While climate change has yet to emerge as a major voter issue, advocates warn the ‘fate of planet’ is at stake.
With climate change fuelling more extreme weather events around the world — from record wildfires to powerful hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and drought — United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres offered a dire warning.
“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he told reporters on June 5. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell, and the truth is we have control of the wheel.”
Yet, in the United States where Guterres delivered his remarks, the climate crisis has been largely sidelined in the lead-up to this year’s presidential election.
Environmental advocates have warned, however, that November’s showdown between Democratic President Joe Biden and his Republican predecessor Donald Trump will not only affect climate policy in the US but around the world.
“The US plays such an outsized role in both international politics and also greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ariel Moger, the government and political affairs director at Friends of the Earth Action, a US-based climate justice group.
“In many ways, I think the fate of our planet lies with the American voters”, she told Al Jazeera, “which may sound a bit hyperbolic, but I think that is the moment that we’re living in”.
