Actually, let me give you the complete setting for that quote:
Elections have consequences, and this is one of the most fateful: Anyone who takes climate change seriously had better do everything possible to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
Those words were written by Eugene Robinson. They appear as the second paragraph in his very powerful Washington Post column for tomorrow’s paper, titled A vote for Trump is a vote for climate catastrophe and I strongly urge you to read the entire thing.
It is chock full of appropriate information. It is backed up by appropriate links — to quotes from Trump on his outrageous statements on climate change, to statements made by Hillary Clinton showing she accepts the scientific consensus that Trump demeans and belittles and attacks, to statements by the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), and more.
He describes how climate change is affecting weather patterns, and to the charge by deniers that we cannot attribute any particular weather event to climate change, while that is true, Robinson reminds us that
the phenomenon is clearly visible in melting glaciers and ice caps, the opening of ice-free sea lanes through the Arctic and, most urgently, sea-level rise.
He explains how warm water occupies more volume than cooler water, and that a great deal of land-based ice is melting.
He describes the impact in various cities around the US, for example
In Norfolk, some low-lying intersections flood so often that officials have installed gauges so residents can tell when the water is too deep to drive through. In Miami Beach, some frequently flooded streets are being elevated. In New York, officials are debating how to prepare for the next storm that takes the path of Hurricane Sandy, which caused an estimated $75 billion in damage in 2012.
Clinton is of course committed to following up on what President Obama has already started, while Trump has promised to stop and roll back such efforts.
In his penultimate paragraph, Robinson lays out the starkness of the difference between the two presidential candidates:
Neither her policies nor Trump’s will reverse the climate effects we’re already seeing. But it is possible, and necessary, to keep the impacts from becoming completely unmanageable. Obama leaves behind a framework for coordinated international action, more than two decades in the making, that still could fail — but that might, just might, succeed. Trump boasts that he can’t wait to tear it all down.
We can argue about many things, but on this issue the difference between the two candidates is so clear. Which presents us with something as stark as the difference between the two on policy … and competence. Robinson expresses it simply in four words:
The choice is ours.
We can only hope that those who care about the future of this planet environmentally make that clear to as many as possible, that those not yet registered can be persuaded to vote if only on this one issue.
It is that critical to the future of the planet.