When the time comes, our legislators in Augusta owe it to the Maine Climate Council to promptly and effectively act on the good and valuable work carried out by that new body this year.

Shifting political sands have injected urgency into some decision-making in recent days and weeks. If the reshuffle in D.C. will lead to the upending of priorities feared by many, the time to act on those endangered priorities is now.

Some of the movement already underway has been personal; Planned Parenthood of Northern New England last week reported a doubling in requests for “long-acting contraceptives” in the days after the presidential election, to give one example.

At the federal level, the Biden administration says it is hastily helping Ukraine, announcing billions of dollars in grants for what could be at-risk infrastructure projects and working to confirm Biden’s pending judicial nominees without further delay.

And then there’s climate change.

Per the Associated Press last month: “Biden wants to establish a legacy for climate action that includes locking in a trajectory for reducing the nation’s planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Former President Donald Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and health care bill and stop offshore wind development if he returns to the White House in January.”

That “if” has since become a “when,” and major offshore wind projects are among the most significant environmental investments – part of what Trump has called the “green new scam” – that may now be in jeopardy.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest investment in climate action in the U.S. ever, identified $800 billion for solar, wind, and other zero-carbon energy sources, as well as supporting workforce initiatives for climate resilience. (Indeed, the prospect of job creation may be something that a Trump administration struggles to totally turn its back on. Even so …)

“There’s a lot of opportunity to throw sand in the gears,” was the recent summary of Andrew Price, president and chief executive officer of Competitive Energy Services, a consulting group in Portland. “I’m very pessimistic about how this impacts offshore wind, which is a big hit to climate goals for a lot of states.”

Maine’s climate goals – very often referred to as “bold” or “ambitious” – are something the state should take immense pride in. Investing in the protection and preservation of our environment is an act of faith in the future. The case for electrification and clean and renewable energy has not been so readily embraced in other parts of the nation.

The arguments against this investment of time and funding (that we simply don’t know enough, or can’t do enough, or have bigger hand-to-mouth demands to attend to, or don’t want to make the changes that meeting these goals will require) are likely to flourish in a political environment that is inhospitable to responsible climate policy and pledges – and dismissive of the crisis of climate change in general.

The slogan of the original four-year plan, “Maine Won’t Wait,” is well suited to the present moment. But pride in our goals and our vision will come to nothing without a widespread commitment to see them through. Our bold commitment (to emission reduction, expansion of renewable sources of energy and the adoption of electric vehicles, new building codes, carbon sequestration and more) needs to be redoubled in the face of equally bold, and soon more emboldened, opposition to it.

“Conservative think tanks in New England are taking aim at state energy policies that promote zero-carbon energy to cut greenhouse gas emissions,” opened a Press Herald news report of last Wednesday, covering the efforts of “free-market advocates” to resist what they call the “staggering” cost of green energy policies in the region.

To these opponents, these policies are seen as top-down “mandates.” Their exploration of the “enormous costs” in question tends to be restricted to the household utility bill.

The only relevant costs when it comes to climate – indeed enormous – won’t be borne by ratepayers but by our children and our grandchildren. As this editorial board wrote in September: “Maine alone can’t stop climate change – there is no argument there. But a critical mass of us must understand that mitigating it is a necessarily collective effort.”