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From Fareed Zakaria's newsletter:

The Electoral College and the Climate

For anyone who wants the US to rejoin the Paris climate accord and limit emissions more aggressively, the 2020 election may seem particularly important. With global-warming projections stressing urgency, former Obama climate envoy Todd Stern tells Foreign Policy, “The stakes couldn’t be any higher.” Scientific American broke with 175 years of tradition and endorsed Joe Biden for president, citing the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

At The Atlantic, Peter Beinart writes that America’s climate action is being hampered by the Electoral College. (That institution, bemoaned widely by the left after President Trump’s win in 2016, is now a perennial topic of conversation: At The New Yorker, Steve Coll rehashes its history as a way to preserve the power of slave states, and its support from the segregationist South during a Nixon-era push to end it, writing that “[t]oday, it effectively dilutes the votes of African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans, because they live disproportionately in populous states, which have less power in the College per capita.”) Beinart writes of another effect: As wildfires spread in the Western US, Beinart suggests they’d be treated differently by America’s political leaders, were they happening in swing states.

As The New York Times’ Stuart A. Thompson and Yaryna Serkez recently detailed, in a story and interactive map, different US regions will be affected by climate change differently. Given that America doesn’t choose its presidents based on a national popular vote, Beinart argues the political impact of climate-related disasters will be cordoned off, along with the Electoral College ballots of the states that experience them. “By the time Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin face climate emergencies that rival those currently afflicting California, Oregon, and Washington,” Beinart writes, “the problem may be too far along for anyone to fix.”