Last week, I told you that, depending upon the outcome of the US presidential election, it was going to be either cyanide or champagne for my partner, Penny, and I!
So you can imagine how elated we were on Saturday morning when all the major news networks called Pennsylvania in favour of Joe Biden. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes put him comfortably above the 270 electoral-vote threshold needed to win the election.
Needless to say, Penny and I broke open our bottle of champagne.
President-elect Biden has already made many positive announcements during his campaign or since last Saturday’s results. He’s appointed a blue-ribbon task force to develop a detailed action plan to address the States’ COVID disaster, and he’s announced that America will rejoin both the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement, which is dedicated to keeping global temperature increases to well below 2 Celsius.
These are just three of the numerous positive announcements Biden’s made, and I have no doubt he’ll continue the encouraging momentum.
I bet Biden will reinstate, in short order, the dozens of environmental policies and laws that Trump disastrously eliminated. He’s also very likely to finally cancel the misguided Keystone Pipeline for carrying tar-sands oil from Alberta — a project Obama had previously stopped but Trump greenlighted.
I also have little doubt that Biden will reverse Trump’s reinstatement of sanctions against Iran. Previously, Obama had lifted the crippling sanctions as part of a deal, provided Iran stopped producing nuclear weapons, which it had.
I’m also cautiously optimistic that Biden will lift or reverse the inhumane and brutally painful economic sanctions Trump inflicted on Cuba, as well as the economic sanctions Trump foisted on other Latin American countries. Trump’s sanctions against Cuba were particularly disappointing given Obama’s initiatives to normalise American-Cuban relations.
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day — a day when we remember all of those who died fighting to protect democracy. Last Saturday, we came ever so close to losing much of what those individuals gave their lives to protect. Another four years of Donald Trump in the White House would have surely moved the US closer and closer to fascism.
Joe Biden is by no means perfect. For instance, he doesn’t support single-payer health care although he does advocate an enhanced Affordable Care Act. He does not support the Green New Deal advocated by AOC and Bernie Saunders, but he does advocate his version of the Green New Deal, which will be order of magnitude better than anything Trump might have ever dreamt up.
Most importantly, I believe that president-elect Biden will “leave the door slightly ajar.”
By this I mean that Biden, so unlike Trump, will be receptive to social pressure or mass campaigns for progressive change. That was something another great US president, Teddy Roosevelt, was famous for: Being receptive to “being pushed” into change. But citizens have to do the pushing.
Last Saturday morning gave the world a new lease on life, even for those of us who don’t live in America. So many pressing issues that seemed doomed now feel like we will get a handle on them, including the climate crisis and mass species extinction. If we just push hard enough we really do have a chance at saving the planet, too.
As Roosevelt said, and I’m paraphrasing just a bit here, “To sit home, read one’s favorite paper [now that would be your favourite website or Facebook page], and scoff at the misdeeds of the people who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective.
“It is what evil men count upon the good people doing.”
Daily atmospheric CO2 [Courtesy of CO2.Earth]
Latest daily total (Nov. 3, 2020): 410.76 ppm
One year ago (Nov. 3, 2019): 409.29 ppm
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