[ Thank the people who put their bodies on the line to block new
fossil fuel infrastructure – without their grassroots embargo of the
Mountain Valley pipeline, for instance, Schumer might not have had the
leverage to finally coax Manchin on board.]
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THE DEMOCRATS’ CLIMATE BILL IS A HISTORIC VICTORY. BUT WE CAN’T
STOP HERE  
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Daniel Sherrell
August 12, 2022
The Guardian
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_ Thank the people who put their bodies on the line to block new
fossil fuel infrastructure – without their grassroots embargo of the
Mountain Valley pipeline, for instance, Schumer might not have had the
leverage to finally coax Manchin on board. _

‘Thank Senator Chuck Schumer, sure, but also thank the staffers who
sat in his office, demanding he restart talks on a bill most of
Capitol Hill had left for dead.’ , Photograph: Ken Cedeno/Reuters //
The Guardian

 

I was at a Mets game when news broke that the climate bill had enough
votes to pass in the Senate. It was the bottom of the eighth, and
Edwin Díaz had just struck out the heart of the Braves’ lineup. The
crowd at Citi Field was feeling good. Everyone could sense a win was
at hand.

I read the push notification then sat there stunned for several
minutes, watching the Mets clinch the game, waiting for the
world-shaping news to register. Then suddenly I was tearing up, rising
from my seat in a daze, the man down the row giving me a look
somewhere between embarrassment and admiration (Jesus, he probably
thought. This guy really loves the Mets).

Up in the nosebleeds, moths were circling in the glare of the
floodlights. The players looked like figurines, tiny and detailed, far
below in their bright diamond. From where we were sitting, we could
see tens of thousands of people, every one of whom would be affected
– in some way, at some point – by the news that had just buzzed in
my pocket. Over the whole scene loomed the logo of Citibank
corporation. In the coming days, Citi – along with its peers in
the Business Roundtable and US Chamber of Commerce
[[link removed]] –
would abet an all-out blitz to kill the bill.

In the week since the Senate voted 51-50 in favor of the Inflation
Reduction Act, I’ve felt a rush of emotion unlike any I’ve
experienced in my time as a climate organizer. Joy and rage, relief
and apprehension, exhaustion and vigilance – a knot too tight to
unravel.

Joy because there is much in the bill that warrants it. According to
multiple independent analyses, the bill’s $370bn worth of climate
investments will reduce US emissions somewhere in the ballpark of 40%
by 2030
[[link removed]],
equivalent to 4bn metric tons of CO2. According to one recent study
[[link removed].],
this level of carbon abatement will prevent millions of avoidable
deaths, most of them in the global south. The investments are also
predicted to generate about 9m domestic jobs
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many of them in purple states, potentially creating new and lasting
constituencies in support of climate action. And the bill invests
$60bn to aid the low-income and communities of color who for decades
have served as dumping grounds of our nation’s dirtiest and most
dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure. This is an unprecedented
increase in federal environmental justice funding – and a far cry
from the climate reparations
[[link removed]] that
are actually owed.

Long the villain of global climate talks, passage of the bill will go
a long way toward helping the US meet its obligations under the Paris
climate agreement, and afford it newfound leverage in convincing other
nations to do the same. Combined with recent climate policy
breakthroughs everywhere from Chile
[[link removed]],
to Germany
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to Australia
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the bill makes it somewhat less likely (though still far from
impossible) that we will breach a civilization-ending tipping point
– and significantly more likely that the 2020s will witness a marked
acceleration in renewable energy deployment.

These moral goods are worthy of real celebration, especially given the
bill’s almost miraculous resurrection: killed twice over by Joe
Manchin before being passed at the last possible moment with the
thinnest possible Senate majority.

Like all historical inflection points, its passage was the product of
a complex interchange between individuals and institutions, singular
moments and longstanding movements. Thank Senator Chuck Schumer, sure,
but also thank the staffers who sat in his office
[[link removed]],
demanding he restart negotiations on a bill most of Capitol Hill had
left for dead. Thank President Biden, but also thank the legions of
young people
[[link removed]] who
transformed the mainstream Democratic consensus and forced the climate
crisis to the top of his policy agenda. Thank the organizers,
scientists, wonks and artists who have labored for decades to create
the political conditions under which this bill could be passed. Thank
the people who put their bodies on the line to block new fossil fuel
infrastructure – without their grassroots embargo of the Mountain
Valley pipeline
[[link removed]],
for instance, Schumer might not have had the leverage to finally coax
Manchin on board.

Already, public discourse around the IRA is ossifying deep contingency
into settled history, transforming the incredibly precarious chain of
events that resulted in its passage into the self-evident monolith of
“what ultimately happened”. But it remains the case – and this
seems vital to keep in mind – that it almost didn’t happen at all.
Why? Because our democracy is under siege.

As soon as Schumer announced the deal, much of corporate America
mobilized to destroy it. The Business Roundtable
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the US Chamber of Commerce
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letters and blanketed Arizona with ads
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railing against its proposed 15% minimum corporate tax rate, and
urging Kyrsten Sinema to vote no. Many of their members, including
CEOs like Tim Cook of Apple
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Jassy of Amazon
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big game on climate in recent years, burnishing their corporate
reputations. But faced with the prospect of paying their fair share in
taxes, they fought hard to derail the most important climate
legislation in US history.

The Republican party, likewise, did everything in its power to kill
the bill. Every single Senate Republican voted no, including those few
– Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski – who occasionally
affect concern over soaring temperatures. This despite American voters
supporting the IRA by a 51-point margin
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despite Senate Republicans representing 40 million fewer Americans 
[[link removed]]than
Senate Democrats. There are various plausible articulations of what
the Republican party has become: a protection racket for fossil fuel
executives; a millenarian cult, too dug in to change course. Either
way, the GOP has proved willing to undermine democracy itself, all
to _prevent_ the public from trying to avert disaster.

And then there were Senators Sinema and Manchin, who took the bill
hostage out of fealty to their corporate donors. Sinema, who since
2018 has received over $2m in Wall Street campaign donations
[[link removed]],
managed to preserve indefensible tax breaks for private equity
executives, carve-outs that even Larry Summers found appalling
[[link removed]]. Manchin
used his leverage to force through multiple handouts to the fossil
fuel industry – an industry that was already one of the richest in
world history, and that in recent months has made record profits
[[link removed]] gouging
working people at the pump.

The handouts will allow the industry to force new oil and gas
infrastructure into communities that are already suffering the fallout
of fossil fuel extraction: cancer clusters, lung disease, ecological
devastation. The damage will be felt worst in low-income and non-white
communities, particularly in Alaska and the Gulf – communities that
the industry has spent decades sacrificing on the altar of their
quarterly profits. Manchin, meanwhile, has made millions from his
family’s coal business
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is one of the biggest beneficiaries of oil and gas dollars in the
Senate
[[link removed]].
No doubt he will make off handsomely.

There is a certain strain of triumphalism that would have us believe
these tragedies are necessary and normal: simply the compromise
inherent in a democracy. But the grievous flaws in this bill represent
a failure, not a triumph, of democracy. In both process and content,
the IRA has demonstrated the extent to which our public policy is
perverted by unelected corporate shareholders and the politicians
they’ve purchased. Legally constituted to hoard profit and
distribute risk, many large corporations continue to engage in a kind
of normalized depravity, choosing – and this is difficult to
overstate – modest tax breaks over the integrity of life on Earth.
They are sociopaths in the Athenian forum, amassing power and
deflecting accountability, masking their monomania with expensive
public relations. Almost everyone suffers from their ruthlessness, but
none more so than the communities where they site their drill rigs and
pipelines. This is less a commentary on any individual executive than
it is on the structure of the limited liability corporation. No entity
with so little allegiance to the public should be granted such
determinative control over its fate.

When Senator Bernie Sanders tried to make this point on the floor of
the Senate (before ultimately voting in favor of the IRA), he was
effectively dismissed by Democratic colleagues. Their reluctance to
engage was hardly surprising. With the thrill of victory comes the
temptation to conflate the world that now is – the new world that
has just come into being – with the world as it should be.
Maintaining the gap between the two takes moral discipline and
political imagination, the kind of cognitive load that few in Congress
seem willing to take on. But maintain it we must, or we risk losing
the only well from which progress has ever sprung.

The IRA has made clear that we need to wrest the wheel of our
democracy from those who would drive us all off a cliff

It makes sense to celebrate the enormous, hard-won, life-saving
victories in this bill. As the longtime climate movement organizer
Daniel Hunter reflected in a recent essay
[[link removed]],
celebrating achievements is crucial for the health of any social
movement. “Who will want to join … if it’s all sadness and
misery?” he asks. “Who will acknowledge our contributions if we
fail to name them ourselves?” Cynicism, in other words, does not
build power – only hope can do that.

At the same time, it also makes sense to mourn, to rage, and above
all, to organize. The IRA has made abundantly clear that we need to
wrest the wheel of our democracy from those who would drive us all off
a cliff. As the climate movement recalibrates post-IRA, a political
program can be seen emerging from this fact.

It goes back to the movement’s bread and butter: fighting fossil
fuel infrastructure tooth and nail, starting with Manchin’s side
deal to fast-track pipeline permitting. This struggle must involve
everyone, but it should follow the lead of frontline communities who
have been fighting pipelines, drill rigs and refineries for decades.
It should use IRA-driven declines in fossil fuel demand to its
advantage.

There are many other worthy fronts emerging: passing state and local
laws that close the still significant distance to our 2030 climate
goals; ensuring all new clean energy jobs are also good union jobs;
ensuring climate investment dollars flow into the hands of working
families, not Wall Street middlemen; incubating a clean energy
industry that is regenerative and respectful, not extractive and
exploitative. Electorally, it will involve supporting candidates brave
enough to channel waxing anti-corporate sentiment across the left and
the right
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order to discipline corporate overreach – up to and including
nationalizing those industries not decarbonizing at the pace required
by physics.

All of this will require a new level of emotional acumen, a structure
of feeling that permits both fierce jubilation and exacting critique,
that sees the big picture without disguising the brush strokes, that
can balance priorities when it needs to but also, sometimes, kick down
the scales. This is work that never ends, but you can already see it
beginning, incubated by the honest, searching debates taking place
right now across the climate movement.

As we question, grapple and experiment – as we lead, in other words
– our opponents hold fast to their myopia. Blinkered, rigid, selfish
to a fault, theirs is a losing ethic, a worldview in retreat. Ours, on
the other hand, is advancing toward the helm. May we occupy every inch
they concede. May the IRA be the floor, not the ceiling, of our
ambition.

_[Daniel Sherrell is a climate organizer and the author of Warmth:
Coming of Age at the End of our World
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(Penguin Books)]_

_After two years of wrangling, false starts and disappointments, it
finally happened: America has passed its first-ever climate
legislation, moving the country closer to its goal of a decarbonized
future and taking a significant step toward helping the planet avert
the worst scenarios of climate catastrophe._

_But it’s not a time to rest. We have always held power to account
– on climate and  every other major issue – from the fossil fuel
companies responsible for heating the planet to the politicians
representing their interests. The country responsible for the most
greenhouse gas emissions in history has indicated it will change
course; we will relentlessly report on what comes next, who will
benefit and the remaining obstacles to progress. _

_With daily reporting and analysis on the climate emergency, we aim to
ensure that even more people are made aware of the dangers – and
opportunities – of this moment._

_Our editorial independence means we are free to write and publish
journalism which prioritises the crisis. We can highlight the climate
policy successes and failings of those who lead us in these
challenging times. We have no shareholders and no billionaire owner,
just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global
reporting, free from commercial or political influence._

_And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this
because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people
can keep track of the global events shaping our world, understand
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truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it. _

_Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and
sustains our future.  Support the Guardian _
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* Inflation Reducation Act
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* Climate Crisis
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* Climate Bill
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* Medicare
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* fossil fuels
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* Chuck Schumer
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* Joe Manchin
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* Kyrsten Sinema
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* Senate
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* Congress
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* Biden Administration
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* environmental movement
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* Environmental Activism
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* 2022 Elections
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