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Things feel pretty weird right now to Americans.
Since we celebrated the New Year, we have seen President Obama’s executive action with rudimentary gun control measures met with widespread backlash from the gun lobby and its political supporters, a state of emergency in California due to a methane leak and Virginia’s GOP launched a pledge that would make it harder for minorities and the poor to vote. One thing we still have not seen, though, is a single Republican presidential candidate acknowledge climate change in the debates despite the historic climate deal in Paris just before the holidays.
The country will hear from President Obama tomorrow night during his the State of the Union address. As for the state of our democracy, we have serious work to do. The good news is that the American people have never been more determined to claim a democracy that represents the people and the issues that matter to us. From issue to issue, people power is winning, and claiming our democracy will be no different.
Today, Bernie Sanders became the first presidential candidate to sign a pledge launched by Greenpeace and partners asking all candidates to support a people-powered democracy and reject campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry. This is the first step in a historic journey to restore power to the people in this country.
To understand the state of our democracy and what’s fueling the growing democracy movement today here are three important realities we must face.
Reality 1: Money in Politics
Let’s start with out-of-control money in politics and its inflated influence on our government.
Private money, from industries like oil and gas, is manipulating our democracy so egregiously that it is has almost ceased to be a real democracy at all. The passage of Citizens United in 2010 unleashed unlimited spending and corporate influence. Individuals can now donate millions to the candidate of their choice.
We have seen the consequences of this. For instance, not one question about climate change was asked during either the Republican or Democratic presidential debates just days after the world reached a historic climate deal in Paris.
Despite her recent comments on fossil fuels and climate change recently, even Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton receives money connected to the fossil fuel industry via industry lobbyists who have bundled contributions to the campaign.
We experience the impacts of excessive corporate influence on our politicians on a daily basis—from access to clean water and air to healthcare reform to student loans to gun control. The New York Times reported this fall that just 158 families have contributed half of the campaign money on the 2016 campaign trail. Where did all that money come from? Primarily the finance and energy industries, particularly oil and gas.
These contributors are not interested in protecting the environment, advocating for social justice or ending gun violence. They are only interested in protecting their sky-high profits.
The one percent is buying their candidates, while making it harder for the 99 percent to even vote in the first place.
Reality 2: Voting Rights
The right to vote is the foundation of democracy. Sadly, certain lawmakers have taken such major steps backwards in voting rights that it is harder for certain groups to vote in 2016 than in it was in 1965.
This will be the first presidential election year in which 15 states have new voting restrictions. These include photo identification requirements, cuts to early voting, and more registration restrictions including the elimination of same day voting registration. Who does this impact? Minorities, the elderly, the poor and students, primarily.
How did all this happen? The catalyst was the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013. The Court voted to reverse parts of a crucial 1965 law that required lawmakers in state with a history of discrimination to receive federal permission before changing voting laws. What followed immediately were laws making it harder for underprivileged communities to vote, including birth certificate requirements and lack of voting booths near public transportation.
Congress’s failure to restore voting rights since that decision means means that a huge chunk of people in America—those most impacted by things like climate change and social injustice—are finding it hard to cast their votes at all.
Reality 3: People Power is Changing Everything
If there is anything to take from 2015, it’s that people-power is winning.
From protecting the Arctic from Shell’s offshore drilling plans to the Black Lives Matter movement, people are becoming more active on the issues that they care about. And that is manifesting into real change- albeit sometimes slow given the political realities.
Both Maine and Seattle voters recently made historic strides in passing initiatives that put more power in the hands of the people. Tallahassee, Florida, voters overwhelmingly supported a sweeping set of ethics and campaign finance laws. There have been major victories in voting rights in 16 states, including Maryland, Delaware and Vermont.
No matter where they currently stand, all of the presidential candidates are getting the message from thousands of supporters and nearly 20 organizations that it is time they support a people-powered democracy by saying “no” to fossil fuel money and supporting people’s right to vote.
2016 just became the year we declare a democracy for the people of the 21st century.
Tell the presidential candidates to just say no to fossil fuel money.
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Kristan Porter grew up in a fishing family in the fishing community of Cutler, Maine, where he says all roads lead to one career path: fishing. (Porter's father was the family's lone exception. He suffered from terrible seasickness, and so became a carpenter.) The 49-year-old, who has been working on boats since he was a kid and fishing on his own since 1991, says that the recent warming of Maine's cool coastal waters has yielded unprecedented lobster landings.
"The temperature of the Gulf of Maine is creating the right conditions for lobster, so it's helped our industry—and it's been a big boost for the Maine economy," Porter, the current president of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, said. "But you never know what lies ahead. If it continues to warm, it may end up going the other way."
The Gulf of Maine is setting frequent temperature records and warming faster overall than 99 percent of the world's oceans, due in large part to climate change. Meanwhile, its lobster population skyrocketed by 515 percent between 1984 and 2014. In 1990, for example, lobster landings in Maine totaled 28 million pounds. Ten years later that figure was up to 57 million pounds. And in every year since 2011, the take has exceeded 100 million pounds, peaking at 132.6 million pounds in 2016 and turning lobster into a half-billion-dollar industry for the state.
Fishermen like Porter have been reaping the benefits of the boom, but he's right — as the Gulf of Maine's waters inevitably continue to warm, lobster populations will almost certainly decrease. The crustaceans thrive at temperatures between 61 and 64 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the water hits 70 degrees, its oxygen levels plummet, to the detriment of a host of marine plants and animals, lobsters included. According to a 2018 study, the gulf's lobster population could fall by 40 to 62 percent over the next 30 years, returning the industry — the nation's most valuable fishery — to early-2000s numbers.
"Temperature is a big part of the story here," said Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) and a coauthor of the study. "Lobster is likely to decline, and that's obviously more worrisome in the North, where it has been booming."
Maine lobsters are normally brown, but about one in every two million is blue.
Richard Wood / Flickr
Marine scientist Susie Arnold of the Rockland, Maine–based Island Institute notes that rising temperatures have also contributed to a decline in other fisheries like shrimp, cod and scallops, leaving fishermen in Maine precariously dependent on the thriving lobster populations. "A lot of fishermen in coastal communities in Maine are relying on just one fishery, and as we're seeing the impacts of climate change, that definitely gets people worried," she said. In response, Arnold and her colleagues are encouraging fishermen to think about diversification opportunities like aquaculture. "We're trying to help coastal communities maintain their cultural heritage, and a large part of that has to do with making a living off a healthy marine ecosystem."
State lawmakers, too, are taking note of the warming trend and rising up in support of climate action. Maine Governor Janet Mills cited concerns about climate change impacting the lobster industry in her February announcement that the state would join the U.S. Climate Alliance. She has also linked the recent creation of a Maine Climate Council and ambitious statewide renewable energy goals to the health of local fisheries. (Mills recently signed several climate bills into law that will help the state transition to 80 percent renewable energy by 2030 and reduce emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.)
Such a head-on response to the impacts of climate change facing Maine offers a much-needed boost to the future of both lobsters and the coastal communities that rely on the fishery. Meanwhile, the iconic sea creatures have already benefited from generations of conservation efforts, as noted by Pershing and his fellow researchers. In addition to heeding minimum and maximum catch size limits, fishers must refrain from taking any egg-bearing female lobsters. Instead, when they catch these breeders, they clip their tails with a "V notch,"—a mark that will stay with a lobster through several molts—then release them. (The clipped tail signals to other fisherman who may encounter the same lobsters that they are off-limits.)
Porter and other fisherman liken this investment in the future of the industry to putting money in the bank. And marine scientists, including NRDC's Lisa Suatoni, call it smart climate policy. "Leaving these large, fecund females in the water is a really good idea in the context of a rapidly changing environment," Suatoni said. "It isn't just fixated on how to get maximum sustainable yield but also expanding our objective to also get increased ecological or evolutionary resilience."
The decline of the lobster industry in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, where waters are warmer and regulations less stringent than in Maine, serves as a cautionary tale for their northern neighbor. Landings in southern New England shrank by as much as 70 percent from 1997 to 2007, but the industry has resisted many conservation measures, and again rejected fishing restrictions brought to the table by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in 2017.
The proposed restrictions would have changed the legal harvesting size and reduced the number of traps allowed per fisherman, among other regulation changes. Had Maine followed the same lax approach, Pershing and his colleagues estimate that lobster populations in the Gulf of Maine would have increased by less than half as much as it did during their 30-year study period.
While Pershing praises Maine's forward-looking approach for boosting the resilience of its lobster industry in the face of the growing climate crisis, "there's a limit to how much we can adapt and how much we can manage around it," he said. "When you look beyond 2050 in a high-CO2 world, it's a scenario where fisheries are really challenged no matter where you look in the country. We have to figure out how to avoid that because everything gets so much more difficult in that world—and we can make that case in a really concrete way with some of the fishery models."
Pershing says that climate change is having impacts up and down the food chain in the Gulf of Maine. For example, a sharp decline in a species of tiny copepod — a shrimp-like creature that is a favorite food of herring, seabirds and endangered right whales — is putting further stress on these creatures.
"These aren't just faraway changes that are happening in the ocean where nobody really sees them," Pershing said. "There are real consequences for the Gulf of Maine and the communities that live on the coast."
Nicole Greenfield is a writer at NRDC whose articles on religion, the environment, popular culture and social justice have appeared in many publications.