Real Environmentalists Vote!

REAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS VOTE!

JOIN US!

Voter turnout has been increasing. Be part of the trend!

The midterm elections are coming up

The midterm elections are coming soon, Tuesday November 8, 2022! In many places there are ways to vote early, whether by mail or in person.

Midterm elections don’t usually draw large numbers of voters, but voting now for candidates that care about the environment and are willing to take action is the most important thing we can do!

Your vote matters

I was asked recently: “What does one vote matter?”

Yes, your vote is just one vote. Unless you talk a friend into voting who wasn’t going to! Help get out the vote and your voice and power grows!

But sure, maybe it won’t matter. Maybe it will. What is 100% guaranteed is that if you don’t vote, you had no chance to have a say in the outcome.

The freedoms you lose matter. The loss of environmental action does matter.

Elections are often won (and lost) at the margins

Remember the 11,780 votes Donald Trump wanted to find in Georgia, an effort that is now under investigation? That was out of about five million votes cast in Georgia. The difference was about one in 500 voters.

Many congressional, state and local elections are decided by dozens to hundreds of votes. The majority in the Virginia state legislature was decided by a coin toss to break a tie in 2018. That single coin toss made a big difference since it decided which party was the majority. One vote would have changed that! It matters because the majority party has great power to set the legislative agenda and to appoint people to important positions, both in state legislatures and the Congress of the United States.

Local elections matter

It isn’t just about Congress, as important as that is.

Don’t think that in the struggle to control climate change and ecological degradation local elections don’t matter.

Local laws and regulations can impact you and your neighbors directly and quickly. Many critical actions, like creating parks and planting trees, caring for infrastructure, zoning and traffic, mass transit, local pollution regulations, and disaster planning, are the responsibility of local governments.

The group C40 Cities has 96 member cities from around the world that represent 20% of the global economy. They are about to have their Global Mayor’s Summit October 19-21, 2022 in Buenos Aires. They aren’t waiting for state, national and international governments in order to act!

Who we vote for matters

 Congress just passed two huge pieces of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act and ratifying the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol of 1987 that will limit hydrofluorocarbons. The latter was a bipartisan effort, and that is to be applauded.

But it isn’t wise to ignore that we lost four critical years during the Trump administration. Climate deniers were appointed to key positions and other tactics were designed to disrupt action on climate change and the environment. The choice to leave the Paris Accords, a mostly symbolic gesture since there is no enforcement anyway, signaled internationally what the priorities were. It wasn’t subtle.

We are now coming up to the midterm elections in the United States. What party is in power sets the agenda.

It matters.

WE Matter.