It’s predicted that the Great Barrier Reef will die completely in our lifetime. 

Our children will never experience its magical beauty. We have ruined that beloved ecosystem. Let that sink in.

Melting ice caps are forcing starving polar bears to look for food on terrestrial land. Ice is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall, inhibiting their ability to hunt as their instincts tell them to.

The Amazon rainforest, home to the richest ecosystem on the planet, is still burning at an unfathomable rate of three football fields per minute. It has been burning for weeks, and countless animal and plant species have been irreversibly decimated. Humans are likely to blame.

The president of Brazil, the country which encapsulates much of the rainforest, is a climate change skeptic. The fire likely started from farmers trying to clear more of the rainforest to use for the country’s soybean and cattle exports.

Our planet is suffering. There has never been a more critical need for change. 

The worst part: there is no answer in sight. 

The globe continues to scramble for solutions and accountability, while many politicians discount the importance and urgency of the matter altogether.

Our president, in fact, is a climate change denier himself. 

Trump, in one of his many infamous tweets, posted in 2012 that he believes that climate change “is a concept created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

I wish I was joking.

Needless to say, no groundbreaking legislation in America will be established to address climate change anytime soon. Quite the opposite, in fact.

During his three years of presidency, Trump has worked to remove many of the limits Barack Obama had in place which limited greenhouse gas emissions. 

Trump also elected to leave the Paris Accord, which is a global effort to mitigate greenhouse gases. In his endless effort to bring back the coal industry, Trump created the Affordable Clean Energy rule, easing limits on coal-fired power plant emissions. 

The Environmental Protection Agency, which is technically overseen by Trump himself, stated that the rule could result in 1,400 more premature deaths by 2030 than Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which it is set to replace.

Trump is hyperfocused on fulfilling his campaign promise of bringing back the coal industry above all else. He ignores modern, cleaner forms of energy and the well-being of Americans to boost his chances of reelection. 

Trump’s gross negligence towards climate change legislation will be felt for years after he has left office. 

Because this article can only be so long, I digress.

Back to my original point, climate change isn’t a political issue. Yet it is. 

Democrats and Republicans play an endless game of tug-of-war stalling, revoking and passing legislation related to the issue.

Republicans generally minimize the importance of the topic, while many democratic presidential candidates are making environmental changes a key part of their campaign platforms.

The importance of the 2020 campaign in relation to global climate change cannot be overstated. Trump’s rollbacks and indifferent attitude towards global warming comes at a particularly vulnerable time, as this July was the hottest month ever recorded and in 2019 the first mammal went extinct as a direct result of climate change. 

Even the immediate onset of the most radical legislation would merely put a bandaid over the irreversible damage already done to the planet.

Climate change is our planet suffering in unprecedented ways as a result of our current practices. 

Though Trump misconstrues climate change as a bipartisan issue, when the planet continues to get hotter, all humans will suffer the impact regardless of political affiliation.