Wow, wrong from the first sentence of the subtitle. I’ll concede that a democrat will do less damage than a republican in the white house, but beyond that I take issue with this opinion piece.

The Willow project. The Biden administration approved this expansion of oil production, against the outcry of millions of people, most notably the Native Village of Nuiqsut and City of Nuiqsut. This opinion piece focusses on the fact that this project will directly release hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels. What is not mentioned is the habitat destruction, poisoning of fish, harm to caribou, air and water pollution, and blatant disrespect to the Native people who are directly affected (I’m not even going to get into how resource extraction causes much of the crisis of MMIWG2S).

As the author concedes in the article’s conclusion, the specifics do matter. So how, specifically, does his opinion piece counter the fact the Biden administration took deliberate action to increase fossil fuel production? With a proposal they made to increase water heater efficiency, backed by a statistic that looks at the cumulative effect nearly 40 years from now. Unstated are the assumptions that this will pass, not get repealed in the future, and that industrial civilization will exist in 2060. There is a similar statistic involving automobiles and fuel efficiency, again involving a future date (2050 this time) and many assumptions, like that people will be using cars for their daily transportation 30 years from now.

These things are not comparable to the immediate harm of the Willow project, taken together they paint a grim picture, one in which fossil fuel production continues to expand while politicians push the problem down the road with reforms that assume society does not need to fundamentally change. We need action now, and the Biden administration is actively making things worse in the present while selling us an unrealistic future.

Electing Joe Biden to be President of the United States of America for a second term in 2024 will not limit global warming to 1.5⁰C. If we actually want any chance of limiting the warming of Earth to 1.5⁰C, we need nothing short of global revolution. Fossil fuel production has to stop, agriculture has to drastically change to regenerate the land, ecosystems must be healed. None of this is workable under global Capitalism, and States will never be an effective method for organizing the kind of human labor necessary to save ourselves and our home. This is a scary idea, it requires us taking personal and collective responsibility for the fate of humanity, going out of our comfort zones, and genuinely caring for one another.

Go ahead and vote for Joe, but don’t kid yourself, he isn’t a solution.