Pretend it’s 1944, deep in World War II, and you’re sizing up a candidate for state representative, or executive council, or Congress, or local planning board – any office at all. Just like you may be doing in 2024.

You talk about taxes and roads and regulations, then you mention the war. And the candidate says “I don’t believe the war is real,” or “the war wasn’t caused by people, it’s just natural patterns” or “the war has gotten too bad and is hopeless, we should move on to other things.”

Their opinions on everything else would be immediately irrelevant, right? No vote for you, bub!

That’s the situation today regarding the climate emergency.

Any wannabe elected official who thinks climate change isn’t real, or isn’t our doing, or is beyond our reach because of the Chinese, or who gives any other excuse for hiding from the problem – they’re not worthy of our support, regardless of their other actions and opinions.

This is true even though coping with the destructive changes in weather patterns is not the only thing that New Hampshire elected officials need to worry about; it’s not even the top item on most of their priority lists. Everybody in any position of authority needs to be prepared to factor climate change into their decision-making, whether they’re approving building codes or handing out contracts for state work or crafting laws. Climate change is that big.

It isn’t just ruining our winters and causing “100-year floods” in the North Country every year. It’s also raising the price of home insurance because of so many disasters, making chocolate and coffee more expensive or hard to get as record heat withers the equator, increasing the possibility that more of our tax dollars will have to be spent on “police actions” overseas as climate refugees try to cross borders. It’s upending everything.

As a voter, we need to know what any candidate for any office thinks about the most important event of our time. Don’t let them pawn you off with claims that it’s not relevant to the office they’re seeking, because it’s relevant to everything.

Now for some (ugh) politics. I realize this advice all but says not vote for anybody on any Republican ticket, right down to your neighbor who wants to be on the select board. Donald Trump’s takeover of the party has pushed it well into the climate-denial camp, and his control of the party’s purse strings means that everybody in the GOP has to toe whatever line he takes or else they’ll face a massacre in their next primary.

That’s a shame because in my youth the GOP, realizing that a functioning ecosystem was necessary for a functioning economy, was an environmental leader. Nixon created the EPA, after all. We can only hope that they’ll come to their senses. Just as we did in World War II.