Bill McKibben - Climate Breakdown Means We Don't Have Any More Presidential Terms To Waste

[hatrack]

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This is one of those terrifying moments in the early history of the global-warming era. As of this writing, Hurricane Laura is headed for the coasts of Texas and Louisiana as a monster storm; meanwhile, the West has been erupting in flames. In California, a heat wave that had produced record-high temperatures ran into a dry storm that, within a couple of days, produced a tenth of the state’s average annual lightning discharges. (Increase the planet’s temperature just a degree Celsius, by the way, and you increase lightning activity by about twelve per cent.) Authorities told all forty million people in California to be prepared to evacuate—indeed, they told them to park their cars facing out of the driveway, in case they had to leave in seconds. But the pandemic has made evacuation more complicated, because heading to a shelter might carry its own dangers, and it has left California’s firefighting force depleted, because the state relies on prison inmates, a group that has been hit especially hard by COVID-19, to fill out its ranks. And that’s just California. The flooding crisis in China intensified again last week, as record amounts of water poured into the reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam.

Here’s what this means: if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take over the White House, in January, they’re going to be dealing with an immediate and overwhelming climate crisis, not just the prospective dilemma that other Administrations have faced. It’s not coming; it’s here. The luxury of moving slowly, the margin for zigging and zagging to accommodate various interests, has disappeared. So, if the Democrats win, they will have to address the pandemic and the resulting economic dislocation, and tackle the climate mess all at the same time. Any climate plan must be, in some way or another, the solution to the current widespread loss of jobs.

That will not be easy, because, although the interests that keep us locked into the use of fossil-fuels are weakening, they remain strong. A remarkable new investigation by the Guardian documented how the gas industry—utilities, drillers, and unions—is spending huge sums to insure that cities don’t start encouraging homeowners to use electricity. (Part of the story documents the industry’s successful campaign to overwhelm efforts by activists in Seattle who are affiliated with 350.org, which I helped found.) But the effort to keep fossil-fuel executives out of the White House is growing: last week, even the veteran centrist John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign, was joining hands with the Sunrise Movement to demand a public pledge from the Biden team to shun oil-industry lobbyists and executives. In a Democratic Administration, however, the role of unions would be as important as the power of companies—and, so far, the building trades have done what they can to block efforts to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

As Kate Aronoff wrote in The New Republic, last week, “establishment Democrats, but also relative progressives championing a so-called just transition, continue to treat the fossil fuel industry as a reliable source of well-paid union work instead of a rapidly sinking ship. As a result, they’re mostly unprepared to rescue its passengers.” This means, she points out, that Biden (and climate policy) likely would be blamed for the loss of jobs, even if it is the cratering economics of fossil fuel that is actually driving the shift. (On Monday night, ExxonMobil was dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after ninety-two years, overtaken by tech companies; as recently as 2011 it was the biggest company on earth.) “Democrats have to be willing to build a generous safety net instead of catering to deficit hawks,” Aronoff added. “And they have to start a frank conversation within the Democratic coalition about the fact that fossil fuel jobs are already disappearing.”

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/on-climate-change-weve-run-out-of-presidential-terms-to-waste

[Sherman A1]

1. Agreed

We haven’t had for a long time, but seem to have wasted far too many of them.