So the US election is finally over. Thank goodness.
It seemed to drag on for ages, and in some respects it was a bit of a circus. What struck me most about the results was that it enabled the world to see in black and white just how deeply divided the United States is. Biden won, yes, but at the time of writing he had just 50.6% of the votes while Trump had 47.7%. That is a very narrow majority. It shows that US citizens are pretty much split down the middle. One Harvard University academic wrote on Monday that the US was “perhaps more divided than it has been since the Civil War” – 155 years ago. The differences between US Democrats and Republicans are not minor either. As she wrote, they disagree sharply about very serious stuff: the economy, racism, threats of climate change, immigration, US foreign policy and the seriousness of the Covid pandemic. Can’t say I am drawn to either candidate, but I am glad that Biden won instead of Trump for two main reasons. The first is that Biden plans to claw back some of the damage done by Trump who failed to tackle climate change. Biden plans to invest $2 trillion into a plan to curb carbon emissions and move the US to a low-carbon economy. He also plans to get the US back into the international Paris Agreement to fight climate change, which Trump pulled out of. The US has a moral obligation to tackle climate change because that country is currently the second biggest carbon emitter after China. But if you add the US carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution – they are still up there in the atmosphere because carbon hangs around for hundreds of years – then the US is the biggest carbon emitter in the world. So no, the US cannot say to the rest of the world “I’m not going to play”. Its massive carbon emissions have a global impact. If its carbon pollution just hung in a bubble over the US, changing only the US climate, the world would not really care. But of course global climate change doesn’t work like that. The second reason I am glad is because Biden says he will tackle the Covid pandemic in his country. About time. Watching the US, a rich country with plenty of educated people, muddle through a deadly disease, was quite breathtaking. There have been 50 million cases of Covid worldwide, of which 10 million were in the US. That is a staggering 20% of the world total. For a country that probably has more doctors, hospitals, scientists and money than most countries, that is shameful. If the US politicians had bungled a deadly disease that stayed within its borders, well, that would be sad, but the rest of the world would not be so concerned. Again, like climate change, a pandemic doesn’t work like that. Will Biden be able to carry out his promises? Who knows? But at least he is making all the right noises now. I’ll drink to that.
