The "Radical Left" Is The Only Reason That We're Even Talking About Global Warming Right Now [View all]

[hatrack]

EDIT

A few days before the smoky haze made it risky for New Yorkers to take their morning jog, the members of the New York Times editorial board chided Biden’s “chattering critics on the left wing of his party” for not giving him enough credit for a series of environmental pledges, a handful of executive actions, and a bipartisan infrastructure bill whose text has not been released. “This was less than Mr. Biden wanted,” the editorial board wrote of the yet-to-be-passed package, “but his critics reacted as if there were nothing there at all, sending protesters to the White House and Capitol Hill.” The climate left, the Times editorial board and others have recently suggested, is too tough on the president, with counterproductive results. They’re wrong. The reason there are currently any climate provisions in this infrastructure package is because of the chattering leftists the editorial board and its fellow travelers are telling to pipe down and call it a day.

EDIT

The result has not been a wholehearted embrace of the Green New Deal but a basic friendliness toward its strategic vision: namely, that policymakers have to make climate policy look like something ordinary people can understand and might want to see. This happened, in part, because the Biden campaign saw the Sanders wing of the party, where young climate activists clustered, as a constituency worth appeasing, and proceeded to enlist them in unity task forces. Whatever its merits, the push for a Civilian Climate Corps is a product of that appeasement process. So is the administration’s all-of-government approach to greening the executive and its creation of dedicated Cabinet posts on climate. The fact that Democrats as fundamentally moderate as Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer are sticking up for climate policy—to the extent that they are—behind closed doors is in no small part thanks to climate leftists who refused to shut up.

Despite global warming being an existential threat, you can count the number of Democratic congresspeople whose top issue is climate change on one hand. The rest rely on an overworked 25-year-old staffer to tell them how to vote on it and what to say in hearings and on television. If these senators and representatives pay attention at all to the climate crisis outside of those briefings, it’s because someone has forced them to, by creating a situation that has made reporters or their constituents ask them about it. Members of Congress are, by and large, insulated from the effects of extreme weather, shuffling between air conditioned cars, homes, and office buildings. They are busy on hours of call time with donors who in some cases would prefer that they didn’t do very much to address the climate crisis at all. The average age of a House member is 58. The average senator is 62. Statistically speaking, they will be dead by the time shit really hits the fan in the United States and probably still insulated from its worst effects if they’re alive: Over half of members of Congress are millionaires.

The brutal fact is that, since James E. Hansen’s pivotal testimony before Congress on the “greenhouse effect” in 1988, no strategy to pass comprehensive climate policy in the U.S. has been successful; every “win” activists have managed to eke out so far should be put in that context. Every rhetorical commitment from Democrats to pass climate legislation is so far just that: rhetorical. Even the $3.5 trillion worth of overall infrastructure spending now on the table—itself already a gross compromise with physics—may not pass. The climate left is pushing to make sure it does. The full range of policies needed for the U.S. to play its part in zeroing out global carbon emissions by 2050—what’s really needed—are not politically possible right now. The role of social movements is to make things that look impossible seem possible. In recent years, the climate left has done just that. There’s no guarantee it’ll be able to do it again.

EDIT

https://newrepublic.com/article/163026/sunrise-ocasio-cortez-infrastructure-climate