< 5 Minutes on Climate & Energy
The climate crisis is the greatest issue our planet faces, and this is the amount of attention it gets in a major presidential debate.
LISTENING: to Sabrina Carpenter because I can't listen to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris anymore
FEELING: frustrated
SEEING: my light catcher shower my office in rainbow speckles
Who else stayed up to watch the debate last night? I'm not a big politics person, so I wasn't exactly planning on it. Then, I got home from a day with my sister and remembered it was happening. I couldn't not turn it on at that point.
Here's the thing, though: I hate politics, man. Everything about it is so freaking icky to me. And watching last night's debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump reminded me yet again of how gross politics is.
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Candidates and politicians always say whatever they think will appeal to whatever group of voters they're interested in. But what about the truth? What about science? What about the people who won't vote in this election but whose lives will be so deeply affected by the U.S. president's decisions?
Welcome to Possibilities, a creative climate newsletter on the possibilities that lie where crisis meets community. I’m Yessenia Funes, and I can't help but wonder what would be possible if the climate crisis got the attention it deserved.
Climate change made the tiniest appearance during the debate. I counted just over four minutes dedicated to the issue — well, those minutes mostly went toward Trump's random comments about fracking, fossil fuels, and the various pipelines President Joe Biden didn't build and the ones Vladimir Putin did build. There was Trump's heartbrokenness over the Keystone XL pipeline that never was and his outrage over Russia's Nord Stream pipeline system.
Such little time toward climate is to be expected, I guess. It's kind of ridiculous that most of what we got was actually on energy and fossil fuels. Sigh. The climate crisis always takes a back seat during election cycles — the people who are living with its impacts now, the communities losing culture to rising seas, the families trying to rebuild after losing a loved one to a wildfire.