In 2018, I wrote in this space about the urgency for Maine to develop a unified climate action plan. At the time, Maine was drifting without a concrete plan beyond 2020, despite mounting evidence of a changing climate around the world and here in Maine. Since then, indicators of a changing climate continue to accelerate and are everywhere in the media. We all know the list. Wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, heat waves, rising sea level, floods, pounding rains, fading winters, ocean acidification, a continuum of record-high temperatures and rising costs too often borne by those who can least afford it.

Since 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released comprehensive reports about the deterioration of our land and our oceans, and the critical need to limit warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius globally by the end of the century. Last year, the IPCC’s sixth major assessment documented the mounting consequences, limited progress and urgency of reducing greenhouse gases and investing in adaptation to the changes we cannot avoid. Continued inaction comes with growing costs and steady increases in billion-dollar disasters. Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court have not effectively dealt with the climate crisis, despite leadership from many members of Maine’s delegation, past and present. Certainly, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offers hope, yet that alone will not get us to the future our children deserve.

Thankfully, Maine has emerged as a leader on climate change, with the current administration in Augusta launching a unified climate action plan in 2020 that we urgently needed called Maine Won’t Wait (a name that feels appropriate for the spirit of this effort). Developed by the Maine Climate Council and grounded in the latest science, this framework has launched Maine on a transition from fossil to renewable energy; invests in Maine communities, farms, forests and fisheries; promotes the training of young people with skills for the world of tomorrow, and increasingly works to achieve this progress through a lens of equity and a just economic transition.

Is the plan perfect? No. But alternative pathways ignoring the urgency of our climate reality were so much worse. The plan is also a process, not a destination, with ongoing stakeholder engagement and planned updates every four years. Can Maine change the world by itself? No. But Maine knows best what works for Maine’s climate solutions, and Maine joined the U.S. Climate Alliance in 2019 to work with nearly half of the U.S. states committed to pursuing the Paris agreement’s goals of keeping global temperature below a 1.5-degree threshold. When we lead by example, our individual impacts are much larger than just the individual, or state.

As a scientist, I would rather be showing graphs and describing climate impacts and solutions. However, elections matter and we are running out of time to go through alternating election cycles of climate response while a better future slips away. Every day that we are working on climate solutions and every fraction of a degree of warming that we avoid matters – in dollars, in lives and in opportunity.

The elections this fall will be critical to solidify strong, cost-effective climate action in Maine and in Washington, D.C. While indicators of climate change are accelerating, so, too, will solutions if we elect political leadership committed to this work. Particularly for youth facing many times more extreme weather events in their future, their vote is incredibly powerful. Of Maine’s over 1 million eligible voters, a quarter are 18 to 34 years old. In 2018, about 150,000 of these young voters sat out the election, with only 29 percent of those 18 to 24 years old exercising their right to vote. In our 50-50 political world, these votes matter. I urge all of us, and particularly Maine’s youth, to vote for leaders in Maine that will build on what Maine Won’t Wait has started, because the climate crisis will not wait.