We are going to presume here that sub-basement-level sanity will prevail, and the Trump administration will not follow the wildest wingnuts of its coalition out the window and out of the climate deal.

AD

But sub-basement level sanity is not remotely good enough. Ideology or no ideology, the United States, yes, even under President Trump, needs to take a leadership role on this issue, and here’s the case. It’s not even close.

AD

• There is no other option. Climate change can be watched in action already, causing wild swings between drought and flooding, melting glaciers and seeping up through Florida’s porous soil. President Trump’s own properties will be among those hit. And then hit again, as all the rest of us wait for our own turn to get hammered by a tornado scattering bits of our homes and home towns, burned to ashes in a wildfire or carried downstream in freak flooding. It is no longer theoretical. We can watch these things regularly in our news and news feeds.

• Renewable energy will be, whether we choose to like it or not, the future of energy production around the world. If we turn our backs on this and bury our heads in a coal mine, we will look up in 15 years with a soot-encrusted face to see that the world has moved headlong into 21st-century technology while we have dug our way back into the 19th.

AD

• Clean energy is what the infrastructure plan needs to be about. Rebuilding an Eisenhower-era highway system, delightful or necessary as that may be, is not the bridge to the future. It is the off-ramp back to the 20th century, which admittedly is one century better than the 19th, but nowhere near good enough to keep our grandchildren’s heads above water in the 22nd. A national program to innovate, support, build and distribute renewable energy would be money well spent, create jobs relevant to actual future needs, put us in the vanguard of global competition in this sector, and, dare we say, help unify the country around a common, and common-sense, purpose.

So, no, don’t sit around chewing your fingers down to the nail bed to see if the United States is going to make the worst-possible choice or only the second-worst. Get real. Let’s get our heads out of the crazy miasma we have been drifting into and demand the actual best policy. It’s not that hard to see it.