The Ocean and the Election — Voting for the Blue in the Red, White and Blue

By David Helvarg / Blue Frontier / Sept. 6, 2024 I feel we need to talk about the ocean as an election issue now.  Obviously and unfortunately our public seas did not get to be a part of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which most viewers saw as a victory for Harris even as things got more heated than Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean in August – when it hit 89 degrees. More surprisingly, climate was not seriously addressed during the 90-minute debate even as Hurricane Francine was heading towards coastal Louisiana and New Orleans.  This followed the hottest summer in recorded history (yes, it really was 89 degrees on Alaska’s north slope). The climate issue was downplayed for reasons we’ll come to shortly. The last question of the evening was on climate change and you’d have expected some substantial disagreement between a climate denier and a woman whose administration passed the largest climate action legislation in the history of the world, the $300 billion misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.