Charlie Jane Anders

Because we are close to reaching climate benchmarks we can’t come back from

Future generations will look back on 2024 as the moment when the United States of America made a defining choice about climate change. This November, we're either going to renew our commitment to fixing this mess we created, or embrace denial and plunge the world into a nightmarish scenario.

Nobody much is talking about it, but this election feels especially important for a couple of reasons: first, we are dangerously close to reaching some climate benchmarks that we won't be able to come back from easily, if at all. And second, we are now being faced with daily brutal reminders of the impacts of climate change on our world. As Kamala Harris herself said in a powerful 2023 speech, climate change is here and the effects are in our face everyday. 

The good news is, the past few years have seen some real advances toward clean energy and green infrastructure. Tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act are helping to make wind and solar power more affordable than non-renewable energy sources, and the subsidies in the bill are creating more jobs in the clean energy sector. But there's much more work to be done — and I'm holding onto hope that President Harris will keep pushing a pro-climate agenda. Yes, I wish she was talking about climate change more on the campaign trail, and I'm saddened that she's committed not to ban fracking. But I look at the things she said in that 2023 speech, where she pulled no punches, and her 90 percent record on climate votes according to the League of Conservation Voters, and I believe that she gets how urgent this problem really is. And meanwhile, I look at Donald Trump making extravagant promises to fossil-fuel executives in exchange for donations, and I know which candidate is likelier to move us in the right direction.

As a writer of speculative fiction among other things, I think a lot about the future. And there's a very bleak future scenario, in which climate change leads to worsening unrest and vicious wars over dwindling resources. We're liable to see massive increases in the numbers of refugees trying to enter the United States and Western Europe. Even though these people will be responding to a crisis we did the most to engineer, I don't imagine we will treat them with any degree of compassion or decency, based on recent events. My darkest future timeline involves a vicious cycle, in which climate change leads to widespread devastation, which leads to chaos and human misery, which strengthens the grip of authoritarian leaders — who in turn plunge us deeper into climate chaos. This, unfortunately, does not feel far-fetched to me: it's the world I fear may come to pass, if we don't act soon.

Many people see the current election primarily as a battle against toxic masculinity-as-public policy. I see toxic masculinity as emblematic of how we're treating our own natural habitat, and the arrogance with which we have wheeled our clumsy power. Electing Kamala Harris is just the beginning of the things we need to do to face this unprecedented threat — we'll have to keep fighting, in so many arenas and against powerful entrenched interests — but it's an essential start to saving us from the worst-case scenario.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster (August 2025), a novel about queer families and magical healing.