Gentle Decline 2/38: Elections & Elucidations

Hello. I’ve had a number of emails and messages from people concerned with the outcome of the US Presidential Election, as it becomes clear that the country has, for reasons not comprehensible to anyone outside it (and considerably fewer than half the people in it) re-elected Donald Trump. This newsletter - and more to the point, my expertise - is about climate, and dealing with its changes, more than it is with the politics of any particular place. But some of the questions are salient, and all of them need some kind of answer. So some have been answered directly, and in this special issue I’m writing up a few here in more detail.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

What effect do you think Trump’s election will have on climate?

Well, nothing immediate. To be blunt, climate chaos is being driven not so much by political will, or lack thereof, but by money. Where the money is in the US economy is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, none of whom care a whit for the environment or climate, because they as individuals are more or less unaffected by it. Harris, if elected, might have started to make some changes to what corporations and very rich individuals can do, and get away with doing, but those changes would have been vigourously opposed. Trump will not make any such changes, and will probably remove whatever brakes exist. There’s only so much can be done in four years, in either direction.

All this really means is that the effects already underway don’t slow at all, and may be accelerated slightly. So on climate, per se, there’s not much going to happen that wasn’t already happening.

The issue will be that all the mitigation, all the coping-with-the-effects changes that a Democratic administration might have pushed in the White House will not only be absent, but opposed, by the Republicans. And honestly, the current Republicans go well beyond conservatism as in don’t-change-anything-I’m-fine (already evil) into change-things-to-hurt-people-deliberately. So you can expect to see FEMA defunded, for example, or a breakup of the NOAA. Trump himself will do whatever things get him the most attention; he doesn’t as far as I can see have any coherent policies or aims, so most of the actual changes will be driven by people in his political party who - temporarily or otherwise - have his ear. It’s hard to say how successful those efforts will be - it’s much easier, in practical terms, to create an organisation than it is to disband it. It takes a few people to get it going, but everyone involved in it will resist its decommissioning. But they’ll try.

They’ll also continue to oppose any efforts toward real education, which I feel has been one of their major tools for decades. The move from the critical-thinking, science-oriented US education of the 1950s and 1960s to the current pass-the-tests get-the-numbers box-ticking exercise has enabled the conservatives more than almost anything else in American life. And unfortunately, education and critical thinking are two of the most essential elements in dealing with climate effects.

So there’s a pretty-much-inevitable downward slide over the next four years, and the next big question is whether Trump (and/or his vice-president and administration) will hand over power peacefully to whoever wins the 2028 election, or indeed, whether that election takes place.

Would it be safer for me, rather than just “move inland” to “move out of the US”?

This isn’t a climate-related answer. It’s down to personal circumstances, really. If you’re white, male, have a reasonably solid income, own your house or have only a small amount of mortgage left, and already live in a place that’s reasonably resilient, you’re probably going to be ok as an individual. If any of the above are not the case, or if you have dependents, relatives, or close friends who do not meet all the criteria above, then you have concerns. And bluntly, everyone has people who don’t fall into the above categories. So if you’re in those categories, give a hand to the people who aren’t, either to get out or to get a step up. Be generous.

If you are, for instance, black (or these days, certain shades of brown), trans and disabled, then you’re on the other end of that spectrum, and bluntly, honestly, something bad will probably happen to you in the next four years, even if it’s “just” having income cut off or healthcare denied. Adults can make their own decisions on these things - you can get out of there, or you can stay and oppose the new administration. If you have children who will be affected, then honestly, I would be looking to at least move to some of the safer parts of the country, if not out of it. You and they can come back later. Anyone who has vulnerable kids and who already has citizenship, support networks and relatives in another country, and can afford to get out, should just go.

I do think that anyone moving to the US now is insane, just don’t do that.

I’ve made this offer in other social media: if you need to get out of the US, and you can get as far as Ireland, there’s a couch here and we’ll feed you until you get your feet under you.

I’m worried that the kind of crazy conspiracy theories that say that weather control was responsible for Helene and Milton will get a boost under Trump. Is there anything that can be done?

I haven’t dealt with enough conspiracy theorists to have a handle on this, really. I spend most of my time as both a historian and a climate specialist (and honestly, in my day job in technical marketing) working out what the facts are, and then building forward from that. And certainly, “fact” is a wobbly thing in history, but it still has to be supported by evidence.

Weather control at that scale is nonsense, and anyone who has any grasp on physics, meteorology, or anything in that area knows it. Yes, it is possible to seed rainclouds, and there are various explosive effects that do stuff with pressure and therefore wind in the short term, but none of them are practical or even predictable. Controlling and directing storms is science fiction.

There’s some solid-looking advice on dealing with conspiracy theorists from The Conversation. However, much of the weather control nonsense probably has roots in the parts of the administration who want to dismantle FEMA, NOAA and other organisations as above. This is coming from dedicated conservatives who believe in “small government”, and have a vested interest in people being kept down by disasters (you can choose the relative importance of those beliefs according to your level of cynicism). Some of those people are not even in the US; there’s plenty of evidence of Russian and other foreign influence in US social media and news, and it’s always on the pro-conservative angles. So one of the main things you can work on is treating incoming “information” as something to look into, not something to believe, up to and including the idea that anyone really believes it. And spread that habit around, teach it to your kids, and generally question stuff. Honestly, if more people did that, Trump probably would not have been elected at all, let alone a second time.

Any advice in general? I’m feeling pretty desperate here.

Usefully, a lot of the stuff I’ve written before about dealing with climate change is also good advice for living in a country run by lunatics. However, there’s some stuff that falls under “Be Generous” that takes on more importance: organisation.

Form groups. Mutual aid groups, specifically. Spread what help you can muster around, form communities (local or otherwise). Here’s an example from Mexico of what organisation can do, and there are many more. Provide your friends and neighbours with food, a place to stay, help to get out of the state or country if they need it, and fundamentally the feeling that they - and you - are not alone. There is more strength in a backyard punk concert, or medieval group gathering, or a barn-raising, or a community garden, than in a thousand years of doomscrolling. At the most absolutely fundamental, go do something with some other people.

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