The New Yorker: A New Day For The Climate

Elizabeth Kolbert

    Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is one of the climate activists in the Senate. For nine years, he took the same "TIME TO WAKE UP" sign to the Senate floor to give speeches to mostly empty seats about how climate legislation needed to be passed. Now that Joe Biden is president, he has passed the baton.

"'A new dawn is breaking,' he said. 'And, when it’s dawn, there’s no need for my little candle against the darkness.'"

    Upon his inauguration, President Biden began to follow through on his promises for serious climate change legislation. He recommitted to various global treaties and organizations and reversed many Trump era domestic policies, such as increasing regulation, ending federal support for fossil fuels, and creating new departments to oversee climate policy.

    Still, there is a long way to go. The next decade will almost certainly see a rise in global temperatures, leading to more of the devastation we are already seeing in California and the Gulf of Mexico. Ice is melting at even faster rates and is raising the sea level. While the pandemic has helped reduce carbon emissions, the world is still a long way from the goal of the Paris Climate Accord. In the US, the conservative-skewed Supreme Court could undercut hastily devised climate legislation as Unconstitutional, and the Democratic majority in the Senate is slim.

"Still, a critical threshold has been crossed. For decades, politicians in Washington have avoided not just acting on but talking about warming."

    Now that it is being talked about, action needs to be taken.