Last night, as election results poured in, I sat on a rock at the edge of the sea on the coast of Rhode Island and watched the moon set. I felt despair and grief. Tiny twinkles of light at the horizon, breaking the deep endless darkness of the sea, caught my eye; it took me a moment to remember these were the lights of the newly installed wind turbines. And I felt hope.
This election has delivered the worst possible outcomes for our fight to cut fossil fuel pollution. It is a staggering—and dangerous—defeat. But when it comes to protecting our children, mothers know how to go into Warrior Mode, and that is exactly where you will find members of Moms Clean Air Force in the years ahead.
Everything we fought so hard to achieve is imperiled under a president who thinks climate change is a hoax. The Biden administration, with some bipartisan support, jump-started a historic, transformative era with deep investments in clean energy and transportation. The Environmental Protection Agency has strengthened clean air protections. But even with an administration willing to respond to a crisis whose dangers we are living with daily across the country—extreme storms, unprecedented wildfire seasons, long droughts and record-breaking heat, continual flooding—we have so much more work to do, with urgency.
We will fight to hold the line to which our progress moved over the last four years. We will be up against a president and an administration with exactly zero interest in a strong and protective EPA—much less any interest in protecting our children from the assault on the stability and health of our world. We are heartsore now. We must take time to grieve, understand what happened, and restore hope and energy.
At Moms Clean Air Force, we have built up a vibrant, dedicated, trusted community of people whose values are shared; we will continue to work together. We will need to support our clean air champions in statehouses and city halls. A clean energy transformation has begun, and will not be stopped. Whether it will grow with the urgency needed is another question. We will fight whatever treachery we confront in the promised dismantling of EPA. We will call on each other to raise our voices. We will never give up.