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      Can Biden’s climate bill undo the fossil fuel industry’s decades of harm?

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      Can Biden’s climate bill undo the fossil fuel industry’s decades of harm?The US spent six decades losing the climate war as fossil fuel companies spread misinformation. It has finally gained significant ground The scientists’ warning to the US president on climate crisis was stark: the world’s countries were conducting a vast, dangerous experiment through their enormous release of planet-heating emissions, which threaten to be “deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Some sort of remedial action was needed, they urged.This official alert was issued not to Joe Biden, who is poised to sign America’s first ever major legislation designed to tackle the climate crisis, but in a report given to his presidential predecessor Lyndon Johnson in 1965, a year when the now 79-year-old Biden was still in college.That it has taken nearly six decades for the US to tackle global heating in a significant way, despite being responsible for a quarter of all emissions that have heated the planet during modern civilization, is indicative of a lengthy climate war. Pernicious misinformation of the fossil fuel industry, cynicism and bungled political maneuvering have stymied any sort of action to avert catastrophic heatwaves, floods, drought and wildfires.If on Friday, as expected, the House of Representatives assents to the landmark $370bn in climate spending hashed out in the US Senate and sends it for Biden’s signature, it will be a watershed moment in a saga that can be measured in whole careers and lifetimes.Al Gore was a fresh-faced 33-year-old congressman from Tennessee when, in 1981, he organized an obscure hearing with fellow lawmakers to hear evidence on the greenhouse effect from Roger Revelle, his former professor at Harvard and one of the scientists who had cautioned Johnson 16 years earlier of a looming climate disaster.Gore is now 74, a former US vice-president and veteran climate advocate whose increasingly urgent warnings on the issue won him the Nobel peace prize when Greta Thunberg was barely four years old. “I never imagined I would end up devoting my life to this,” Gore said.“I thought, naively in retrospect, that when the facts were laid out so clearly we would be able to move much more quickly. I did not anticipate the fossil fuel industry would spend billions of dollars on an industrial scale program of lying and deception to prevent the body politic acting in a rational way. But here we are, we finally passed that threshold.”Gore considers the bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, as a “critical turning point in our struggle to confront the climate crisis” that will supercharge deployment of renewable energy such as wind and solar and push fossil fuels towards irrelevancy.Al Gore hails Biden’s historic climate bill as ‘a critical turning point’Read moreMany current Democratic lawmakers, who narrowly passed the bill through the Senate, also felt the weight of the moment, with many of them wearing the warming stripes colors showing the global heating trend. Some burst into tears as the legislation squeaked home on Sunday.“We’ve been fighting for this for decades, now I can look my kids in the eye and say we’re really doing something about climate,” said Brian Schatz, a senator from Hawaii and one of the tearful. “The Senate was where climate bills went to die and now it’s where the biggest climate action by any government ever has been taken.”The list of previous failures is lengthy. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House, only for Ronald Reagan to rip them down. Bill Clinton attempted a new tax on pollutants only for a sharp backlash from industry to see the effort die. The US, under George W Bush’s presidency, declined to join the 1997 Kyoto climate accords and then, when Barack Obama was in the White House, botched climate legislation in 2009 despite strong Democratic majorities in Congress.Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, torched most of the modest measures in place to curb planet-heating gases and campaigned wearing a coalminer’s helmet. “I didn’t doubt we’d get there but there were times when the struggle became harder than I thought it would be, such as when Trump was elected,” Gore said.Climate change has inflicted increasingly severe wounds on Americans as their politicians have floundered or dissembled. Enormous wildfires are now a year-round threat to California, with the US west in the grip of possibly its worst drought in 12 centuries. Extreme rainfall now routinely drowns basements in New York, Appalachian towns, and Las Vegas casinos. The poorest fare worst from the roasting heatwaves and the continued air pollution from power plants, cars and trucks.James Hansen, the Nasa scientist, told Congress in a landmark 1988 hearing that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here” and yet the escalating subsequent warnings appeared to make little difference. Shortly before a Senate deal was brokered, the climate scientist Drew Shindell said that the lack of action made him “want to scream” and that “I keep wondering what’s the point of producing all the science” if it’s only to be ignored.Much of the blame for this has been laid on the fossil fuel industry, which has known for decades the disastrous consequences of its business model only to fund an extensive network of operations that concealed this information and sought to sow doubt among the public over the science.“These forces have been far more active and effective in the United States than in other countries,” said Naomi Oreskes, an American historian of science who has written on the false information spread by industry on climate crisis.“For more than 20 years, American public opinion has been heavily influenced by the ‘merchants of doubt’, who sold disinformation designed to make people think that the science regarding climate change was far more uncertain than it actually was.”Industry lobbying and generous donations have ensured that the Republican party has fallen almost entirely in line with the demands of major oil and gas companies. As recently as 2008, a Republican running for president, John McCain, had a recognizable climate plan but the issue is now close to party heresy, despite rising concern among all Americans, including Republican voters, about climate-induced disasters.The strategy of misinformation “worked even more than its originators imagined”, Oreskes said, noting that every single Republican senator voted against the Inflation Reduction Act. Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, lambasted the bill as “Green New Deal nonsense” out of step with Americans’ priorities, even as much of his home state of Kentucky lay underwater from its worst flooding on record, killing dozens and inundating whole towns.The continued, staunch opposition to any meaningful climate action by Republicans means the climate wars in American politics are not likely to draw to a close anytime soon. But climate advocates hope the gathering pace of renewable energy and electric car adoption will soon be unstoppable, regardless of any attempted backsliding if Republicans regain power.The question will be how much damage to a livable climate will be done in the meantime. The climate bill is expected to help slash the emissions of the US, the world’s second largest carbon polluter, by about 40% this decade, which should prod other countries to do more. Crucial, upcoming UN climate talks in Egypt suddenly look a more welcoming prospect for the American delegation.“In the prior administration, I think the rest of the world lost faith in the United States in terms of our commitment to climate,” said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser. “This doesn’t just restore that faith in the United States, but it creates an opportunity zone that other countries can start thinking about.”But almost every country, including the US, is still not doing enough, quickly enough, to head off the prospect of catastrophic global heating. The climate wars helped enrich fossil fuel corporations but cost precious time that the new climate bill does not claw back.“It was a celebratory and joyful moment when the legislation finally passed but we can’t let this be a once in a lifetime moment,” Gore said. “The path to net zero (emissions) requires us to move forward and a lot of the hard work lies ahead.”TopicsClimate crisisAl GoreUS politicsBiden administrationTrump administrationObama administrationfeaturesReuse this content More

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      The Democrats’ climate bill is a historic victory. But we can’t stop here | Dan Sherrell

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      The Democrats’ climate bill is a historic victory. But we can’t stop hereDaniel SherrellPassage of the Inflation Reduction Act filled me with joy and rage, relief and apprehension, exhaustion and vigilance. We must celebrate, but also mourn, rage and organize 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).Congress is about to pass a historic climate bill. So why are oil companies pleased? | Kate AronoffRead moreUp 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 – 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, equivalent to 4bn metric tons of CO2. According to one recent study, 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, 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 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, to Germany, to Australia, 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, 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 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, 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 and the US Chamber of Commerce penned letters and blanketed Arizona with ads, 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 and Andy Jassy of Amazon, have talked a 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, despite Senate Republicans representing 40 million fewer Americans 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, managed to preserve indefensible tax breaks for private equity executives, carve-outs that even Larry Summers found appalling. 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 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 and is one of the biggest beneficiaries of oil and gas dollars in the Senate. 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.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, 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 in 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 (Penguin Books)
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      Democrats celebrate ‘historic’ climate bill: Politics Weekly America

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      As the Inflation Reduction Act heads to the House floor, many Democrats are hoping the landmark legislation to tackle the climate crisis, which passed in the Senate last week, will result in more votes in the November midterm elections. Some experts aren’t convinced the bill goes far enough.
      Joan E Greve speaks to Leah Stokes, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, about what the bill – if passed into law – will mean for Americans, and for the planet

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      Archive: MSNBC, NBC, C-Span Listen to Thursday’s episode of Today in Focus, as Hugo Lowell and Michael Safi discuss the FBI raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this week. Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

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      While Biden is tackling inflation and shaping a green economy for the US, Britain is being left behind | Carys Roberts

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      While Biden is tackling inflation and shaping a green economy for the US, Britain is being left behindCarys RobertsThe Inflation Reduction Act is a big win for jobs and the environment, but Truss and Sunak have nothing similar to offer Over the weekend, US Democrats overcame months of political struggle to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate, marking a major victory for the president, Joe Biden, and for “Bidenomics” before the US midterms.The bill makes the single largest climate investment in US history, with $369bn for climate and clean energy. It is expected to enable the US to get two-thirds of the way towards its Paris agreement commitments while reducing energy costs. It lowers health costs for millions of Americans. It seeks to tackle inflation by directly reducing costs for individuals and by reducing the deficit through closing tax loopholes and increasing tax on corporates and the wealthy.The act is far from perfect. It is the diminished descendant of the failed Build Back Better Act, a $2tn package that would have radically extended childcare, free community college and subsidised health insurance, but which ultimately failed to secure the support of the Democrat senator Joe Manchin (a necessity given the evenly divided Senate). Winning political support for the act has required rowing back on climate ambition and more extensive plans to reduce costs for families; allowing further drilling for fossil fuels; and carve-outs to protect private equity profits from the corporation tax element of the act. For this reason, the act will and already has come under intense criticism from activists and climate groups.However, in the face of fierce political opposition it is a major – even landmark – achievement. It is also a win for the activists and economists who have been persistently pushing and providing ideas for the Biden administration to pursue an alternative approach to the economy and environment: market-shaping green industrial strategy to create good, green jobs; social investment; worker power and incentives for employers to offer decent pay, apprenticeships and profit-sharing with communities; higher taxes on the wealthy to reduce inflation and contribute to the costs, including through a new tax on share buybacks which only serve to boost investors’ incomes. These ideas are no longer stuck on the bench.Historically the US and UK have taken a shared, leading role in the intellectual development and political implementation of new ideas and policy paradigms. Whether we think about the postwar Keynesian consensus, the neoliberal revolution of Thatcher and Reagan or the third way politics of Clinton and Blair, both countries have tended to move in lockstep. Yet right now, in the context of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and the Conservative party leadership race in the UK, our policy paths are diverging.The US has further to go than the UK when it comes to reducing climate emissions and building economic justice. The US has significantly higher levels of emissions (on an absolute and per capita basis) than the UK and the US is also the world’s biggest producer of fossil fuels. Similarly, inequality in the US is starker, and poverty deeper than in the UK. Put simply: the land of opportunity is not delivering for too many American citizens.But Democrat leaders are pushing through a bold agenda to break through deep political polarisation and reset the shape and direction of what US economic success looks like. The irony when we compare this with the UK is that the conditions are far more favourable here for action commensurate to the scale of the climate and nature crisis, an economic strategy that prioritises everyday people and places over wealth and profits, and for extending collective provision of the things and services we all rely on. We have a head start in terms of the social democracy basics. In sharp contrast to the US, there is more consensus across parties on the need for the government to take action on the climate and nature crises. Action taken now would be far less likely to be wiped away by an opposition win than the fragile progressive gains in the US.Biden can still stop Trump, and Trumpism – if he can find a bold plan and moral vision | Robert ReichRead moreThe Conservatives, who have held power for more than a decade, have in recent years flirted with some of those ideas – from May’s mission-oriented industrial strategy to Johnson’s net zero and levelling up pledges – recognising the electoral benefits of doing so. Yet at this moment, the Conservatives are plunging in the opposite direction to their US counterparts, and debating – in the middle of sharply rising inflation and a cost-of-living emergency – policies that are catnip for the Tory membership such as grammar schools and corporation tax cuts, rather than looking around the world or at the evidence on how to address the pressing problems of our time. Truss, widely seen as the frontrunner, has fallen back on outdated tropes of financial support as handouts and has virtually nothing to say on how she would achieve net zero, both for its own sake and as a response to the cost-of-living crisis. Nothing of substance is being suggested to address the creeping, real privatisation of the NHS as those who can go private rather than languish on a waiting list.It would be wrong to point at the US and claim it has its house in order or that lessons can be read in a simplistic way. But Biden and the activists and researchers around him are ambitiously forging a new kind of economic policymaking that seeks to rapidly decarbonise, reduce pressures on family purses through collective provision, and tax wealth and profits to fund this and quell inflationary pressures. The UK government – whoever it is headed by – should take note of the new economics rather than be left behind.
      Carys Roberts is executive director of the Institute for Public Policy Research
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      Congress is about to pass a historic climate bill. So why are oil companies pleased? | Kate Aronoff

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      Congress is about to pass a historic climate bill. So why are oil companies pleased?Kate AronoffThe bill is a devil’s bargain between the Democrats, the fossil fuel industry, and recalcitrant senator Joe Manchin. Yet it’s better than nothing “We’re pleased,” ExxonMobil’s CEO, Darren Woods, said on an earnings call last month, speaking about the Inflation Reduction Act. He called the bill, now making its way through the US Congress, “clear and consistent”. After it passed the Senate Sunday evening, Shell USA said it was “a step toward increased energy security and #netzero”. The world is currently on track to produce double the amount of coal, oil and gas in 2030 than is consistent with capping warming at 1.5C. To state the obvious: climate policy should strike fear into the hearts of fossil fuel executives, not delight them. So what have some of the world’s worst polluters found to like about a historic piece of climate legislation?Guilt by association only goes so far: that the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed is undoubtedly good news. It will do a lot of good things. Democrats face the distinct possibility of being locked out of power for at least a decade after midterm elections this November, when they’re expected to lose the House of Representatives. Republicans won’t be keen to recognize that another party’s candidate could win the presidency, let alone reduce emissions. That something being called climate policy passed at all is thanks to the tireless work the climate movement has done to put it on the agenda, and the diligent staffers who spent late nights translating that momentum into legislation.But it also reflects just how much power the fossil fuel industry has amassed. The IRA is the product of a devil’s bargain struck between (among others) Democrats and Joe Manchin, speaking on behalf of his corporate donors. In exchange for his agreeing to vote for some $370bn worth of genuinely exciting climate spending, the West Virginia senator has demanded sweeping permitting reform and an all-of-government greenlight for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Many of the worst provisions are slated to be passed in future legislation this September. The IRA itself contains a remarkable poison pill, requiring that 60m acres of public waters be offered up for sale each and every year to the oil and gas industry before the federal government could approve any new offshore wind development for a decade.Then again, maybe the oil and gas CEOs have finally come around, and such sweeteners are a distraction from the real story. After decades of lobbying against climate policy perhaps they’ve seen the inexorable march of history towards decarbonization and decided to hitch their wagons to it. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this show before. Over a decade ago the likes of BP and ConocoPhillips joined the US Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of green groups and corporations that set about trying to pass climate legislation at the start of the Obama presidency. The House of Representatives went on to pass the hulking carbon pricing bill it supported, only to see it die in the Senate.For corporate members of USCAP the situation was a win-win. With one hand they helped craft legislation so friendly to their interests that it would leave their core business model – pouring carbon into the atmosphere – mostly untouched. With the other hand they tried to make sure nothing passed at all. As the political scientist Jake Grumbach has shown, several corporate members of the coalition were simultaneously paying generous membership fees to the American Petroleum Institute, the Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations working actively to kill it. The same was true this time around; the critical difference this time is that their bill passed.Understanding what’s just happened demands a longer view. For decades, oil and gas executives have worked to create a political climate wholly allergic to comprehensive climate action. Part of that has been lobbying against climate legislation, of course, working to undermine bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and spread disinformation. But for nearly a century the same corporations have conducted an all-out attack on the ability of the US government to get big, good things done.Climate change is ultimately a planning problem: there is no entity other than the state that can electrify the country, expand the grid, build prodigious amounts of mass transit and wind down coal, oil and gas production in time to keep warming short of catastrophic levels. For all its many shortcomings, the FDR-era New Deal sought to construct a state capable of tackling such complicated problems. The right – supercharged by fossil fuel funding – set out to destroy it, polluting our politics with the idea that efficient markets are the only reasonable answer to what ails society. Predictably, they railed against the Green New Deal, too, which rejected that logic. That’s not the result of some cadre of conniving CEOs waking up every morning and deciding to destroy the planet. They just happen to sell the lifeblood of capitalism and aren’t eager to be booted from that business.That the IRA’s most promising elements are a series of modest incentives to get corporations to do the right thing on climate – that demanding they actually do so feels so far out of reach – is the result of this long-running and largely successful ideological quest. This bill is woefully inadequate, featuring a cruel, casual disregard for those at home and abroad who will live with the consequences of boosting fossil fuel production as a bargaining chip for boosting clean energy. And it’s almost certainly better than nothing.
      Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back
      TopicsEnvironmentOpinionClimate crisisUS politicsBiden administrationUS CongressFossil fuelsOil and gas companiescommentReuse this content More

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      Landmark US climate bill will do more harm than good, groups say

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      Landmark US climate bill will do more harm than good, groups sayBill makes concessions to the fossil fuel industry as frontline community groups call on Biden to declare climate emergency The landmark climate legislation passed by the Senate after months of wrangling and weakening by fossil-fuel friendly Democrats will lead to more harm than good, according to frontline community groups who are calling on Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.If signed into law, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) would allocate $369bn to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy sources – a historic amount that scientists estimate will lead to net reductions of 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels.Democrats celebrate as climate bill moves to House – and critics weigh in Read moreIt would be the first significant climate legislation to be passed in the US, which is historically responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country.But the bill makes a slew of concessions to the fossil fuel industry, including mandating drilling and pipeline deals that will harm communities from Alaska to Appalachia and the Gulf coast and tie the US to planet-heating energy projects for decades to come.“Once again, the only climate proposal on the table requires that the communities of the Gulf south bear the disproportionate cost of national interests bending a knee to dirty energy – furthering the debt this country owes to the South,” said Colette Pichon Battle from Taproot Earth Vision (formerly Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy).“Solving the climate crisis requires eliminating fossil fuels, and the Inflation Reduction Act simply does not do this,” said Steven Feit, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (Ciel).Overall, many environmental and community groups agree that while the deal will bring some long-term global benefits by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, it’s not enough and consigns communities already threatened by sea level rise, floods and extreme heat to further misery.The bill is a watered-down version of Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better bill which was blocked by every single Republican and also conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have both received significant campaign support from fossil fuel industries. West Virginia’s Manchin, in particular, is known for his close personal ties to the coal sector.“This was a backdoor take-it-or-leave-it deal between a coal baron and Democratic leaders in which any opposition from lawmakers or frontline communities was quashed. It was an inherently unjust process, a deal which sacrifices so many communities and doesn’t get us anywhere near where we need to go, yet is being presented as a saviour legislation,” said Jean Su, energy justice program director at the Center for Biological Diversity.The IRA, which includes new tax provisions to pay for the historic $739bn climate and healthcare spending package, has been touted as a huge victory for the Biden administration as the Democrats gear up for a tough ride in the midterm elections, when they face losing control of both houses of Congress.The spending package will expedite expansion of the clean energy industry, and while it includes historic funds to tackle air pollution and help consumers go green through electric vehicle and household appliance subsidies, the vast majority of the funds will benefit corporations.A cost-benefit analysis by the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), which represents a wide range of urban and rural groups nationwide, concludes that the strengths of the IRA are outweighed by the bill’s weaknesses and threats posed by the expansion of fossil fuels and unproven technologies such as carbon capture and hydrogen generation – which the bill will incentivise with billions of dollars of tax credits that will mostly benefit oil and gas.“Climate investments should not be handcuffed to corporate subsidies for fossil fuel development and unproven technologies that will poison our communities for decades,” said Juan Jhong-Chung from the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, a member of the CJA.The IRA is a huge step towards creating a green capitalist industry that wrongly assumes the economic benefits will trickle down to low-income communities and households, added Su.Many advocacy groups agree that the IRA should be the first step – not the final climate policy – for Biden, who promised to be the country’s first climate president.People vs Fossil Fuels, a national coalition of more than 1,200 organisations from all 50 states, recently delivered a petition with more than 500,000 signatures to the White House calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency, which would unlock new funds for urgently needed climate adaptation in hard-hit communities, and use executive actions to stop the expansion of fossil fuels.Siqiniq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, said: “This new bill is genocide, there is no other way to put it. This is a life or death situation and the longer we act as though the world isn’t on fire around us, the worse our burns will be. Biden has the power to prevent this, to mitigate the damage.”TopicsUS politicsClimate crisisDemocratsRepublicansJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      White House warns of ‘intensifying impacts of climate change’ as Biden tours flood-hit Kentucky – as it happened

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      On Joe Biden’s visit to flood-ravaged eastern Kentucky today he is not just viewing the effects through the lens of a disaster needing federal assistance but also through the lens of the climate crisis that is making events like this more intense, more common and more deadly, in America and around the world.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed the issue in her media briefing aboard Air Force One en route to Lexington with the US president and first lady Jill Biden a little earlier.“The floods in Kentucky and extreme weather all around the country are yet another reminder of the intensifying and accelerating impacts of climate change and the urgent need to invest in making our communities more resilient to it,” she said.Kentucky was hit by massive flash flooding in the last two weeks that killed 37 people and caused mass destruction. The atypical rain storms followed eight months after tornadoes killed almost three times that many people in western Kentucky and many parts of the country are suffering record heatwaves, drought and wildfire after an extreme 2021 in the American west.Jean-Pierre of course emphasized the importance of the Senate vote yesterday to pass the historic climate action bill , which she called “so vital” alongside previous infrastructure legislation.“Over the long term, these investments will save lives, reduce costs and protect communities like the one we are visiting today,” she said. Biden is due to land in Kentucky about now.
      Amidst the flood damage, Joe Biden reiterated his commitment to Kentucky and seeing the areas impacted by the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 set back to rights. “Everybody has an obligation to help. We have the capacity to do this. It’s not like it’s beyond our control,” Biden said. “The weather may be beyond our control for now, but it’s not beyond our control and I promise you, we’re staying, the federal government, along with the state and county and the city, we’re staying until everybody is back to where they were.”
      Two years’ worth of text messages exchanged by right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones have been turned over to the House select committee tasked with investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, according to CNN. The texts had come out after Jones’ attorneys “messed up” and inadvertently sent the text messages to the plaintiffs’ attorney during a defamation trial in which Jones has been ordered to pay nearly $50m over his repeated claims that the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
      The Biden administration has pledged another $1bn in military aid for Ukraine, the largest promise of rockets, ammunition and other arms to Ukrainian forces. This brings the total US security assistance committed to Ukraine by the Biden administration to roughly $9bn since Russian troops invaded in February.
      Rudy Giuliani, lawyer for Donald Trump, was caught in a lie when he tried to argue that he couldn’t travel to Atlanta to appear before a special grand jury investigating whether Trump and others illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 general election in Georgia. Giuliani said he couldn’t travel because of a medical procedure but Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, pulled up a tweet of his showing that he had gone to New Hampshire recently, as well as evidence that he had purchased airline tickets to Rome and Zurich that were meant for use between 22 July and 29 July, after his medical procedure.
      The photos everyone is talking about today are the ones published by Axios purportedly backing up the claims that Donald Trump periodically blocked up White House and other drains by flushing documents.The photos show folded-up paper, marked with Trump’s telltale handwriting in his favored pen, a Sharpie, submerged at the bottom of various toilet bowls.Read more about it here:Photos suggest Trump blocked toilets with ripped-up White House documentsRead moreRon DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is widely seen as a potential leading Republican presidential contender, will campaign this month for Donald Trump-endorsed party candidates in key swing states for the 2024 White House race, Reuters is reporting.DeSantis, who is currently running for re-election in Florida, will speak at “Unite and Win” rallies on behalf of congressional and gubernatorial candidates in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania later this month, his campaign and rally organizer Turning Point Action said today.“He’s a wildly popular political figure and I think he can really make a difference for some of these candidates,” said Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point Action, which is the political arm of the conservative school campus group, Turning Point USA.Joe Biden promised the crowd he spoke to before a toppled building in Lost Creek, Kentucky that even with the at least 37 killed and the substantial flood damage, “we’re going to come back better than we were before”. “We’re the only country in the world that has come out of every major disaster stronger than we went into it,” Biden said. “We got clobbered going in, but we came out stronger. That’s the objective here: not just to get back to where we were, but to get back to better than where we were.” He said with the bipartisan infrastructure bill – the feather in his legislative agenda – “we have the wherewithal to do it now”. Biden said that because of the bill, now when crews are replacing damaged water lines, municipalities have the funds to also lay down high-speed Internet at the same time. “I don’t want any Kentuckian telling me you don’t have to do this for me,” Biden said. “Oh yes we do. You’re an American citizen. We never give up. We never stop. We never bow. We never bend. We just go forward and that’s what we’re going to do here. And you’re going to see.”Joe Biden has taken to the podium in Kentucky, where he is touring flooding damage from the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 and displaced hundreds. “The people here in this community are not just Kentuckians, they’re Americans,” Biden said. “This happened in America. This is an American problem. Everybody has an obligation to help. We have the capacity to do this. It’s not like it’s beyond our control. The weather may be beyond our control for now, but it’s not beyond our control and I promise you, we’re staying, the federal government, along with the state and county and the city, we’re staying until everybody is back to where they were.” Rudy Giuliani was among the many allies of Donald Trump that were subpoenaed by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, in her investigation into whether Trump and others illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 general election in Georgia.A judge ordered Giuliani to appear before a special grand jury in Atlanta this month, and today he made an emergency motion to postpone his scheduled deposition. Rudy GIULIANI has made an emergency motion to postpone his scheduled Fulton County deposition. A hearing on his motion is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. pic.twitter.com/hltHbN2Odn— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
      Giuliani’s excuse was that he had a recent medical procedure that left him uncleared to fly. He was willing to appear virtually and is prepared to testify, but the district attorney is insisting he appears in person. UPDATE Giuliani’s motion to delay his grand jury appearance seems to be medical — he says a recent procedure has left him uncleared to fly. He says he is prepared to testify and even willing to appear virtually but DA has insisted he appear in person. https://t.co/DAPhXqXDp7— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
      The Fulton county district attorney’s office quickly countered with a tweet of Giuliani’s that showed he had traveled out of state – Giuliani said he had traveled to New Hampshire by car. But the district attorney also found evidence that he had purchased airline tickets to Rome and Zurich that were meant for use between 22 July and 29 July, after his medical procedure. The DA says it has obtained records that show Rudy purchased air travel tickets meant for use between July 22-29. They also included a tweet showing Giuliani had traveled (he says by car) to NH last week. https://t.co/y0HVyd3cZl pic.twitter.com/KkSKY1lsgo— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 8, 2022
      Amazing. Giuliani said a recent heart procedure meant he couldn’t travel to ATL out of state …so the Fulton DA’s office found a tweet of Giuliani apparently traveling out of state. pic.twitter.com/LZONxwDxZz— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) August 8, 2022
      CNN is reporting that two years’ worth of text messages exchanged by right wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones have been turned over to the House select committee tasked with investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. News: The Alex Jones texts have been turned over to the 1/6 committee, I’m told. https://t.co/s1kQg6AT1g— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 8, 2022
      During Jones’ defamation trial, in which Jones has been ordered to pay nearly $50m over his repeated claims that the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, an attorney for the plaintiffs revealed that Jones’ attorneys had “messed up” and inadvertently sent him the two years of text messages. The House select committee was immediately interested: Jones’ rhetoric is popular among those who swarmed the Capitol that day, and he was on the grounds in the lead-up to the attack, riling up the crowd. However, according to CNN, Jones claims he tried to prevent people at the Capitol from breaking the law, and has rejected any suggestion that he was involved in the planning of violence. “Well, we know that his behavior did incentivize some of the January 6 conduct and we want to know more about that,” congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who sits on the committee, told CNN this weekend. “We don’t know what we’ll find in the texts because we haven’t seen them. But we’ll look at it and learn more, I’m sure.” Jones’ attorney had asked the judge to order Mark Bankston, the attorney who represented the two Sandy Hook parents who successfully sued Jones, to destroy the texts and not transmit them to the House committee.“I’m not standing between you and Congress,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble told Bankston. “That is not my job. I’m not going to do that.”The Biden administration has pledged another $1bn in military aid for Ukraine, the largest promise of rockets, ammunition and other arms to Ukrainian forces.This brings the total US security assistance committed to Ukraine by the Biden administration to roughly $9bn since Russian troops invaded in February.“At every stage of this conflict, we have been focused on getting the Ukrainians what they need, depending on the evolving conditions on the battlefield,” Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, said in announcing the new weapons shipment.New today: US announces another $1 billion military package for Ukraine including more ammo for HIMARS. And USAID announces $4.5 billion in economic aid to the Ukrainian government— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) August 8, 2022
      Greetings all – Vivian Ho here, taking over the blog from Joanna Walters. Over in Kentucky, Joe Biden kicked off his tour of the catastrophic flooding that has killed at least 37 people with a briefing. Touring flood damage in eastern Kentucky – @POTUS participates in briefing at Marie Roberts Elementary School in Lost Creek KY. @AndyBeshearKY welcomes the group – confirms 37 Kentuckians have died in the storm. Adds there are still 2 missing people. pic.twitter.com/Wed6Bei500— Julia Benbrook (@JuliaBenbrook) August 8, 2022
      Hello, live blog readers, with the climate crisis as a powerful undercurrent to Joe Biden’s visit to flood-ravaged eastern Kentucky today, we’ll bring you more news on that and all the developments, as they happen.My colleague Vivian Ho will take over the blog after this and keep you up to speed for the next few hours.Here’s where things stand.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre addressed the climate issues in her media briefing aboard Air Force One en route to Lexington with the US president earlier. “The floods in Kentucky and extreme weather all around the country are yet another reminder of the intensifying and accelerating impacts of climate change and the urgent need to invest in making our communities more resilient to it,” she said.
      During his time in the Oval Office, Donald Trump wanted the Pentagon’s generals to be like Nazi Germany’s generals in the second world war, according to a book excerpt in the New Yorker. Peeks of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s new book The Divider have more on some of those screaming matches in the White House between the-then president and senior aides.
      Joe Biden is visiting eastern Kentucky to tour areas inundated and families devastated by the terrible flooding a week ago that killed dozens of people. Biden is expected to make public remarks (around 2pm ET) as well as talking with relatives and officials in private, and he and the first lady will return to the White House this evening.
      The US president said “I’m not worried, but I am concerned” about China’s aggression towards Taiwan in its live-fire military exercises that lasted for the last four days and menaced the island democracy, whose capital, Taipei, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi controversially visited early last week.
      Joe Biden is touring flood damage in eastern Kentucky with state governor Andy Beshear.The state’s lieutenant governor, Jacqueline Coleman, earlier told CNN that in one county, 50 bridges had been wrecked by the floods that have devastated the region in late July-early August.“The infrastructure needs are monumental,” she said.Coleman described the rains that hit the area.“It happened so fast and it happened overnight and that’s the reason folks were trapped in their homes,” she said, often in areas of mountainous terrain.Asked if, with the climate crisis, this kind of extreme weather is going to become the new normal, she remarked: “I hope this is not the new normal, for sure.”The 700-plus-page inflation reduction bill moving through the US Congress would steer significant new funds toward battling wildfires and extreme heat – climate change-related risks that are wreaking havoc across the country this summer, Reuters reports.The legislation, pared down from earlier versions, would direct approximately $370 billion toward a range of climate and energy initiatives, including renewable energy tax credits, backing for electric cars and heat pumps, and environmental justice..css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This is going to, if passed, be the most action the United States has ever taken on climate. Will there be more that we need to do? Absolutely. But this is just so significant and [it’s] so important that we get this over the finish line,” said Christina DeConcini, director of government affairs at the World Resources Institute, a global research group.As drought-fueled wildfires spread out of control in the western United States, lawmakers want to direct about $2 billion toward hazardous fuels reduction.The money in the bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, could go toward measures like clearing brush through prescribed burns or mechanical thinning so when fires do occur they’re not as intense.The bill also earmarks funds to combat increasingly extreme heat as the United States – and much of the world – grapples with record-shattering and increasingly deadly temperatures this year.For example, there is $1.5 billion in grant funding through the US Forest Service for initiatives such as helping cities plant trees, which provide natural cooling and can improve air quality.The bill aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade through other spending on clean energy tax incentives and electric vehicle credits.Sponsors of the bill say more than $60 billion in measures included are directed toward “environmental justice” initiatives intended to help communities that have disproportionately borne the brunt of poor air quality and pollution.But that amount isn’t nearly enough, said Anthony Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice at the nonprofit New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.You can read the full Reuters report here. More

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      Democrats celebrate as climate bill moves to House – and critics weigh in

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      Democrats celebrate as climate bill moves to House – and critics weigh in Bernie Sanders calls climate measures a ‘very modest step forward’ and Republicans denounce the bill altogether Democrats celebrated the much-delayed Senate passage of their healthcare and climate spending package, expressing hope that the bill’s approval could improve their prospects in the crucial midterm elections this November.The bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the Senate on Sunday in a party-line vote of 51-50, with Vice-President Kamala Harris breaking the tie in the evenly divided chamber.Raucous applause broke out on the Senate floor after Harris announced the final tally, and Democrats continued their victory lap once the vote had concluded amid a belief that the bill will give Biden – and many Democrats – a record of significant achievement to campaign on.“I’m really confident that the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining feats of the 21st century,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said at a press conference after the bill’s passage. “To do small things with 50 votes is rough. To pass such a major piece of legislation – with only 50 votes, an intransigent Republican minority, a caucus running from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin – wow.”Democrats’ work is not quite done though. The Senate-approved bill now heads to the House, which must pass the legislation before it can go to Joe Biden’s desk. The House is scheduled to return from its recess on Friday to take up the bill, and Democratic leaders have expressed confidence that it will pass.“The House will return and move swiftly to send this bill to the president’s desk – proudly building a healthier, cleaner, fairer future for all Americans,” the Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said in a statement.Democrats hope the bill’s passage could also help them persuade voters to keep them in control of Congress in November, when every House seat and 34 Senate seats will be up for grabs. So far, Democrats’ prospects in the midterm elections have appeared grim, as Republicans are heavily favored to regain control of the House of Representatives.Asked on Monday morning whether he believed the bill’s approval would benefit Democrats running in November, Biden said, “Do I expect it to help? Yes, I do. It’s going to immediately help.”Biden pointed to some of the bill’s healthcare provisions, including capping Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket prescription costs at $2,000 a year, to argue that the legislation would provide concrete assistance to millions of Americans. But that policy will not go into effect until 2025, and Biden acknowledged that some of the bill’s most important provisions will take time to kick in.That delayed implementation could prove detrimental to Democratic candidates trying to make a pitch to voters about how the party has made the most of its control of the White House and Congress.Despite its name, the bill is also not expected to provide immediate relief to Americans struggling under the weight of record-high inflation. According to a report issued by Moody’s Analytics, the bill will “modestly reduce inflation over the 10-year budget horizon”.Republicans accused Democrats of ramming through a partisan bill that failed to address voters’ top concerns, as polls show most Americans believe the economy is getting worse.“Democrats have proven over and over they simply do not care about middle-class families’ priorities,” the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said after the bill’s passage. “They have spent 18 months proving that. They just spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prove it again.”Republicans’ talking points were echoed by a surprising voice on Sunday: Bernie Sanders. The progressive senator expressed concern that the bill would do little to help working Americans, after he unsuccessfully pushed amendments to the bill that would have expanded its healthcare and financial assistance provisions.“It’s a very modest step forward,” Sanders told MSNBC. “Bottom line is, I’m going to support the bill because given the crisis of climate change, the environmental community says this is a step forward. It doesn’t go anywhere near as far as it should. It is a step forward.”Democrats have championed the bill’s environmental provisions, which mark America’s most significant legislative effort yet to address the climate crisis. Experts estimate that the climate policies in the spending package will slash US greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. That accomplishment will bring the US within striking distance of Biden’s goal to cut emissions in half by the end of the decade, which scientists say must be achieved to avoid climate disaster.To win the support of the centrist senator Joe Manchin, the bill also includes controversial proposals to expand oil and gas development on federal lands, which have sparked outcry among some climate activists. But the bill’s defenders say the climate benefits of the legislation far outweigh the costs.As the spending package moves to the House, Pelosi has the weighty task of keeping her entire caucus in line to ensure the bill’s passage. Given Democrats’ narrow majority in the lower chamber, Pelosi can afford to lose only a few votes and still get the bill passed. It seems like Pelosi will have the votes she needs, after moderates and progressives alike endorsed the package, so Biden could be reaching for his bill-signing pen by the end of the week.TopicsUS politicsDemocratsClimate crisisUS SenateHouse of RepresentativesUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More