In purple Pennsylvania, senior climate activists are telling potential voters: “We caused this.” We can solve this.

Fall has arrived and the leaves have turned red, orange and obscure brown as 73-year-old Phyllis Blumberg takes to the streets of West Philadelphia amidst record heat wave and persistent drought, a notebook in your hand and the climate in your head.

The seriousness of the global climate crisis has pushed the veteran political agitator and other senior citizens into neighborhoods like this one to wake up potential voters and urge them to cast their ballots. Although some did not respond, Blumberg – after two decades of knocking on doors to get the vote – accepted it as a reality.

“I don’t ever want to go to my grave thinking, ‘I didn’t do it all,’” she said.

The Montgomery County resident was one of about 75 seniors who gathered Oct. 22 at historic Clark Park, where climate activist Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental group 350.orgprepared them for the day when they could reach potential climate voters. The stakes are clear to McKibben, who can rile up the audience at any moment by reciting a list of natural disasters happening across the United States.

“Given the strange architecture of our electoral system, Pennsylvania will likely decide the presidency, [and] and with it the fate of our democracy and, in no small part, how high the temperature will reach on our planet,” McKibben told Capital & Main before the acquisition. Pennsylvania, z 19 electoral college votes which could affect the presidency, and the division of the population between blue cities and deep red rural areas is both politically powerful AND painfully purple.

It’s for this reason that McKibben said, without mincing words, “It’s the most important place on the planet.”

McKibben’s trip to Philadelphia came after stops in Montana and Georgia and before barnstorming trips to Phoenix and Reno, Nevada, as part of the show Silver Wave Tripa series of campaign events mobilizing environmentally conscious older Americans in key swing states. In Pennsylvania, his organization Act threeconsisting of adults over 60 concerned about climate change, combined with non-partisan groups Ecological voter projectwhose mission is to engage environmentally concerned non-voters in elections up and down the ballot. The two groups, along with a cohort of volunteers, knocked on doors through West Philadelphia in hopes of reaching climate-conscious people who might not otherwise vote.

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Just two weeks from Election Day, it may seem uninteresting to remind Americans that this is the most essential election of their lives. But that’s what McKibben thinks. Scientists say it will be necessary to prevent total climate collapse halving greenhouse gas emissions from 2010 levels in the next six years. “The next president after the current one will be inaugurated in January 2029.” McKibben told the crowd during a pre-acquisition speech in Philadelphia. “So it’s the last election that counts in this.”

For him, that means getting Vice President Kamala Harris, who he has criticized for not putting climate issues at the top of his political platform, but which he believes is the nation’s only chance to prevent total ecological catastrophe. Harris was decisive vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, a series of spotless energy investments that McKibben says disrupts the economic power of the fossil fuel industry. As California’s attorney general, Harris punished polluting oil and gas companies, and in September debate with Donald Trump to the nation’s highest office, mentioned the urgent need to address extreme weather. Her economic plan I vow “[tackle] climate crisis” and “[protect] public lands and public health,” while stating that U.S. energy production “from a variety of sources, including natural gas and renewable technologies, has reached historic levels, and the vice president remains committed to supporting the growth of U.S. energy production.”

Oil production has increased for Harris and President Biden and her recently signaled support for the planet-warming natural gas industry, McKibben’s position does not share. However, he promised the room that regardless of who is elected, he will not be ashamed to press the White House to make climate the most essential issue for him.

Meanwhile, former President Trump promised “drill, baby, drill” begging $1 billion from oil and gas executives with a promise that if elected, he would withdraw incentives to apply spotless energy AND statute.

For Blumberg, who paraded through the streets with a clipboard and a sun hat, the effects of the climate crisis are being felt. She grew up in a family of naturalists and remembers taking her children on hikes as soon as they could walk. She said she sees the environment around her changing. He points to two maple trees that appear to be dying and laments the devastation that humans have wreaked on ecosystems. “I was really upset with people who didn’t understand that it was true,” she said. “We caused it. We can solve this.”

In the neighborhood where she knocked on doors, Blumberg sees environmental injustice all around her. In the nearby botanical garden there was, among others, industrial chemical leak. The historically black district lacks tree canopies, which means that the streets are noticeably warmer than in nearby blocks of flats.

Blumberg said she hopes a climate-minded candidate — although the Environmental Voter Project, a bipartisan group, cannot lean toward either party — will be the obvious choice for voters here.

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But in other parts of Pennsylvania, where the deep red rural areas contrast starkly with the blue islands of Philadelphia, the choice is less obvious. Many people in rural areas identify as conservationists even though they support Trump’s support for oil and gas. Some receive royalties from the state’s copious fossil fuel production or have worked in oil or gas fields themselves. Some people fear government intervention as much as they fear corporate greed. More Pennsylvanians support regulation of hydraulic fracturing or fracking than either candidate seems to admit, show recent data — but even among these voters, many are comfortable with the technology.

In the battlefield districts – clustered north of Philadelphia AND in the Pittsburgh areathe picture becomes more complicated and this applies to both sides caught their attention to these areas, hoping to take advantage of any doubt.

“We don’t tell people who to vote for; we are simply mobilizing them to vote,” said Shannon Seigal, organizing and field director of the Environmental Voter Project. “We want so many climate voters to vote that every person running for office must be a climate leader.”

The handful of out-of-towners who took to the streets with Blumberg did so out of their own sense of urgency.

“I’m just really scared about the election outcome, but as we say in the climate movement, action is the antidote to despair,” said Veronique Graham, administrator of Third Act in Brooklyn and a longtime U.S. resident who cannot vote because she is not yet a citizen. Her daughter Charlotte, who missed a day of school to canvass, is similarly confined: at 15, she is deeply concerned about the climate crisis but too newborn to vote. “I want to vote so bad,” she said. “I’m really scared.”

Roberta Rominger, 69, who flew from Renton, Washington, to canvass voters in Pennsylvania, did so with a different sense of urgency. “Our votes aren’t worth much in Washington,” she said, referring to the state’s long liberal history. “I came here hoping to make a difference in the elections. I really and passionately want to make a difference.

When Pennsylvanians go to the polls on November 5, many will do so with their own experiences of the climate emergency potentially informing their decision. in August extreme flood rolled through north-central Pennsylvania amid Tropical Storm Debby. In June, Pittsburgh residents experienced near-record temperatures as the city was covered in rain heat dome. Last summer there was smoke from the wildfires choked the state as it came from Canada.

These and other natural disasters remind McKibben that time to take action continues to shorten. “If we don’t win soon,” he said, “we won’t win.”