[It’s become fashionable to suggest climate activists are too
hard on Joe Biden. Being hard on Joe Biden is what got climate
spending into the infrastructure package. ] [[link removed]]

THE LEFT IS THE ONLY REASON WE’RE TALKING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AT
ALL  
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Kate Aronoff
July 22, 2021
The New Republic
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_ It’s become fashionable to suggest climate activists are too hard
on Joe Biden. Being hard on Joe Biden is what got climate spending
into the infrastructure package. _

"Zitat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" by kontrast.at, licensed under CC BY
2.0

 

Smoke from raging, climate-fueled wildfires out West blanketed East
Coast skies this week. Siberia is burning, too. And flooding in China
has displaced some 1.2 million people
[[link removed]].
In Jacobabad
[[link removed]],
Pakistan, conditions are too hot and humid for the human body to
withstand, leading to a rash of heat-related illnesses and death. One
might think this drumbeat of extreme weather would have some bearing
on the week’s political events in D.C. It hasn’t. Republicans are
still dragging the process along on the White House–supported
infrastructure bill so as to obstruct it for as long as possible, and
Joes Manchin and Biden are still holding out hope for bipartisan
agreement from a party that can’t agree that Donald Trump lost the
presidential election.

A few days before the smoky haze made it risky
[[link removed]] for
New Yorkers to take their morning jog, the members of the_ New York
Times _editorial board chided
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] others
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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.

After the failure of cap-and-trade legislation at the start of the
Obama administration, the Beltway was out of ideas for how to move
climate policy forward—intimidated by the reactionary frenzy the
Koch brothers helped whip up to defeat that bill. Democrats largely
stopped talking about climate policy at all, since the prospects for
passing it looked so dim.

The moment things started to change can be traced most neatly back to
a 2018 Sunrise Movement sit-in at then–aspiring House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi’s office, where newly elected Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez
showed up. (While Pelosi took the day mostly in stride
before ridiculing
[[link removed]] a
“green dream, or whatever,” other top Democrats feared
[[link removed]] the
demonstrators’ demands would undermine their prized committee posts,
and launched into hissy fits.) But the shift had its roots in
Indigenous-led fights against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access
pipelines, among others; Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign; and
decades of unglamorous climate and environmental justice organizing.

Sunrise and Ocasio-Cortez, when they demonstrated in Pelosi’s
office, weren’t calling for the immediate passage of a Green New
Deal. Rather, they were proposing a select committee that would take
more than a year to draft legislation so that, by now, there would be
something coherent to roll out and pass. (This request was rejected
[[link removed]].)
The innovation climate activists offered was, instead of seeing
climate policy as a matter of sacrifice—figuring out the right way
to make things more expensive—reframing climate policy as a series
of investments that create jobs and improve livelihoods. Lacking any
other ideas for how to talk about climate change, the Biden
administration and top Democrats have mostly run with that, ending
a decades-long love affair
[[link removed]] with
carbon pricing as the be-all and end-all of emissions reduction
policy.

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
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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.

The role of social movements is to make things that look impossible
seem possible.

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]—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.

Left to their own devices, though, neither Congress nor the White
House can be trusted to pass climate policy. They certainly won’t
pass anything that meets the scale of the challenge head-on, which
requires a radical shift away
[[link removed]] from the
fossil fuels that have built industrial capitalism. Many, many
thousands of people need to join the fight and put more pressure on
congressional inertia. Who knows whether they will, or if it’ll
work. But no one should be telling the handful of people who’ve
dragged politicians this far to keep quiet.

_Kate Aronoff
[[link removed]] @KateAronoff
[[link removed]] is a staff writer at The New
Republic._

_Want more climate change ideas and updates?
Sign up for TNR’s Apocalypse Soon weekly newsletter.
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