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BETRAYAL, IT’S NOT THE SUNRISE MOVEMENT, IT IS THE GOVERNOR OF NEW
YORK  
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Bill McKibben
June 6, 2024
The Crucial Years [[link removed]]

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_ A plea not to be angry with the youth. _

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I had another piece planned for today, and I will get back to it
soon—it will deliver a certain amount of good news. But events
intervened. I try not to write out of anger, but on occasion it
overtakes me, and yesterday’s actions by the governor of New York
were so shockingly cynical that—fair warning—I’m indulging some
of that fury.

But as I begin, a plea _not_ to be angry with the youth. There was a
mild kerfluffle on the climate interwebs yesterday, when the Sunrise
Movement—the youthful progenitors of the Green New Deal—announced
that they weren’t yet ready to endorse Joe Biden for president. The
keyboard gladiators of the status quo—led as usual in their
chivalrous charge by the reliable
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Matt Yglesias—crackled with indignation
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folks.

LMAO — I HOPE EVERYONE WHO GASSED THIS INSTITUTION UP WITH MONEY AND
COVERAGE IS PROUD OF THEMSELVES

I am an unrepentant supporter of Sunrise, so let me explain. I knew
many of their first generation of leaders, who had cut their teeth on
the fossil fuel divestment campaign; wanting to fight on after
college, they’d formed Sunrise, ginned up the Green New Deal, and
used a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office, with AOC in attendance, to
give it oxygen. Their tactics worked—they were a big reason that by
the 2020 Democratic primaries ‘climate change’ was the number one
issue for huge numbers of voters. They were obvious Sanders
supporters, but when he lost they swallowed hard, and took part in the
negotiations that produced a united Democratic front for Biden:
indeed, Sunrise’s director, Varshini Prakash, was on the team that
sat with a couple of key Biden aides to work out the essentials of
Build Back Better. They didn’t endorse Biden, but they did work
hard, and effectively, against Trump, as the youth vote in 2020
eventually demonstrated. And then they worked hard, and effectively,
to pass Build Back Better, even as Joe Manchin cut it down into the
Inflation Reduction Act—again they swallowed hard and backed a
seriously imperfect bill. It was a rare display of political maturity
and effectiveness among any progressives, let alone young ones.

Now a new generation of Sunrise volunteers is saying they can’t,
yet, endorse Biden—but they’re also promising to fight hard
against Donald Trump. Look, I’m fighting hard FOR Biden. I
understand deep in my soul the existential risk Trump poses. But I
also get why young people are having a hard time joining fully
in—it’s because of Gaza, above all. AND WE DO NOT WANT A WORLD
WHERE YOUNG PEOPLE WOULD NOT BE HIDEOUSLY UPSET BY ISRAEL’S ENDLESS
BOMBING CAMPAIGN, a campaign of immiseration clearly designed, as
Biden said this week, to protect Netanyahu’s political
future. Though the media has seized on every example of left
obtuseness they can find (usually
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young people I’ve watched have been clear
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their condemnation both of Hamas’ repulsive violence, and of
anti-Semitism. And in part because of their hard work, Biden has shown
more willingness to stand up to the repugnant Netanyahu and try to end
the fighting even as he works to head off a regional war. The
invaluable Kate Aronoff has a fine account
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the Sunrise news in the New Republic yesterday, and she even bothered
to call up the head of the thing and ask what it meant.

“Do we want to be fighting for a Green New Deal under a Trump
presidency or a Biden presidency? To me, the answer is pretty
clear,” Stevie O’Hanlon told me earlier today. “Donald Trump
winning a second term is an existential threat to our climate and our
democracy and will set back the fight for a Green New Deal.”

So yes, Gaza is complicated and nuanced. _But a society needs people
for whom complication and nuance are not central, and these are
usually young people. They offer useful clarity._ AND IF BIDEN
EVENTUALLY LOSES, IT WILL BE LESS BECAUSE YOUNG PEOPLE DON’T SUPPORT
HIM THAN BECAUSE OLD PEOPLE DON’T: THERE ARE FAR MORE OF US, AND WE
ARE NOT RELIABLY VOTING IN DEFENSE OF THE VALUES WE GREW UP WITH
(LIKE, RESPECT, DECENCY, KINDNESS, AND NOT GETTING CONVICTED OF
FELONIES). That’s why we at Third Act [[link removed]] are
backing Biden with all that we’ve got—we don’t like what’s
happening in Gaza, but a job of older people is to bring to bear the
somewhat wearying but valuable experience that simply living longer
allows you to accumulate. We admire Biden for the good things he’s
done, and we know that Trump can and will make the bad parts worse,
beginning with his promise to radically accelerate the climate crisis.
But I’m glad, for one, that the young are making the witness that
they are.

YESTERDAY DID OFFER A REAL BETRAYAL, though, and it came from
Democratic elders—most particularly New York governor Kathy
Hochul. SHE—OUT OF THE CLEAR BLUE—ANNOUNCED SHE WOULD BLOCK NEW
YORK CITY’S CONGESTION PRICING PLAN, DUE TO GO INTO EFFECT JANUARY
30.

This is stupid policy—it’s the most aggressively
anti-environmental stand I can recall a major Democratic governor
taking, beating even Gavin Newsom’s recent demolition
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rooftop and community solar in California. Congestion pricing meant
that people who wanted to drive into the clogged streets of lower
Manhattan would pay a $15 toll; the revenue would go to support the
beleaguered transit system that actually allows New York to operate.
This kind of system has been a huge success in the European cities
that have tried it, like London and Milan; Manhattan (as advocates
back to Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer have noted
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would be an incredibly sweet place with many fewer cars. This is, as
Robinson Meyer noted yesterday “tier one climate policy,” which
with a success in Manhattan could quickly spread to other
cities. _And so there’s been a tremendous effort over decades to
build out support for congestion pricing_. An earlier version came
close to passing years ago—lore has it that the opposition of
parking garage owners carried the day in Albany. This time, though,
everything was lined up: Governor Hochul had given a rousing defense
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the plan in a speech just two weeks ago. I’m going to quote from it
at some length, because I think it’s possible that no politician in
American history has ever flip-flopped quite so thoroughly or so fast:

Walk around many major cities and it won’t take long to encounter
frustrated drivers caught in traffic jams, cars spewing exhaust on
overpacked streets. We determined that the average New York City
driver spends 102 hours a year stuck in traffic. Those hours add up to
more than four days of your life – every year.

That’s four days sitting behind the wheel of a car instead of
sitting by your kid’s bedside, reading them a book, sitting around
the dinner table or reconnecting with a friend.

There has to be a better way. So, starting next month, New York City
will become the first city in the U.S. to implement congestion
pricing. We’ll charge people $15 every time they drive into New
York’s Central Business District.

London, Milan, Stockholm, and Singapore have all implemented similar
plans with great success. In New York City, the idea stalled for 60
years until we got it done earlier this year.

It took a long time because people feared backlash from drivers set in
their ways. But, much like with housing, if we’re serious about
making cities more livable, we must get over that.

We estimate congestion pricing will reduce the volume of vehicles in
Manhattan’s central business district by 17 percent. Fewer cars
mean less gridlock, traffic and pollution. Fewer cars means safer
streets, cleaner air and more room to maneuver for pedestrians and
bicyclists.

Congestion pricing will generate $1 billion every year, which will
then fund large-scale projects that make public transit faster and
more accessible. That’s key because we’ll never change people’s
habits if we don’t offer safe, reliable alternatives to driving that
work for everyone.

In her remarks blocking the plan yesterday, Hochul said something
something pandemic—when work on the plan began in 2019, “workers
were in the office five days a week, crime was at record lows and
tourism was at record highs. Circumstances have changed and we must
respond to the facts on the ground.”

But clearly none of those circumstances changed in the past two weeks.
Who knows what caused this unreal shift. Speculation ranges from (the
now fashionable) brain worm to lots of Hochul fundraising by local
autodealers
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the notion that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries was worried
that congestion pricing would hurt the prospects for regaining his
majority in the fall elections. (A bad showing by New York Democrats
in the suburbs cost him the speakership last time around; the same
people are still in charge of the Empire State campaign this time
around). If it’s really electoral fear that drove Hochul’s stab in
the back, then this is political malpractice: you don’t wait until
the last possible moment to jerk around the advocates who have spent
years working with you to craft an agreement.

People on the outside underestimate, I think, the degree to which
significant change comes from a long and controlled dance between
activists and politicians—and one of the rules of that, on both
sides, is that you don’t pull out the rug at the last minute. People
like Charles Komanoff have spent most of their lives working up to
this deal, jumping through every hoop 
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demonstrate the needed support, and now it’s been trashed. And
trashed with the support of other parts of the progressive coalition.
It was so sad to see the United Federation of Teachers gloating
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the downfall of congestion pricing—the larger left has engaged in a
generational effort to raise teacher pay, understanding it to be both
right and a core concern of a partner; the UFT ignored the core
concern of environmentalists in order to help teachers who wanted to
keep driving. PUBLIC school teachers should be supporters
of PUBLIC transit; this, not Sunrise, is real-world malarkey.

If any possible good could come from Hochul’s cold-blooded betrayal,
it’s that she, and Albany Democrats in general, might feel the need
to give environmentalists some kind of win. The NY Heat act, and
the climate superfund bill
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are both up for action in this final week of the legislative session.
It would be scant comfort to see them passed in the wake of this
shocking schism, but it would be something.

BILL MCKIBBEN [[link removed]]:
author, educator, and environmental activist; a founder of 350.org and
Third Act.

* environment
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* Sunrise Movement
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* Joe Biden
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* traffic congestion
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