With the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, just weeks away, there are three words I would love to hear from everyone asking for our vote: “Hold me accountable.”
For those who refuse to be held accountable, especially some of those holding office right now, those three words are like garlic to a vampire. And that is exactly why we should demand them.
Leaders Who Know What We Are Living Through
In my opinion, we need to elect leaders who can identify with what the majority of us are going through right now: the struggle to feed our families and ourselves; a healthcare system that too often measures success by money flowing into the pockets of those who approve or deny care, rather than by our health; and an education system as battered as castle walls after a long siege.
Let us be honest. We are used to being hoodwinked. Too many of the people we elected have developed a taste for the wealth that flows from corporations, wealthy individuals and families, industries, and tech firms that seek to shape our lives, our pockets, and our future, and in the process wear down our spirit to fight back.
Many incumbents, including Republicans who have stood behind this administration, are now asking to be re-elected. I will not tell anyone who to vote for, and I honestly do not know whether every candidate on either side deserves your vote. What I am asking is that we judge every candidate, of every party, by one standard: will they let us hold them accountable? Given where we are and where we are headed, that question has never mattered more.
And where we are headed involves five converging emergencies.
The Climate Emergency
The Climate Emergency is worsening at a time when we should finally be confronting it in a safe and sustainable way. We tend to forget that it is tied directly to our children’s well-being, today and in the future, and to the resources we need to keep living on this planet, including the biodiversity of land, ocean, and plant life that sustains us. The Climate Emergency is no joke, and it must be treated with the seriousness it demands.
The Ecological Emergency
The Ecological Emergency concerns extinction, ocean health, animal species on the edge of disappearing, and the plant life many of us depend on for food. All of these are in decline. Insects and birds are disappearing, and they support life in ways most of us never see: pollinating crops, controlling pests, and spreading seeds. North America alone has lost roughly three billion breeding birds since 1970.
How can we remain so uninformed about the interconnectedness of all life on this planet, including you, the person reading this?
Sometimes I joke that there are far more advanced civilizations out there, perhaps leaving crop circles to warn one another: “Not this planet. Not yet. They haven’t evolved.” A silly thought, I admit, but some days it is hard to argue with.
The Humanity Emergency
That brings me to the Humanity Emergency: the normalization of cruelty and willful ignorance, emotional and intellectual immaturity, corrupted relationships, disrespect for human dignity and rights, the open elevation of racism, and the hatred and division fed by an “Us vs. Them” mentality, whether rooted in religion, politics, or identity.
It is disappointing. But it does not mean goodness has been erased. There are millions of kind and respectful human beings, and many remain that way even after suffering the very abuses I just described. I will also be addressing how many men treat women through dedicated spaces within Climate Tribe Social, so look for those blog posts at climatechangecommunity.com.
Recently, while I was driving with my windows down, a stranger in another car yelled into mine: “I hate you, [expletive], I hope you die.” In that moment, I did not feel defeated. I felt proud: proud to be an American and proud to be Boricua. A true patriot would never do what that person did, no matter how deeply they disagreed with me. To me, a true American cares about people, not only in this country but around the planet.
The Democracy Emergency
In some places, people have already lost the freedom to express themselves, to speak their minds without reprisal, and to freely choose who they vote for. In other places, that loss is not yet cemented, but forces are working to make it a reality. When a leader with authoritarian ambitions is surrounded by a cabinet and followers who value loyalty above principle, the values of democracy are in danger.
A society that abandons ethics, shared values, and respect for others will find itself spiraling toward one that discards those who are already struggling. I do not need to give examples. Simply turn on the news.
The Displacement Emergency
Finally, there is the Climate Refugee Emergency, which I now call the Displacement Emergency, and it is truly alarming. The IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, the report that first opened my eyes, projected that between 75 and 250 million people in Africa alone would face increased water stress by 2020. Later IPCC assessments have only deepened those warnings. Today, access to clean, reliable water is becoming one of the defining pressures pushing people from their homes, compounded by storms of increasing ferocity that have become part of our daily news cycle.
A Word on Data Centers and Energy
I do not classify this one as an emergency, but as a failure of judgment and of concern for the communities involved: how and where we build data centers. The International Energy Agency projects that global data center electricity demand will roughly double by 2030. Surely we can choose more sustainable locations and ways of powering them, and give host communities a real voice in the decision.
My personal view is that we should prioritize solar and wind, backed by battery storage and a modernized grid, along with promising emerging research, much of it coming out of China, into “hydrovoltaic” technology that generates electricity from moisture and water evaporation. That research is still at an early stage, but it deserves our attention.
Why do I keep nuclear off my list? Solutions that take ten or more years to build cannot meet the urgency of this moment. And a warming planet is already exposing nuclear power’s vulnerability to heat: during recent European heatwaves, rivers grew too warm to safely cool reactors, forcing operators in France and Switzerland to shut down or throttle plants exactly when demand for electricity peaked.
Holding Myself Accountable
I want to end where I began. When I write something and ask AI to enhance it, to check spelling, improve sentence structure, and suggest stronger words, I also ask it to strictly hold me accountable: to point out where my thinking should be reconsidered, where something I wrote might hurt others or come back to hurt me, and where I can be more kind and considerate of people’s situations.
If I can ask that of a tool, surely we can ask it of the people who govern us.
We need leaders who truly care, and ideally who have lived what the majority are living now. We learned a hard lesson from electing the current president and his cabinet, and we can learn from that mistake by not repeating it. We have seen what incapable looks like. We have seen attacks on our human dignity. And we have seen the human cost of abruptly cutting the aid we once provided as good neighbors to other nations: independent researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of lives may already have been lost, with a study in The Lancet projecting more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 if the cuts are not reversed.
We have seen how wealth in the wrong hands can do devastating harm, and how manipulation and lies spread fastest among those whose critical thinking has been weakened, or whose hearts were already carrying prejudice. We have felt the pain. That pain should spur us to say, “We will not let this happen again,” and then to act on it, starting on November 3.
Let us move ahead in a more sustainable and caring way, not only for ourselves, but for our children’s future and the health of our biodiversity.
Read posts at climatechangecommunity.com
Protecting our Children & Biodiversity’s future towards a more sustainable and habitable Earth!
Compiled & Mr. Alvarez’s Thoughts | AI Enhanced.
A note on this post: I use AI as a tool to enhance my creativity and thinking. The ideas, convictions, and experiences here are my own.
Sources
- IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (2007), Working Group II, Summary for Policymakers: Africa water-stress projections.
- Cotta, Macinko et al., The Lancet (July 2025): projected deaths from USAID funding cuts through 2030.
- Center for Global Development: estimated lives lost in 2025 following USAID cuts.
- International Energy Agency, Energy and AI (2025) and 2026 update: data center electricity demand to 2030.
- Axpo and EDF operator notices, June–July 2025: Beznau, Golfech, and Bugey reactor curtailments during heatwaves.
- Rosenberg et al., Science (2019): loss of nearly 3 billion North American birds since 1970.
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