vanished, and perhaps always fictional world, a world characterized by honor, nobility, and bravery such as most people now ignore. He is not so much fighting against windmills as fighting for the proposition that there is something worth fighting for, that a man on a horse and with a sense of honor can make a difference in the world.

In the actual book, that fight is a losing proposition. Quixote’s attempts to be a hero all backfire, he helps nobody, and ultimately he regains his sanity and disavows all interest in the romantic stories that used to fascinate him. It is Randall Monroe’s contention, however, that crazy Don Quixote is still out there somehow, and that there will come a time in which we need him.

When we need precisely someone who is crazy enough to believe that he or she can make a difference, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Is the real question, then, how do we maintain ourselves as the right sort of “batshit insane”?

Some Provisional Answers

I’m hardly an expert on how to solve the world’s problems. There are days I can barely manage to clean the cat box. I’d be much more comfortable if I could have Googled up some DIY tips on how to fight the good fight, recommended by a successful activist with a background in psychology besides. But that didn’t happen. So, instead I’m presenting a couple of ideas of my own. After all, I’m going to be forty next week. I figure that after forty years (less one week) on this planet, I’ve learned a few things worth sharing.

1. You Can Only Do What You Can Do

A primary struggle for me is finding myself mysteriously unable to do things. I mean I intend to do it, I plan to do it, I mean to do it, and I don’t. “It” could be anything from losing weight to cleaning the toilet, but the most relevant example is the expansion of this site that I began soon after the election and have not yet completed. Why not?

I’ve tried on a lot of explanations, mostly revolving around quirks of my brain that really do make a lot of things harder for me, but none of those explanations suggested a solution. I suspect I’ve simply been engaging in my own version of what my mother does–calling herself lazy when she finds she can’t work more than anyone humanly could (she’s retired now, but still busy with four grandkids and a big house and yard, plus volunteer commitments). Both of us are under the persistent delusion that we have super-powers, and we set goals and priorities for ourselves accordingly.

I mean, here I am, working as a free-lance writer to pay the bills, plus maintaining three unpaid blogs and writing multiple novels all at once, and I’m down on myself for not also building this site into a major online resource for activists?

Maybe if I sat down and made an honest assessment of what I can do, and then re-prioritized, I’d be more successful at meeting my goals.

I’m not just talking about time management, here. I’m talking about energy. I’m talking about money. I’m talking about resilience in the face of stress. I’m talking about physical and mental health. I’m talking about ability, which, yes, does vary. All of this varies, from person to person and from day to day, often for reasons we do not and cannot know. To some extent we may be able to change our reality–I may be able to do things tomorrow that I can’t do today–but we can’t just wish it away.

If you only have ten minutes a day to devote to saving the world, then accept that and make your ten minutes count. Develop a plan you can actually enact.

2.Don’t Ask Whether You Can Do It–Ask How

I realize this point and the previous one look like contradictions, but I’m actually addressing two different aspects of “can.” There is choosing an achievable goal, and there is choosing a workable method.

For many years I confused the two. When I despaired of achieving something and people told me to believe in myself, I thought they meant I should make like the Little Engine That Could and motivate myself to the top. And that just made me feel worse, because while strong motivation can indeed unlock hither-to un-guessed-at possibility, I knew that real limitations exist also. Sometimes, even the Little Engine can’t.

Maybe that’s what they did mean–the idea that attitude is everything is a very common fallacy, and it results in people not only feeling terrible for not being good enough, but also torturing themselves with the thought that somehow they must not have wanted it badly enough.

But eventually somebody nudged me into realizing that there is a better way to think about goals; don’t ask whether the goal is attainable, assume that it is–then ask what method is workable.

Maybe the Little Engine can take a different way up the mountain.

There is no logical reason whatever to waste time and energy wondering whether we can still prevent climate change disaster. We know that this goal is worth everything we can throw at it, and that if we are to succeed, we must throw everything at it. We will get up that hill or we will die trying, because the alternative is to die without trying and that is worse.

The real question is how are we going to try getting up that hill?

3. Just Pick Something

Ok, but how are we going to attack that hill? Let’s be honest; there are days when each of us thinks we may be facing a no-win scenario, here. And when you believe that you’ll fail no matter what you do, how do you pick a thing to try to do anyway?

I have lots of experience with this conundrum, because I have a really hard time making seemingly arbitrary choices. There are days I do no housework at all because I can’t decide whether to clean the kitchen or the bathroom first. Based on my extensive experience, I can offer two suggestions:

1. Pick something. If it doesn’t matter which you pick, then you can’t pick wrong.
2. Once you pick, do something to make it seem less arbitrary, like investing money in your choice, or commiting to a friend you’ll stick with it.

4. The World Usually Doesn’t End

This one’s pretty simple. Yes, it seems plausible that everything we hold dear is about to be destroyed, especially this week, as the leaders of two nuclear-armed nations engage in what might even charitably be termed a pissing contest. But the end of everything has seemed plausible before and the world didn’t end. It usually doesn’t.

5. Don’t Dis Despair

Another friend of mine insists that despair is a useful state, not to be resisted. I don’t really understand this. I trust him to be wise, however.

I do know that temporarily giving into despair can be useful if only in that it allows a rest from the work of resisting despair. Rage, cry, curl up in a fetal position, and then pick yourself back up and get on with things again. I also know that giving up on one thing can be the first step to trying something else–a different, more workable method, perhaps.

How to…?

So, how to keep it together in the face of climate change, or at least fall apart in a useful way? I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t found anyone who can tell me. But at least part of the solution, in my experience, involves the following:

1. Honor your own situational and personal limits
2. Choose ambitious, pie-in-the-sky goals and practical means of reaching those goals
3. If no course of action looks better than any other, choose randomly
4. No matter how bad things look, remember the world usually doesn’t end
5. And if you do get caught up in despair, give in to it occasionally–you might find something useful down there in that pit.

That’s what I’ve got. Let’s see how it works.

note

I’ll post later this week. Today I was just too busy earning a living.

-C.

Confession

I have a confession to make; I don’t feel like writing today. I don’t mean I’m not in the mood or that I don’t want to, I mean that I’ve spent most of the past hour staring at my computer screen while drawing a complete and utter blank, nothing at all in my mind except for some bleak pop song that’s been on infinite repeat inside my skull all evening for no good reason.

My husband is away on a wildfire, so I am NOT going to write another post about how dangerous climate change is for forests and wildlands fire fighters. Not until he is safely back home. Yes, I m superstitious.

I wanted to write about upcoming climate protests, except I can’t find any. Or, I haven’t found any yet, anyway.

I found something interesting on the radio today, to the effect that the cutting of an old-growth forest in Poland, which has been on the news and in social media of late, has a climate change connection, that the cutting is designed to contain and counteract a beetle infestation caused by climate change (I have seen what are probably similar beetle problems in the US, where too-warm winters allow beetle populations to get unusually large and/or summer droughts keep the trees from making enough sap to defend themselves). So this is not humans intruding on a pristine forest, this is humans trying to repair damage other humans did. Also, this is not a forest that has never been logged before, it has in fact been manged by foresters able to plan cuts that leave the forest’s primeval character intact. I don’t know if this alternate version of the story is true, and I did not think to write down the name of the NPR story in question, but the contrary-ness of it appeals to me.

My dog is barking. She wants me to do something. Probably she wants me to make my husband, whom she misses, reappear. She’s making my ears hurt.

Look, this blog post is unlikely to win the Pulitzer Prize, but I wanted to at least check in with you.

Looking at Wind Power

Wind power has been in the news in my area lately, with the pros and cons of specific projects being argued in the papers. As often happens, these stories have raised questions for me, and inspired me to do a deep dive into the subject. Here goes.

In the News….

Remember Martin O’Malley? He ran for the Democratic nomination for president last cycle. I suspect he will try again and could well be president someday. He is still very much a rising politician. In any case, he used to be the governor of Maryland, my state, and as such racked up a very impressive environmental record. He takes climate science very seriously. And one of the things he did was to champion the Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act of 2013, which incentivizes wind power in various ways. Various renewable energy companies have been attempting to take advantage of the opportunity. This spring, two companies received regulatory approval to build wind farms near Ocean City. Combined, the project would be only the second US offshore wind farm, and by far the largest.

There are a lot of issues involved in this project. Besides the hoped-for emissions reductions, there is the political value of getting a major renewable power facility up and running, and the economic value of a big manufacturing project. The turbines themselves would be made here in Maryland.

But not all issues are positive. There is concern that wind turbines can disturb or kill wildlife, and there are worries that wind power might not be as “green” as it’s made out to be. Finally, there are aesthetic concerns. Though I, personally, find wind turbines kind of cool-looking, plenty of people don’t, and the project has been pushed farther and farther offshore in order to minimize its visibility from the beach–tourism being a major source of Ocean City’s revenue. I have seen a photograph doctored to represent how the current project will look from shore when completed (it’s included in one of the articles I’ve linked to), and honestly I’m not sure whether the specks visible on the horizon are wind turbines or dust on my screen. But yet some in Ocean City remain concerned.

In comes Dr. Andy Harris, Eastern Maryland’s delegate to the US House of Representatives (and yes, he’s a medical doctor, too).

Representative Harris has sponsored an amendment (an amendment to what, I’m not sure) that would block Federal funding for site assessments for wind turbines within 25 nautical miles of the coast. This move, if approved, would effectively block at least one, possibly both of the planned projects. Not only would moving the wind farms further out take time that neither company has budgeted for, but the farther offshore a wind farm is, the more expensive it becomes. At a certain point, a project simply stops making good business sense. Representative Harris says he supports the wind farm, but is simply concerned about the business interests of his Ocean City constituents–but it’s worth noting that his overall environmental record is terrible. In general, the wind farms have a lot of public support (though less in Ocean City).

Pros and Cons of Wind

Politics aside, how do wind farms actually stand up, environmentally? The environmental cost of a wind turbine is not zero, for although there are no carbon emissions during operation, the same cannot be said for manufacture,transportation to the site, routine maintenance, and so forth. So, what is that cost? The answer depends largely on which data you include in your analysis and how exactly you ask your questions–which is one reason why it’s possible to find wildly differing conclusions on the subject, all apparently “fact-based.” With that in mind, I focused as much as possible on more scholarly sources, people who did not seem to be arguing for a specific preferred option. But it is possible I missed something. As always, this post is meant as the beginning of your research on a subject, not the final word.

Wind at Home

Most of the figures I looked at related to the large turbines used for utilities-scale generation. After all, my hunt for information was started by a proposed wind farm. It’s worth noting, though, that there are other forms of wind generation. Some turbines are small, designed for home use. Some are even portable. I expected that small-scale turbines would have a better environmental profile than large ones, partly because they just appeal to my taste (I WANT them to be better!), and partly because the absolute environmental cost of a small unit is obviously so much smaller. But the important thing to consider is not the absolute cost but the cost-benefit ratio, and according to one study, home-based wind turbines don’t always have a good ratio.

The way cost-benefit ratios are expressed in this context is payback time–how long does it take for the carbon emissions saved by using a turbine to equal the amount of greenhouse gas emitted during construction, installation, maintenance, and decommissioning of that turbine? If the payback time is shorter than the working life of the turbine, its net impact is carbon-negative (that’s good). If it’s longer, that’s a carbon-positive impact, meaning a net increase of emissions (bad).

Three figures go into determining how long payback time is for a given system: the total environmental cost of the turbine; how much electricity the turbine generates; and the environmental cost of whatever form of electricity generation the turbine replaces. Payback times in general are expected to lengthen in the future as the electricity grid, as a whole, becomes less carbon-intensive.  For micro-wind, both carbon cost and electricity generation can vary widely.

The study I mentioned analyzed several different turbines at several different locations. The “greenest” turbines were responsible for less than 200kg (441 pounds)of carbon dioxide—not good, exactly, but many people emit as much every day simply by commuting to work in the morning. Others topped 1,500kg (3307 pounds).

Meanwhile micro-turbines sited in windy areas could generate a respectable 40% of a typical home’s energy use, but turbines in large cities, where buildings block or dissipate a lot of the wind through turbulence, only generated about 2%.

So, if you live in a windy area and your house is relatively isolated, you can achieve payback in a year or so, if you choose a micro-turbine model with a low carbon cost. But in other circumstances, payback might never happen. You’re better off buying your electricity from the grid.

Wind and Birds

One of the most concerning charges against wind power is that turbines kill birds and bats and otherwise harm wildlife. Of course, so does climate change harm wildlife. As much as I don’t want anything to harm animals, a fair judgment depends on a realistic comparison.  Large number of birds are at risk of extinction due to climate change, so if wind power can slow climate change, then the birds come out ahead, unless the death toll from turbines is truly horrific.

According to a document by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the death toll from turbines is not horrific—no bird or bat populations are at risk from turbines. The number of individuals killed can be dramatically reduced by careful siting and other steps, such as locking the turbine blades when the wind is low. Bats are more active in calmer air, when turbines don’t generate much electricity anyway. Offshore turbines can negatively affect marine life, but can also create artificial reefs that help marine life, so again, proper siting is critical.

Carbon Cost for Large-Scale Wind

For a detailed look at both the environmental and financial costs of wind, check here. The article also addressed several specific common criticisms in quick detail. At present, payback time for utility-scale installations is one to two years, unless sited somewhere, such as peatlands, where the disturbance of development itself has a high carbon cost. A graph comparing the per-kilowatt hour cost of various forms of energy makes it difficult to compare the different renewables–because all of them are so low as to be indistinguishable from zero next to fossil fuel generation. Not that their emissions are zero, but it’s like trying to create a graph comparing the body weights of three different kinds of songbird, a mouse, a sheep, and a cow.

Does wind reduce carbon emissions as compared to fossil fuel? You bet.

At least wind reduces carbon if it replaces other forms of energy generation instead of adding to them. While the article does address the issue of standby generation (some people have charged that because wind doesn’t always blow, wind power requires the use of other forms of generation. The article acknowledges the point, but says the carbon emissions still end up going down), it does not address the issue of overall demand caps.

Let’s say we us X amount of electricity generated by fossil fuel. So if we bring X amount of non-fossil fueled generation online, will that mean the end of fossil fueled electricity? Or will the public just decide to use twice as much electricity?

The answer to that puzzle lies somewhere in a complex tangle of economics and policy. I am not prepared to answer it, but it must be answered. My guess is that this is a problem the free market cannot solve by itself, even assisted by subsidies. We will eventually need a cap on either total electricity use or total fossil fuel use in order to get off fossil fuel.

And get off fossil fuel we must.

To the Point

My time has been highly limited this week so far because I had medical appointments two days in a row–nothing serious, don’t worry, I just needed new glasses and also had some questions for my MD. Just somehow the two appointments ended up being back-to-back, so now I’m behind on everything. Rather than skip this week’s climate post or try to squeeze it into Wednesday, I’m going to just take a few minutes right now to say….

Where are the climate protests? I have a friend who intentionally got himself arrested the other day protesting the healthcare bill, which is absolutely admirable, and it one of many worthy issues that deserve phone calls and emails to elected representatives. But it made me realize that I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the climate movement lately.

Either there are actions going on that aren’t well-organized enough for me to hear of them and don’t make the news, or nobody’s doing anything, and I don’t know which one is worse. So, I say again, climate change is the central issue, both because it can hurt us on a scale like almost nothing else and because the fossil fuel industry is currently the primary driver of most of our other political woes. Follow the money; no matter where you start, you’ll end up in oil.

So. There are heat waves and droughts and famines and fires afoot right now. Let’s get climate change back in the news.

As If

A few weeks ago, I sent an email to my teacher.

To be clear, I’m not currently taking any classes, nor am I in a training program of any kind. There are simply some people who remain one’s teachers no matter what. I have two, and I sent an email to one of mine the other week, more or less just to say hi.

He asked how I was. I confessed I was not well; multiple people I care about have cancer and a president named Trump. He made the appropriate sympathetic noises (we’ve never talked much about private matters with each other) and then reminded me that “especially in politics, this too shall pass.”

I suspected him of being blithely ignorant, though of course I didn’t say so. The forces that would see the Earth burn so they can make a buck seem to be winning, and he tells me it will be ok? Yes, this, too, SHALL pass; in twenty million years, biodiversity and climate stability will likely have recovered, but that’s supposed to be comforting?

Actually, it is comforting. As I think I’ve said before, I find great comfort in Ursula K. LeGuin’s line, “No darkness lasts forever, and even there, there are stars.” The character who speaks this line is talking about the literal end of the world. “There” refers to the land of the dead. That no matter what we humans do, the Earth will probably be able to repair itself in a few million years is a kind of good news.

Beyond that, “this, too, shall pass” is not necessarily a note of hope in the ordinary human sense. The idea is not necessarily that things will get better (though they may), but simply that things are transitory, that the current situation is not the only context, and not the permanent context, that can apply. I have heard it suggested that the way to really internalize and believe “this, too, shall pass” is to make a point of saying it when things are going well.

As a Buddhist might, I can take refuge in the simple truth of impermanence.

I suspect my teacher would be on board with all these interpretations, but could he also have meant what he initially seemed to mean, that yes, indeed, things will be alright? This isn’t the end of the world?

Back when he was more obviously engaged in teaching me, I became fairly sure this man was always right, that things he said were true because he said them. Even before I finished grad school, I’d modulated that stance somewhat. Yes, he could be wrong (though it does seem to be rare), but it was more interesting, and ultimately more educational, to begin with the presumption that he wasn’t. The principle here is a bit like that of a Tarot deck or a zodiac–the process of figuring out how the oracle applies to your question is a wonderful source of insight, whether the oracle actually applies to your question in a literal sense or not. Rather than wondering is my teacher right? I made a practice of asking myself what if he is right? What can I see from the perspective he is offering me?

(I mean this principle within certain limits, of course. Clearly, treating individual human beings as totally infallible could cause problems)

So, I decided to return to that practice and ask myself what if things aren’t as bad as I fear that they are? What does the world look like if the anti-environment plutocracy we now face is simply transitory?

The thought echoed one I learned many years ago–when faced with a challenge, don’t ask whether I can succeed. Assume that I can, and seek to discover how.

And from my teacher’s vantage point of hope and optimism I looked out and saw…a spaghetti pile of possibilities that I find utterly overwhelming. I don’t know about you-all, but I find it very difficult to choose among equally valid options. Faced with a to-do list of five quick items and an afternoon to do them in, I not infrequently end up spending the whole afternoon playing on Facebook because I can’t decide which one to do first. Occasionally I have actually asked my husband to pick a task for me. He complies with good humor.

So, I seem to be paralyzed now, not by the awesome awfulness of Trump (who, after all, will pass, one way or another), but by the difficulties of my own brain. But while awesome awfulness seems like a very big problem to tackle, I have at least some hope of learning to operate my own grey matter. It’s a start.

What about you? What lies in the way of your own action? What does the world look like if you assume you’ll succeed?

Independence

Happy American Independence Day.

The best of America has always been an ideal to which reality aspires in an irregular and sometimes ambivalent way. Our principle of equality has always been marred by racism, sexism, and various other interrelated isms, and yet the principle itself is valuable as a stated goal—and for much of our history, we have enjoyed a more egalitarian, and more participatory political and legal system than much of the rest of the world. It is not true that anyone can be anything if only they work hard, but hard-working people do have more latitude here than they might, as the flow of economic refuges to our borders attests. We are not the bastion of democracy that we should be, but we are the imperfect bastion that we are.

Anyone who thinks that the United States is the greatest and most perfect country on Earth has not been paying attention. But anyone who cannot tell the difference between the US and a third-world dictatorship hasn’t been paying attention either.

So, with that caveat, I’ll get to my point: the US is not currently independent.

Russia did try to get Donald Trump elected. Whether their involvement was decisive is debatable—it’s possible he would have been elected anyway. That Candidate Trump himself actually cooperated with Russian interference on his behalf has not been proved and might not be true. Yes, his public joking, during the campaign, to the effect that Russian hackers should help him is not, by itself, a smoking gun that he actually expected him to do so, or that any quid pro quo arrangement was made between the American oligarch and any Russian counterpart. That other people connected to the campaign were actively working for, or trying to work with, foreign entities during the campaign is also not proof, nor is the fact that President Trump has some odd financial ties to foreign entities (the extent of which we don’t know because he won’t release his taxes) proof. The whole thing is suspicious as all get-out, but we don’t actually know.

But the fact remains that by attempting to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, President Trump is acting in the interests of Russia (and Saudi Arabia) and not those of the United States. Maybe he’s doing it out of the “goodness” of his own heart, a spontaneous volunteerism with no prior planning or thought of reward, but he is acting in the interests of a foreign power.

I’ve argued previously that pulling out of Paris, and otherwise minimizing or reversing American action on climate, is the primary reason for Mr. Trump’s presidency, the true central plank of his personal platform. His rhetoric on the subject of the economy and American security, his dog-whistles to white nationalists, his consistent vocal abuse of women both individually and collectively, all of that can be chalked up to either personal proclivity or empty campaign promise. A wall on the border with Mexico would do nothing whatever to protect his constituents’ job prospects or personal safety, even if Mexico did pay to have it built. Getting out of Paris, though, is the one campaign promise he’s acted on and the only one that will actually help anyone.

It will help the owners of the fossil fuel industry.

I said that part already. What I did not point out before was the way in which acting on behalf of that industry constitutes selling out American interests in favor of those of other countries. It is true that Russia has powerful interests in oil, but so does the United States. While transnational corporations are, in some ways, independent of any country, Exxon, for example does have an American origin and the US still produces substantial amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas. It’s possible to tell this story as one of private, corporate interest, and many of the interested parties are Americans.

But the United States doesn’t need the fossil fuel industry. We have a fairly diversified economy, a highly diversified resource base, and we’re a net exporter of food. There is huge economic opportunity for us in a properly managed transition, and we’ll likely survive, or even come out ahead, as fossil fuel prices drop due to lessened demand. Russia is simply not as well prepared for the shift. Oil is its primary source of national wealth.

While I haven’t looked into what climate change will do for Russia, I don’t imagine that a rapidly warming planet is actually good for that country. And Russia did, in fact, sign the Paris Climate Agreement. But even if they don’t have less to lose that we do to a changing climate, certain elements within Russian society do have more to gain from hanging on to fossil fuel a little longer.

And we do have a lot to lose. Most of our major cities are coastal and thus vulnerable to sea level rise and a possible increase in hurricane activity. Much of our landmass is already capable of experiencing killer heat waves, and thanks to air conditioning, many of our most vulnerable citizens live in places that get dangerously hot (like Arizona and Southern Florida)—a problem that will only get worse. Increased drought and increased flooding will likely interfere with our agriculture. In many areas, our use of irrigation water is already unsustainable. The United States already gets more tornadoes than any other country on Earth, and while there is no way to tell whether climate change is increasing tornadic activity (there’s no reliable baseline data), it is a fair bet that it will. Political and economic instability in other countries caused by climate change represents a major threat to American security.

Mr. Trump is willing to risk all that for the sake of short-term economic gain—by people other than us.

I want to make very clear that I do not have anything against Russians as a people. Russia is not, at present, a free democracy, so I don’t hold its people accountable for what their leaders are doing. I also want to make clear that I’m not blaming Russia for America’s troubles. While it does seem clear we are under attack, our vulnerability to such attack is entirely home-grown. I’m only pointing out that our laws and government institutions are currently being used to protect a foreign government’s revenue stream at our expense.

241 years ago today, we told the world we weren’t going to let that happen anymore.