By Laurie Casey

As my daughter enters the final weeks of her senior year in high school, she should have been running her personal best times at the conference track meet, getting ready for prom and planning what to do on senior ditch day. But she is faced with a very different reality: abiding by government edicts to shelter in place. As her mother, I feel sad that she’s missing out on senior year fun. But what keeps me up at night is the toll that climate change will take on her whole adult life.

For the past several years, One Earth Film Festival has displayed the Atmospheric CO2 Level on our website home page. In Coronavirus terms, this number should be as familiar to us as the number of COVID deaths in our state.

The gold standard for global CO2 measurements is the Keeling Curve, named for the man who developed it. As of May 8, it’s 417.04 CO2 concentration in parts per million (PPM). You can see atmospheric CO2’s ominous march upwards since 1960, as well as the “hockey stick,” as climate scholar Michael Mann calls it, that describes the trajectory of atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 10,000 years.

The mechanics of this number are simple: If we remove CO2 from the atmosphere, we reduce the effects of climate change. If we continue to pump it out, climate change will grind forward, causing biodiversity blackouts and unleashing more new viruses and diseases. Wildfires will ravage the landscape. Floods will carve away our soils and towns. There will be furious droughts, millions of climate refugees and potential wars over water. There won’t be an end to the suffering, the fear and the economic upheaval.

It’s interesting to consider the way we’ve addressed the climate crisis thus far in light of the way we’ve addressed the COVID crisis. Ponder Greta Thunberg’s words about the climate crisis as she addressed the Austrian World Summit just a year ago:

"If there really was a crisis this big, then we would rarely talk about anything else. As soon as you turn on the TV, almost everything would be about that. Headlines, radio, newspapers, you would almost never hear or read about anything else. And the politicians would surely have done what was needed by now, wouldn’t they? They would hold crisis meetings all the time, declare climate emergencies everywhere and spend all their waking hours handling the situation and informing the people what was going on.

“But it never was like that. The climate crisis was just treated like any other issue. Or even less than that. We must admit that we do not have the situation under control. And we must admit that we are losing this battle."

As Thunberg notes, we’re missing our resolve. But that’s all we’re missing. We have what we need to fight climate change.

We have a window – no one knows exactly how large -- several years on the inside, a few decades on the outside – to address the crisis.

We have the tools: solar, wind and geothermal energy; public transit, electric cars, bikes and other green transport; composting, gardening and our grandparents’ waste-not-want-not values. We have a growing army of vocal young people who are fighting literally for their lives and the future of our planet.

Another key, crucial tool is a new—really old – lesson that COVID is teaching us: the importance of community, solidarity, togetherness, whatever you want to call it. We look around us and notice who is sick and who is lonely, who is bored and who needs a smile. We share our hand sanitizer, our eggs and our skills. We sing and clap on our front porches and dance in the street. This weaving together of our bonds as people is powerful. We understand what we owe each other and what we can freely give. Let’s overthrow the greed and self-interest of the last 4 decades. By taking care of each other, we can take care of ourselves.

If you are among the lucky ones who have spare time during the COVID emergency, use it to call your elected representatives, join a political advocacy organization and write to your favorite companies to demand new policies that address our climate crisis. Donate money to political campaigns, encourage others to register to vote and in November VOTE for leaders who will prioritize policies that protect people and planet.