At last! A ray of hope for the environment

America’s upcoming presidential election may be a crucial event in human history

Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race for president and recommendation of Kamala Harris for the job is epochal. Biden was OK for the environment but couldn’t defeat Trump. Harris has what it takes to demolish Trump and lead the battle against runaway warming.

Donald Trump, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, “Drill baby drill!” trumpets his gleeful intent to totally ignore environmental concerns to maximize the production of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Full of bombast and demagogic charisma, Trump shows many symptoms of narcissistic psychopathy. I use these four linked words advisedly. I strongly recommend that no one should simply accept my application of them to Trump. Read how Wikipedia defines them and make up your own minds based on what you, individually, have observed about Trump, and consider whether this kind of person should should ‘lead’ the world. Personally, as an evolutionary biologist also interested in political history and who has been totally focused on earth systems science for the last eight years, I think that another Trump presidency would destroy humanity’s last chances to control runaway global warming to avoid being erased in global mass extinction.

Biden was never charismatic, and due to his age and visibly increasing debilities in verbal and physical mobility there was no longer any hope that in a head-to-head contest he could shatter Trump’s ego-maniacal but charismatic pretenses that Biden was a doddering has-been. He, The blessed by God, TRUMP THE GREATEST, the Golden-Haired Master of the Universe, could miraculously ignore or overcome any physical reality, Constitutional clause, or enacted law impeding his fantasies. As an aside to Trump’s irrationality in the face of the climate crisis or anything else, apparently the only weak spot in Trump’s armor of narcissistic charisma is being laughed at by a woman amused by his antics.

By comparison to Biden, ‘laughing’ Kamala Harris may be the perfect person to explode Trump’s monstrous egomania to reveal the hate filled, ignorantly evil and vicious con-man who is blowing the bubble of bull dust that has been so attractive to people who feel left behind where others have succeeded. Seriously, the trumpeting is all about Trump’s own ego, and has nothing to do with any concern for ordinary people facing hard times now or even harder ones in the future.

Hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type It’s worth listening to the whole 6 minute speech.

From the Atlantic:

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Harris fought a smile as her campaign headquarters erupted in applause.

The enthusiasm seemed only to build as Harris proceeded to tick off her accomplishments as a local prosecutor, a district attorney, and an attorney general. Within hours, Harris had locked in all the Democratic delegates needed to become the party’s nominee; the next morning, her campaign announced that, in the little more than 24 hours since Biden had withdrawn from the race, Harris had raised more than $100 million.

After years of struggling to find her political voice, Harris seems to have finally taken command of her own story. “I was a courtroom prosecutor,” she proudly said to open her next stump speech, in Milwaukee. Just as in Wilmington, she spoke with the confidence of a politician who knows that what she is saying is not only true but precisely what her audience wants to hear. Four years after the fevered height of “Defund the police,” “Kamala is a cop” has a different ring to it—and with the Republican nominee a convicted felon, Harris’s appeal, her allies believe, is now the visceral stuff of bumper stickers: Vote for the prosecutor, not the felon.

Read the complete article: https://www.rsn.org/001/the-prosecutor-vs-the-felon.html….

What is the problem?

Actually, there are many crucial problems in the real world that need to be solved (or at least managed) — any one of which will have life-changing or threatening impacts on many people (both US citizens and ordinary people everywhere on Planet Earth): wars, plagues, economic, theft of personal data, etc. The unavoidable reality for people is that what the President of the United States does or doesn’t say or do about each of these crucial problems will have major effects on many people in many places.

The biggest, most dangerous problem we face in the world today is that humans’ competition to maximize energy production for rapid economic growth and power to control Earth’s natural resources has produced enough greenhouse gases to raise global average temperatures enough to set off positive feedbacks in the natural environment. Currently these feedbacks are increasing temperatures faster than can be compensated for by any reductions humans may be making.

Personally, I have become increasingly depressed about the inevitability of the human species being included in the global mass extinction resulting from runaway warming should Donald Trump win the US election with his “drill, baby, drill!” policy. However, with Ms. Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for President, I can actually hope that America will lead a credible emergency mobilization to reverse the warming. First, Harris is superbly qualified to prosecute the spectrum of evil in the growing bubble of psychopathically egomaniacal charisma surrounding the trumpet blowing the bubble. Second, as the daughter of a leading progressive economist and an internationally recognized cancer researcher, and in many other ways that are not immediately apparent, she may well prove to be the most qualified person in US history ever to run for the office of the President.

I’m an expatriate American and very happy to be a Naturalized Australian. I emigrated from America in 1980 because the irrational fundamentalism that has led many Americans to Trumpism was already growing, and no one was making any effective efforts to stop it. Then, as an academic teaching Evolutionary Biology at the University of Maryland, 12 km from the US Capitol Building, I could not identify a single student who had any interest in what I was teaching, let alone minding the future. When I recently got around asking Google and Ancestry.com where I came from, I was surprised to find that my American ancestry has several well-documented direct lines from both my parents to people who migrated to America before 1750, including at least one of the Mayflower Pilgrims on my father’s side and Robert Morris (Financier of the American Revolution) on my mother’s side. Morris was one of only two people who signed all three of America’s foundation documents. In any event, in 1980 as Ronald Regan was elected President, irrationalist know-nothings were clearly well on the way to controlling the future, and I was powerless to change things, so I voted with my feet to a saner country with no pretensions to lead the world (Australia).

Up until a couple of weeks ago, Trumpist leaning America was denying the reality that cascading positive feedbacks are driving our planet towards runaway heating and global mass extinction. A Trump-Biden election guaranteed America would continue to be dominated by a Congress already owned by the special interest carbon burners…. With no real antidote, most rational Americans like me would have little reason to vote at all, leaving control to irrational, antiscientific, fundamentalist demagogues, party or special-interest puppets, and useful idiots. Even if Biden won the election, he had already demonstrated that he was far too senile to stem the tide. Unfortunately for humanity, a Trumpist America would still be powerful enough to distract/disrupt any attempts by the rest of the world to achieve any effective action to stop the runaway. Russia and to a lesser extent China don’t seem particularly interested in stopping carbon burning….

Given the current American Government congealed under its irrationally fundamental Trumpist influences, Kamala Harris qualifies as a powerful catalyst who has the capacity to shatter and implode the Trumpist matrix like a highly stressed glass object (e.g., like ‘shatter-proof’ glass that crumbles into popcorn if it is nicked in the right way). Harris is both a very powerful American Black politician and the Antithesis of Trump. 

I have been researching Kamala’s extraordinary background, starting life as a first-generation Afro-American born to two extraordinary immigrant ‘black’ parents who came to America to complete doctoral degrees in biochemistry and economics at the University of California-Berkeley, one of America’s most prestigious research universities, before returning to advance their home countries. The two academic high-flyers, met at Berkeley, married, and produced two daughters, making them an immigrant family because neither parent was content to live in the other parent’s country.

Kamala’s father, Donald Harris, grew up in an Anglican family from the plantation-owning aristocracy of Jamaica of Afro-Irish ancestry and came to America supported by a Jamaican government scholarship to complete his PhD in Economics. After marrying Kamala’s mother and graduating, Donald worked for several years teaching economics in the Midwest USA (achieving tenure at University of Wisconsin three years after graduating). Stanford University’s economics faculty recruited him three years later in 1972 as professor , their first ‘black’. Donald became very popular teaching post-Keynesian economics with only a little bit of Marxism and he still belongs to the Faculty today as an Emeritus Professor.

Kamala’s Indian background is detailed in a Los Angeles Times article: Her parents were both progressive and concerned with civil rights in India. Kamala’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was of Tamil Brahmin Hindu ancestry, born in Madras (now Chennai). Shyamala’s father was a career civil servant — and later a diplomat in Zambia. Shyamala’s mother never worked but was a powerful force in the Indian women’s rights movement. Shyamala (who was also a gifted singer of the highly technical South Indian classical ‘Carnatic‘ music) aspired to be a biochemist but could only earn a degree in ‘home science’ in India. Unbeknownst to her parents, she applied to complete her studies in nutrition and biochemistry at UC Berkeley and was accepted. Although Shyamala had never been out of India and the family did not know anyone in America, despite the surprise, her father gave his blessings and financed her first year in Berkeley.

Both Donald and Shyamala were politically active and intended to involve themselves in anti-colonial/human rights movements in their home countries. Independently, they gravitated to Berkeley’s emerging Afro-American Association reading and discussion group (the group invented the label ‘Afro-American’ and later gave rise to the Black Panther movement), where they met, fell in love, got married, had two daughters (Kamala and a younger sister), and effectively became Americans. Due to skin color, Kamala’s parents were ‘black’ Americans. Due to politics they were Afro-Americans. Kamala remembers participating demonstrations and marches from her stroller.

On graduating, the Harrises were subjected to the prejudices of the day and couldn’t find suitable work in California. They ended up in the Midwest to find jobs in reasonable proximity to one another and soon (when Kamala was 5) split up. (This often happens with marriages between high-powered graduate students where each is determined to build a career as I have seen happen.) Donald and Shyamala divorced when Kamala was 7. Kamala has said that her mother became somewhat bitter over the divorce, but according to Kamala’s sister, the divorce was somewhat acrimonious, but the major disagreement not about money or the children, but rather who got the library (typical academics!). After a couple of short-term appointments, Donald ended up with tenure at the University of Wisconsin, and was hired away from there by Stanford University in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley (S of San Francisco). Shyamala (with the girls) found work back at UC-Berkeley for a few years on breast cancer research. However, despite her ground-breaking research, still in the days prior to Affirmative Action, her application for a faculty appointment at UC-Berkeley was rejected in favor of a less qualified male because she was both female, black, and a migrant. In 1976, Shyamala found a home for her cancer research in Montreal, Canada at Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and teaching at McGill University.

Kamala spent most of her primary school years in Berkeley, where she was among the second group of students to be bussed to a primarily white school in aid of desegregation. Because Shyamala was a poorly paid ‘black’ (Berkeley was still ‘redlined‘ to keep ‘white areas’ pure. The link demonstrates the pervasiveness of racism was and to some extent still is in the US), Shyamala could only find a place to rent in a ‘black’ area. The house Shyamala rented was owned by a politically active Black American Baptist social worker originally from Louisiana, Regina Shelton, who lived two doors down the street. The upper floor was the rental property and Regina and her family operated a day-care center on the ground floor. 

Kamala Harris’s social and character development must have benefited immensely from this arrangement. She could not help but draw on three diverse and highly capable extended families. (1) Kamala became close to her progressive and highly capable and responsible Tamil Hindu Brahmin family through extended sojourns in southern India and Zambia with her active feminist grandmother and socially and politically progressive Brahmin civil servant/diplomatic grandfather, and the grandparents’ other descendants. In India, the young Kamala was welcomed to join her grandfather on his walks and discourses on civil rights and democracy with his activist friends. (2) In the Bay Area, Kamala was also able to spend weekends in Palo Alto with her father, Donald, after he came back from the Midwest to Stanford (but other kids weren’t allowed to play with her because she was ‘black’). Donald also took both girls to Jamaica, so they could get to know his progressive Anglican family in Jamaica. (3) By no means least, Kamala was also adopted into the landlord’s extended Afro-American family and their involvement in America’s Black social welfare and civil rights issues. After school, when the young Kamala wasn’t helping her mother on late nights washing bottles and test tubes in the biochemistry lab at UC-Berkeley, she was fully involved with her surrogate Afro-American family in their good works in and around the American (Black) Baptist Church. She came to know this church as well or better than the Hindu Temple Shyamala still occasionally sang in. Despite making sure her girls had full knowledge of their diverse cultural backgrounds, Shyamala made sure they were deliberately raised as responsible, thinking Afro-Americans. While she was worked in Montreal, her daughters would often spend part of their summers with the Sheltons back in Berkeley. The girls were literally born into and grew up in that environment – surrounded and nurtured by Afro-American Association friends; they were American-born with dark skin, and they would inevitably and always be seen as Afro-Americans by both Blacks and Whites.

Above all of these influences from extended, devout, and politically passionate families, Shyamala’s own influence on her children as they were growing up must have been profound while she was advancing her career in cancer research, shuttling back and forth between the Midwest, Berkeley, and Montreal, Canada. Career-wise, Shyamala eventually became an Associate Professor of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal, where her cancer research lab was well funded by Canadian Institutes of Health grants and to some extent by US National Institutes of Health (NIH). She was later invited back to Berkeley and supported through 2001 by several grants from the US National Institutes of Health in the Life Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As reported in a feature article in the July-August 2021 edition of the NIH in-house newsletter, Catalyst: “Successful women often wear more than one hat. Gopalan was simultaneously raising her two young daughters, Maya and Kamala, alongside a career rich in discovery and partnerships. ‘My first job was cleaning pipettes in my mother’s lab,’ said Harris. “I grew up around science. [It was] taught to me by someone who was so profoundly passionate about a gift, which is what scientists give to us.’”

Kamala’s secondary schooling and first years at college took place in Montreal, Canada — a predominantly French-speaking environment (most of Kamala’s schooling was in English because Shyamala moved the family to Canada just a year before French schooling would have been mandatory.) In Francophone Quebec, Kamala was exposed to yet another culture striving for individual freedom and civil rights. Kamala also became aware of a whole new layer of fraught social justice issues through a close high school friend who confided her experiences of sexual assault by her stepfather. Shyamala also heard the story and invited Kamala’s friend to live with them until she finished school. Kamala later told her friend that her knowledge of this kind of reality was a driver for her interest in the law and profession as a criminal prosecutor.

Kamala took her first year of college in Montreal and completed her bachelor’s degree in economics and politics at Howard University in Washington, DC. “While at Howard, she interned as a mailroom clerk for California senator Alan Cranston, chaired the economics society, led the debate team, and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She also completed a summer internship at the Federal Trade Commission, worked as a tour guide at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and participated in anti-apartheid protests at the South African embassy and National Mall. Harris graduated in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics.” [Wikipedia].

From Howard University, Kamala returned to the Bay Area to enroll for legal studies at the University of California’s principal Hastings College of the Law, located in San Francisco. There, she graduated with the law degree in 1989, and was admitted to the Bar in 1990.

In 1990 Kamala was hired as a deputy district attorney to work as a prosecutor through 1998. In 1994 she also was appointed to the State Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later also to the California Medical Assistance Commission. For the first 6 months Kamala took leave from the prosecutorial role, and after that managed all three responsibilities concurrently.

In 1998, the city of San Francisco recruited Kamala as an assistant attorney, where she served as the chief of the Career Criminal Division, supervising 5 other attorneys prosecuting homicide, burglary, robbery, and sexual assault cases. Her direct boss found her to be too progressive for his liking and demoted her. In 2000, Harris filed a complaint. resigned, and took a job in City Hall working for the City Attorney to run the Family and Children’s Services Division representing child abuse and neglect cases (one of the reasons she chose to go into the Law).

An NPR interview fom 2020 explores Kamala’s path as a prosecutor and between law enforcement and chief legal advisor/administrator of the law and Senator. In 2002 she began preparations to run for the elective office of San Francisco District Attorney as a virtually unknown black woman from an immigrant family originally hailing from the ghettos of Berkeley and Oakland against two established and known candidates with solid San Francisco credentials – – one of them the incumbent who had hired her as an assistant attorney. A fascinating article by Michael Cruse in Politico should be read because it is far too important and detailed for me to summarize here. It explains logically and coherently that Kamala, starting from nothing, through hard work and genuine involvement in San Francisco’s charities, community organizations, and cultural institutions, was able to win financial support across every district, from the super-wealthy socialites and capitalists to the poorest workers. Because of her unique upbringing, she was — and came across as — the real deal rather than the usual political grafter and con artist. Yes, she was a glamorous and sophisticated powerhouse of a woman who could mix and schmooze with the highest and mightiest, but equally truly, she was the Afro-American kid from the ghetto raised by an aspirational single mum.

In 2004, Kamala survived the runoff and won the election against the incumbent with 56 percent of the vote. She became the first person of color elected as district attorney of San Francisco and was reelected unopposed for her second term in 2007. Kamala’s Wikipedia article details the range of largely progressive improvements and reforms she introduced as San Francisco District Attorney. Several of these were adopted by other jurisdictions in California and well received by her growing numbers of campaign sponsors and political peers.

In 2010 as San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris ran for the elective office of California State Attorney General against the Los Angeles District Attorney and won by 0.8% – thanks to a big plurality she won in Los Angeles County, the closest margin in her career. (It should be noted here that a statewide job in California is not trivial, as the state has 5th largest economy in the world, behind the USA, China, Japan, and Germany.) Backed by President Obama and other prominent Democrats, Kamala was the first woman, the first African-American, and the first South Asian-American to win the office in California’s history. Again, Wikipedia details the largely progressive changes, reforms and legal actions she instigated as Attorney General.

In January 2015, Barbara Boxer, California Senator since 1993, announced that she would not contest the 2016 election. Within a week Kamala Harris announced her intent to run for the office. California’s election process for their Senate representatives is a bit weird in that both parties run together in the same primary, and then the top two candidates, irrespective of their party affiliations, contest in a runoff in the General Election. In the primary Kamala won first place by 23 points! with a female Mexican-American Democrat candidate coming second. Both Obama and Biden, along with most leading California Democrats endorsed Kamala for the run-off, which she won by 61.6%. Following her victory, she promised to protect immigrants from President-elect Trump’s policies and announced her intention to remain Attorney General through the end of 2016 (US national elections are held in November and the Government changes in mid January). 

As Senator for California, Kamala did what she could as one of 100 senators to prosecute Trump’s stooges and vicious acts from a liberal/progressive point of view. Again, Wikipedia details her major actions in the Senate, including her co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal, i.e., a major step towards the kind of emergency global mobilization that will be required to stop and reverse the existential threat of runaway warming (see the many articles in Climate Sentinel News on this threat).

In mid 2018, as Donald Trump bulldozed his way through his term in office, Kamala began to express her interest to run for President against Trump. As Wikipedia tells it, “in January 21, 2019, Harris officially announced her candidacy for President of the United States the 2020 presidential election In the first 24 hours after her candidacy announcement, she tied a record set by Bernie Sanders in 2016 for the most donations raised in the day following an announcement. More than 20,000 people attended her formal campaign launch event in her hometown of Oakland, California, on January 27, according to a police estimate.” 

In the first debate among Democratic presidential candidates, Kamala’s polling rose significantly, but in the second debate in August 2019, her record as Attorney General was attacked by Biden and one of his supporters, leading to a fall in her polling which continued to drop over the next several months because she was “too tough on crime“. “On December 3, 2019, Harris withdrew from seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination, citing a shortage of funds. In March 2020, Harris endorsed Joe Biden for president.”

“In May 2019, senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed the idea of a Biden–Harris ticket. In late February, Biden won a landslide victory in the 2020 Democratic primary election with the endorsement of House Whip Jim Clyburn, with more victories on Super Tuesday. In early March, Clyburn suggested Biden choose a black woman as a running mate, commenting that “African American women needed to be rewarded for their loyalty”. In March, Biden committed to choosing a woman for his running mate.” In mid April, Kamala said that she would be ‘honored’ to be selected as Biden’s VP. “On August 11, 2020, Biden announced he had chosen Harris, who appealed to a younger generation. She was the first African American, the first Indian American, and the third woman after Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin to be picked as the vice-presidential nominee for a major party ticket. Harris is also the first resident of the Western United States to appear on the Democratic Party’s national ticket.” In short, she met all the needs for a “balanced” ticket by covering bases Biden couldn’t, appealing to a lot of voters who wouldn’t have otherwise voted for the aging and always somewhat incoherent Biden.

My assessment (for what it is worth) is that neither Kamala nor the American voters were quite ready for the kind of cataclysmic social/political renaissance likely to follow from her election as President.

This year, in 2024, it became excruciatingly clear to anyone who watched the Presidential Debate between Biden and Trump that America faced an impossible choice between a geriatric egomaniac who seems to think he’s divinely chosen to be America’s dictator, and the almost equally blind ego of an even older man becoming senile (at 85, I’m well aware of the frailty of aging brains) who seemed to think that he was still the best President America ever had. Fortunately, at the last possible moment, Biden had enough wisdom and honesty left to recognize that he could no longer cut the mustard against the loudly Trumpeted brain-farts of the would-be maximum leader. For the sake of America and the world, he accepted the reality that Kamala Harris — his own rational choice for VP — was the right person for the job, and announced that he would not contest the election, and nominated his Vice President for the Election.

Evidence from rapidly rising voter registrations and donations suggests that Kamala is offering something better to many people who have ignored past elections because neither candidate offered a plausible future. Given who she is, the choice she offers will be especially appealing to rational people of all ages, and especially ethnic and young voters. One thing is clear. After decades of watching elections largely contested by generally sleazy and mediocre puppets of the special interest, irrationalists and know-nothings, few pundits seem to understand what is going on. I think this is because they haven’t really grasped just what Kamala brings to the job. They have not yet made the effort to understand the background that makes her very different from the usual politician.

Also, based on many reports where authors have noted that Kamala Harris has not responded to their requests for comments, it is clear that she does not spend much time or effort blowing her own trumpet. Rather, it seems that rather than saying what she would do, she acts on her beliefs and thoughts. Reporters have little choice but to report what she does and has done. Looking at her history, I think that once she has the completely formal endorsement of the Democratic National Convention we will see just what a highly competent and just prosecutor with the force of law and justice behind her can do with her favorite prey: sexual predator, fraudster, and recidivist felon — all wrapped into one. The meat and offal of the trumpet will be flayed, quartered, sliced, and diced into fermenting mincemeat stuffed into a pig’s intestine to cure and be buried because the end product will be too toxic for consumption or any other use. And chances are that the climate will be vastly better with the source of that toxic odor gone and buried for good.

I would argue that her strongest capabilities (all founded in her childhood) are cultural breadth and understanding, ethical responsibility and integrity, social skills, caring for people no matter what their station in life, and scientific rationalism. The few days of polling since Biden withdrew from the race to concentrate on finishing his term as President shows a significant increase in support for the Democrats. Where Trump was definitely leading on most measures Biden, Harris is now level-pegging or even the preferred President. Over the next 3+ months, the radical difference between the would-be insane dictator and demagogue divorced from reality, and the rational, sane, competent, and wise citizen of the world will become so stark that she may well win by enough of a landslide to bring along a supermajority of progressives into both Houses of Congress.

What does this mean for the climate emergency?

In California as a prosecutor, Attorney General, and Senator, Harris was no friend of big oil, prosecuting companies for environmental damage, working with some success to block fracking, co-sponsoring and leading the campaign in Congress to pass the Green New Deal. As quoted in the New York Times, “‘Climate change is real, and it poses an existential threat to us as human beings, and it is within our power to do something about it,’ Ms. Harris told a New Hampshire crowd in 2019 when she was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. ‘I am supporting the Green New Deal,” she said to thunderous applause.'” As the likely Democratic Candidate for President in the 2024 Election she has also already been endorsed by many green organizations, including those who had not endorsed Biden.

Because Kamala is a rational realist, who learned what science is and how it works while at her mother’s knee in her mother’s pioneering cancer research labs, (1) I am confident that Kamala knows and understands the existential threats we face from runaway global warming, and (2) as President will do everything that is politically possible to ensure that America joins (or even leads) the emergency global mobilization that will be needed to actually stop and reverse the warming before that is physically ruled out by the still accelerating positive feedbacks that have already been released by ongoing warming processes. 

Because Trump is the complete Antithesis of everything Kamala Harris is and stands for, if he wins his second term, he has already said that it will be the last election. He and his VP Vance are both already cheering “Drill, baby, drill, drill baby drill!!” This alternative will almost certainly lead to physically unstoppable runaway warming and global mass extinction that will inevitably include humans along with most other complex life. Scientific evidence I have discussed in Climate Sentinel News suggests that the rate of warming is probably an order of magnitude faster than in the End Permian. extinction – the most complete extinction of complex life in Earth’s history.

Kamala has the last word in her New York Times interview with Astead Herndon on 16 Nov. 2023:

We haven’t even begun to discuss what we have done on one of the biggest crises, front page of your newspaper and everywhere else, which is the climate crisis. Our administration has been able to get through, often without bipartisan support, what I estimate to be probably $1 trillion that we are investing in climate resilience and adaptation, in clean energy, a new economy, job training, jobs. This is the work that we have done, and it’s because people voted. And what we will be doing between now and November of 2024 is thanking them because they went out there and they said, this is what we want of our government and for our future.

Listen to the interview and read the transcript.

Posted by William P. Hall

Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'. Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry. After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology. In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne. In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract. Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'. Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe. As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.

Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.