I will ALWAYS tell people they need to be strategic about voting. A vote is not an endorsement. It’s not a pledge of deep personal conviction for a cause. Your vote is currency to be spent, and it should be spent in such a way that gives you the best possible rate of return. Refusing to vote, letting a Trump win, actions like that? Pretty poor return on investment. If you’re in a place like California where you know the state is going Biden anyway and you think you can spend that vote in a way to protest and create more impact that way, that’s reasonable and cool. If you’re in Georgia, where every damn vote counts, and you do the same, you are being anything but.

But on climate, I’ll defend Biden. The IRA is a good piece of legislation. It’s hard to overstate how good it is. He somehow got the biggest climate policy in US and likely the entire world’s history past an essentially-hostile congress (including 51+ anti-climate senators), and the law is almost entirely sound, reasonable, effective policy. It’s even baked into its design to have a self-reinforcing constituency – every year it survives, its repeal becomes less likely, just like with something like medicare or the ACA – since it promotes and creates entire slow-moving industries to respond to its built-in incentives.

And sorry not sorry to piss off a lot of people, but climate is hierarchically the most important issue. If we do not address climate, all these other issues are irrelevant. We’re talking about something with possibly-apocalyptic ramifications. Our civilization has the potential to exist a very long time. We have the potential to make a lot of changes, right a lot of wrongs, make the future way better. Climate change is very nearly the only threat that cannot take advantage of all that time, because the deadlines are fast approaching – some already blown away.

I’ll be voting for Biden in the next cycle. I think his entire foreign policy related to the middle east is asinine and evil. I think that if he does lose in November, it will be 100% his own fault for throwing in with the undeniably-genocidal regime of Benjamin Netanyahu. But I know that things will be worse for Gaza with Trump in the white house, because then what little resistance to the slaughter exists will go away; Trump loves a dead Arab, after all. And more important, I know things will be way worse for absolutely everyone if the hard-won progress we have had on climate since 2020 is all thrown in the bin. That may well be the point of no recovery for the entire world.