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      Why the collapse of Biden’s Build Back Better would be a major blow to the climate fight

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      Why the collapse of Biden’s Build Back Better would be a major blow to the climate fightIt would be almost impossible for the US to comply with its greenhouse gas reduction pledges without the $1.75tn package that Manchin refuses to support The collapse of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation would have disastrous consequences for the global climate crisis, making it almost impossible for the US to comply with its greenhouse gas reduction pledges made under the Paris accords.Dire end to Biden’s first year as Manchin says no on signature billRead moreThe US president’s sweeping economic recovery and social welfare bill is in serious trouble after the Democratic senator Joe Manchin announced his opposition to the $1.75tn spending package that includes the country’s largest ever climate crisis investment.The shock move by the fossil fuel-friendly West Virginia lawmaker came after a year of record-breaking fires, floods, hurricanes and droughts devastated families across America, and amid warnings that such deadly extreme weather events will intensify unless there is radical action to curb greenhouse gases.The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation earmarks $555bn to tackle the US’s largest sources of global heating gasses – energy and transportation – through a variety of grants, tax incentives and other policies to boost jobs and technologies in renewable energy, as well as major investments in sustainable vehicles and public transit services.It is by far the largest chunk of federal funding for Biden’s climate crisis initiatives, without which experts say it will be impossible to meet the administration’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.Globally, the US is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China, and scientists warn that even halving emissions by 2030 may not be enough to avoid a catastrophic rise in atmospheric and oceanic temperatures.But BBB would be a major step forward towards the US meeting the goals laid out by Biden at last month’s UN climate talks in Glasgow, with no time to waste given the regression during the Trump administration. Without it, the Biden administration would be forced to rely on a web of new regulations and standards which could be overturned by future presidents.Lawmakers, climate experts and labor groups have voiced intense anger and frustration over Manchin’s refusal to support the bill, which would leave the Democrats without the necessary votes to get it through the Senate.Raúl Grijalva, chair of the House natural resources committee, said the concentration of political power in a few hands had caused nothing but “gridlock and frustration”.“Our country has serious economic and environmental problems that demand government action. If we don’t take that action, we’ll look back at this moment as a decisive wrong turn in the life of our country,” Grijalva said in a statement.“Who died and made Joe Manchin king, how is this a democracy?” said Mary Annaïse Heglar, climate writer and co-host of the podcast Hot Take. “There’s been a dereliction of duty by politicians for decades who’ve failed to make the case for climate action … climate math won’t reset just because the political math did.”Writing on Twitter, Jesse Jenkins, an energy professor at Princeton University who leads a group analysing the potential of BBB, said Manchin’s decision was “devastating” given the high stakes. “Passing #BuildBackBetter would lower energy costs and secure both the US’s climate goals and its global competitiveness in some of the most important industries of the 21st century. Failure would cost Americans dearly.”BBB would build on a bipartisan infrastructure bill, signed into law last month, which contains important steps towards transforming America’s fossil fuel fired transport system by incentivizing zero emission public transit, a national network of electric vehicle chargers and a renewables energy grid.But BBB goes much further. For instance, homeowners would get incentives to install rooftop solar systems and insulate their homes.It also provides significant funding to address a range of environmental injustices which have led to Black, Latino, Indigenous and other marginalized Americans being disproportionately exposed to the harmful effects of fossil fuel pollution, ageing infrastructure like lead pipes, emerging toxins and the climate crisis.The bill includes billions of dollars in grants and other schemes to clean up pollution and create toxic-free communities, healthy ports and climate-resilient affordable housing, as well as research and development infrastructure at historically Black colleges and universities.So if Manchin move finally scuppers the BBB act – as is widely feared – frontline communities in the US, and across the world, would bear the brunt of the inaction.“Build Back Better is our once-in-a-generation opportunity to combat the climate crisis and advance environmental justice through transformative investments that only the government can provide,” said Abigail Dillen, president of the legal non-profit Earthjustice. “The urgency couldn’t be greater. As communities across our country are displaced by weather disasters and others breathe polluted air and drink poisoned water, political leaders like Senator Manchin cannot continue denying the crisis before us.”The climate crisis is undeniably causing havoc and misery across the world, with 2021 one of the deadliest ever years for weather disasters in the US. This year’s death toll includes at least 200 people killed by extreme heat in the Pacific north-west over the summer and 125 deaths caused by the extreme freeze in Texas in February.After years of scepticism, the majority of Americans now want government action to tackle the climate crisis but the majority of republicans – and a handful of democrats – continue to obstruct meaningful policy initiatives.Manchin, whose family profits from the coal industry in West Virginia, has already pushed out key climate policies during the BBB negotiations including a program to incentivize electricity utilities to use renewable power sources.Yet even some of Manchin’s core supporters are urging him to reconsider his opposition to the current bill, which includes several policies that would directly benefit large numbers of West Virginians including the state’s struggling coal miners.In a statement, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which named Manchin as an honorary member last year, warned that benefits to coalminers suffering from black lung disease will expire at the end of this year unless BBB is passed. The union also supports the bill’s tax incentives that encourage manufacturers to build facilities on abandoned coalfields that would employ thousands of unemployed miners.Cecil Roberts, the union’s president, said: “We urge Senator Manchin to revisit his opposition to this legislation and work with his colleagues to pass something that will help keep coalminers working, and have a meaningful impact on our members, their families, and their communities.”TopicsUS politicsClimate crisisJoe BidenJoe ManchinUS CongressDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      By ditching landmark climate legislation, America makes the world unsafe | Kate Aronoff

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      By ditching landmark climate legislation, America makes the world unsafeKate AronoffThe rest of the world needs to start treating the US as what it is: a dangerous country that needs to be reined in As the now very likely collapse of the Build Back Better Act underlines, what’s exceptional about the United States is its extraordinary ability to dole out harm. Besides its ever-ballooning military budget and foreign wars, America also makes the world unsafe thanks to the prodigious amount of fossil fuel it continues to send around the world.US ‘closer to civil war’ than most would like to believe, new book saysRead moreOil Change International, Earthworks and the Center for International Environmental Law have found that burning the oil and gas expected to be drilled in the US alone over the next decade could gobble up 10% of the entire world’s remaining carbon budget, the amount of carbon dioxide that can be released before the planet warms above 1.5C.The Build Back Better Act wouldn’t have made a dent in that drilling, of course: constraining US fossil fuel production or exports has been a political third rail on both sides of the aisle, despite John Kerry having spent months hectoring other smaller and less wealthy nations about their own fossil fuel use in the lead-up to Cop26.Just last week, energy secretary Jennifer Granholm went out of her way to assure oil executives that the administration wouldn’t reinstate the longstanding crude oil export ban, assuring them: “I don’t want to fight with any of you.”West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin – whose promised no vote on Build Back Better seems to have hammered the nail into Biden’s legislative agenda – made half a million dollars last year off his family’s coal business, and was reportedly speaking weekly with ExxonMobil lobbyists this spring. But he’s hardly the only Democrat furthering the fossil fuel industry’s interests.What the Build Back Better bill represented was a bare minimum, at best: the roughly $55bn a year the bill would spend on incentives for renewables deployment, building upgrades and electric vehicles over the next decade is roughly half of what Americans spent on caring for their pets in 2020, and pales in comparison to the $768bn one-year Pentagon budget that breezed through both chambers last week.Even the White House’s topline goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 is dangerously behind the times: that’s when the entire world should be carbon neutral. With its vast resources and outsized historical responsibility for the climate crisis, the US should get there much, much sooner. But what the United States should do to reduce emissions and what its staid, corporate-captured democratic institutions are capable of at this moment are two different things.That’s not to say the fight is over. Congressional leadership could finally call Manchin’s bluff and force a vote on Build Back Better. Biden has a slew of emissions-cutting executive actions at his disposal should he choose to use them, including the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide. And there are exciting victories at the state and local level to build on.But the road ahead is a rocky one. With a deadly Omicron surge encroaching, the child tax credit about to lapse and student loans payments starting up again in February, Democrats will struggle to point voters to success stories during next year’s midterm elections without Build Back Better in hand.They face a potential blowout in the House, where a Republican majority may well refuse to recognize that any Democrat could win the 2024 presidential election. It’s very likely that the United States, the world’s largest economy and second biggest greenhouse gas emitter, will not pass its first-ever comprehensive climate legislation for at least a decade.Should they take back control in Washington, Republicans will expand drilling as quickly as possible, rest of the world be damned. Countries committed to seeing temperatures not rise above 1.5 or 2C should start treating the US for what it is: an exceptionally dangerous country that needs to be reined in.
      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
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenClimate crisisUS domestic policycommentReuse this content More

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      Humanity’s failure to tackle climate change in the 1980s had many causes | Letter

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      Humanity’s failure to tackle climate change in the 1980s had many causesNathaniel Rich responds to claims about Losing Earth, his 2018 article for the New York Times, later published as a book In his article (Neoliberalism wrecked our chance to fix the climate crisis – and leftwing statements of faith have changed nothing, 17 November), Jeff Sparrow repeats Naomi Klein’s simplistic claim that, in Losing Earth, I “attribute” the missed opportunity on climate change during the critical decade between 1979 and 1989 to “human nature”. Anyone who reads Losing Earth will see that I do no such thing.The failure can be attributed to various causes. Among them are: the fecklessness of bureaucrats tasked with developing legislative solutions to a global problem; a generation of influential US scientists’ blind faith in American exceptionalism; the anti-environmental blitzkrieg launched by the Reagan administration on taking office; the failure of journalists, scientists and policymakers to explain the severity of the threat to a disinterested public; the refusal by the major environmental organisations to embrace climate change as a cause worthy of their attention; the machinations of George HW Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu; and ultimately the mobilisation of the oil and gas industry around a massive disinformation campaign, the origin story of which I reported for the first time.Humanity’s general reluctance to take urgent, dramatic action to counteract long-term threats offers a serious challenge to the passage of major climate policy, but not a decisive one. The story is far more complex, fascinating and tragic than that. It doesn’t serve anybody to condense history into talking points for the purpose of hollow sloganeering. When “neoliberalism” is the answer to everything, it’s the answer to nothing.Nathaniel RichNew Orleans, Louisiana, United StatesTopicsClimate crisisUS politicsEnergyFossil fuelslettersReuse this content More

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      Biden-Xi virtual summit: Biden says US and China must 'not veer into conflict' – video

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      US president Joe Biden has told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that he hoped to have a candid conversation about human rights and security issues as the two began a meeting meant to lower tensions between the two global superpowers. Biden added that the two leaders must make sure their relations do not veer into open conflict, including by installing ‘common sense’ guardrails. Biden spoke with Xi over a video conference as the two leaders engaged in their most extensive talks since Biden became president in January. Xi said the two sides must increase communication and cooperation to solve the many challenges they face.

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      Cop26 reveals limits of Biden’s promise to ‘lead by example’ on climate crisis

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      Cop26 reveals limits of Biden’s promise to ‘lead by example’ on climate crisisUS declined to join promise to end coal mining and to compensate poor countries for climate damage. Critics ask, is that leadership? The crucial UN climate talks in Scotland have produced landmark commitments to phase out coalmining, to call time on the internal combustion engines and to compensate poorer countries for damage caused by the climate crisis.The United States, which has trumpeted its regained climate leadership at the summit, has not joined any these pledges as the talks draw to a close.This disconnect has provided the world with a muddled sense of America’s willingness to confront the unfolding climate catastrophe, with the fate of historic legislation to lower planet-heating emissions still uncertain ahead of an expected vote in Congress next week.Joe Biden arrived in Glasgow vowing the US will “lead by example” on climate change and avoid disastrous global heating beyond 1.5C, dispatching his entire cabinet to the Cop26 talks and making widely praised new promises to cut methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and to end deforestation.Two dozen Democratic lawmakers wearing congressional lapel pins have swept the conference venue this week, all expressing confidence that the vast $1.75tn spending bill will pass back home.“This is the most ambitious climate legislation of all time,” Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, told the summit. “America is back and is ready to lead,” added Kathy Castor, chair of the House select committee on the climate crisis. “Once we pass this historic package, finally, it will help keep 1.5C alive.”But the US is bedeviled by its recent past and – many delegates of other countries fear – its potential future, following Donald Trump’s embrace of climate science denialism and American isolationism. “We have not recovered our moral authority,” admitted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York representative, when asked about the specter of the former president. “I believe we are making steps, but we have to actually deliver the action in order to get the respect internationally. It’s that simple.”There is also mounting criticism that Biden’s actions have not matched his words and that the US president’s negotiators haven’t pushed hard enough for an ambitious deal in Glasgow to secure the deep emissions cuts needed to avoid disastrous warming that will spur ever-worsening floods, heatwaves and wildfires.More than 40 countries announced at Cop26 a promise to end the mining of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, although the US was conspicuously absent from the list. “It’s very disappointing because the science is quite clear that we have to turn sharply away from coal this decade if we are going to meet our climate goals,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.“We need very clear signals that orientate the US towards clean energy,” she added. “The climate crisis is too dire to just wait for coal to fall out. It’s just another signal of the sway the fossil fuel industry still has over US politics.”Despite its attempts to expand the rollout of electric vehicles, the Biden administration has also declined to set an end date for the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars, unlike the UK, European Union, Canada, India and a slew of other countries at Cop26. Its delegation in Glasgow is similarly wary of a push to provide “loss and damage” payments to countries vulnerable to climate impacts and has sought to shift criticism towards the inaction of China and Russia, although the US and China did unveil an unexpected plan to work together on cutting emissions, despite the enmity between the two countries.This reticence, critics claim, undermines Biden’s credibility on climate. Others say the dysfunctional nature of Congress, where sweeping climate legislation to expand renewable energy and wind down fossil fuels is effectively in the hands of a senator who derives most of his income from investments in coal, is to blame.“There is a handful of members of Congress who represent coal-intensive parts of the country who see [climate action] as a threat to their region,” Sean Casten, a Democratic representative, told the Guardian. “It’s kept the president from doing all that he’d like to do.”Pete Buttigieg, the US transport secretary, told the Guardian that the Biden administration aims to give Americans better public transit options, as well as electric vehicle rebates and infrastructure, but that “each country is on its own path” to ending the age of fossil fuel-powered cars.“What we are talking about is a race to the ambitious targets the president has set,” Buttigieg said, adding that the goal of half of all car sales being electric by 2030 will be in itself a “massive lift”.Biden will face further scrutiny almost immediately after some sort of deal is struck in Glasgow, not only over the fate of the Build Back Better bill but also his issuance of permits for oil and gas drilling.An auction of 80m acres of the Gulf of Mexico seabed, an area larger than the UK, will be offered to fossil fuel companies next week, while a new report has warned that the oil and gas that will be burned in the Permian Basin, a geological formation in the south-west US, by 2050 will release nearly 40bn tons of carbon dioxide, nearly a tenth of the remaining global “carbon budget” to stay under 1.5C.“If the Biden administration wants to be serious about its promise to demonstrate US climate leadership, it must first clean up its own back yard,” said Steven Feit, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law.“The Permian Basin is the single largest fracking basin globally, and the continued reckless pursuit of oil extraction from New Mexico to the Gulf coast is the ultimate display of hypocrisy.”TopicsCop26Climate crisisUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

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      Barack Obama has a nerve preaching about the climate crisis | Kate Aronoff

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      OpinionCop26Barack Obama has a nerve preaching about the climate crisisKate AronoffThe former US president directed his Cop26 speech at young people, but he made the task of keeping warming to 1.5C far harder Wed 10 Nov 2021 05.00 ESTLast modified on Wed 10 Nov 2021 12.06 ESTHundreds of people thronged the corridors at Cop26 on Monday, trying to make it into an event in one of the Scottish Event Campus’s drab plenary rooms. Passing by, I asked a man in the crowd what all the commotion was for. He responded with one word: “Obama.” The former president still maintains his rock star-ish appeal. His speech proved the biggest draw of the conference so far. But what should we make of it in the cold light of day?Much of his message was directed at young people, whom he praised as both “sophisticated consumers” and the source of the “most important energy in this movement”. He was clear: it’s up to all of us – but especially young people – to come together and keep the planet from warming beyond 1.5C. “Collectively and individually we are still falling short” he said, in the kind of grand, sweeping tones that built his career. “We have not done nearly enough to address this crisis. We are going to have to do more. Whether that happens or not to a large degree is going to depend on you.”Obama implores world leaders to ‘step up now’ to avert climate disasterRead moreWho precisely is “we” in this scenario? The young people who were children when Obama took office did not clear the way for a 750% explosion in crude oil exports, as he did just a few days after the Paris agreement was brokered in 2015. Nor did they boast proudly about it years later, as ever-more research mounted about the dangers of continuing to invest in fossil fuels. Speaking at a Houston, Texas gala in 2018, the former president proudly took credit for booming US fossil fuel production. “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer. That was me people,” he boasted jokingly to an industry-friendly crowd. “Say thank you.”The UN-backed 2021 Production Gap Report found that world governments are now on track to produce double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is compatible with keeping warming below 1.5C. Obama’s approach to boosting gas and renewables simultaneously, which he dubbed the “All of the above” doctrine, still appears to be a guiding principle of the Biden administration.Young people also didn’t use the US Export-Import Bank to direct $34bn to 70 fossil fuel projects around the world. Neither did they deploy the National Security Administration to surveil other countries’ delegations at the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009. And they have not joined other wealthy nations at the UN Framework Conventions on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks to keep conversations about the enormous climate debt they owe the rest of the world off the table.Obama’s rhetoric mirrored the approach of the United States at countless climate talks. Where it tends to collapse the vast differences between and within countries, to avoid all but the most symbolic discussions of “common but differentiated responsibility”, as it says in the UNFCCC.The global north is responsible for 92% of excess carbon dioxide emissions since the dawn of the industrial age. The United States alone is responsible for 40% of those – a fact its negotiators in Republican and Democratic administrations alike have long sought to obscure. “If equity’s in,” said top Obama-era climate negotiator Todd Stern at climate talks in Durban, South Africa in 2011, “we’re out.Cop26 leaders blame individuals, while supporting a far more destructive system | Stephen ReicherRead moreObama speech day was also, less glamorously, loss and damage day. Climate-vulnerable countries continue to demand real financial commitments to support them rebuilding from the damages that rising temperatures are already causing. His administration is one major reason why that’s been so difficult. “There’s one thing that we don’t accept and won’t accept in this agreement,” Stern said while negotiating the Paris agreement in 2015, “and that is the notion that there should be liability and compensation for loss and damage. That’s a line that we can’t cross.”Obama wants to continue to make lofty speeches, which are ultimately campaigning for a return to his version of business as usual – better than Trump but utterly ill-equipped to take on the climate crisis. And he can’t help but take a swings at the left. “Don’t think you can ignore politics … You can’t be too pure for it,” he scolded. “It’s part of the process that is going to deliver all of us.”Plenty of young people did get involved in electoral politics, of course. They knocked on doors and made phone calls for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. He enjoyed the support of 60% of voters under 30, partly for his commitment to a $16.3tn green new deal climate programme.To hear Obama tell it, if enough people come together to raise awareness about the climate crisis and consume smartly, they will change enough hearts and minds to keep warming below 1.5C. That would be a lot easier if Obama, in his time as leader of the free world, hadn’t made the task so much harder for all those inspiring, passionate young people. TopicsCop26OpinionBarack ObamaGreenhouse gas emissionsUS politicsClimate crisiscommentReuse this content More

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      If Biden doesn’t pass the climate bill, it will be the betrayal of a generation | Daniel Sherrell

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      OpinionClimate crisisIf Biden doesn’t pass the climate bill, it will be the betrayal of a generationDaniel SherrellFailure to pass Build Back Better would disillusion a generation of voters, and potentially fracture the Democratic party Tue 9 Nov 2021 06.16 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 13.10 ESTDeep into the night last Friday, long past the hour when most Americans had ceased paying attention, Congress passed the $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure bill otherwise known as the BIF. Its passage was heralded as a victory for President Biden, and the daily news chyrons dutifully marked a point in his column. But beyond the horserace myopia of the Beltway – and especially among young people – the news came tinged with the threat of disaster. Because for those of us interested in sustained human civilization on a habitable planet, the most relevant fact about the BIF is this: without consequent passage of the clean energy and social welfare bill known as Build Back Better, the BIF alone will exacerbate the climate crisis.AOC says Republican who posted sword attack video ‘cheered on’ by partyRead moreThe reasons are manifold. The bill is riddled with exemptions and subsidies for corporations like ExxonMobil, whose lobbyists were caught bragging about their role in shaping the text. It invests in highways, bridges and airports that – in the absence of an aggressive drive to electrify cars and planes – will only add to emissions from the transportation sector. And the climate funding it does contain is focused not on drawing down emissions but on preparing Americans for worsening floods, fires and superstorms. If this is all we get, the message to young people is clear: Exxon will continue to be allowed to drown your homes, but not to worry, the government is investing in some life vests. Good luck!When it comes to passing the Build Back Better bill, the handful of extremist, Wall Street-backed Democrats who have obstructed it for months are now asking for something they have done very little to earn: trust. It would be one thing if congresspeople like Josh Gottheimer and Abigail Spanberger gave the impression of fully understanding the gravity of the climate crisis and pulling out all the stops to make a commensurate response politically possible. Instead, they come off as narrow-minded political animals, too blinkered by the game to see the world around them burning.It seems doubtful that any of them have read – much less internalized – the findings of the latest IPCC report. If she had, Representative Spanberger might have registered the irony in her insisting that Biden “be normal and stop the chaos”. As if it weren’t precisely those ideas long considered “normal” – massive fossil fuel subsidies, economic austerity, energy market deregulation – that are leading us straight into planetary chaos.Even more worrisome, their excuse for obstructing Build Back Better seems less than fully genuine. They insist they need to see an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office on how the bill would affect the national deficit. But they seemed little bothered when the CBO made it known that their BIF would expand it by $256bn. They also seem intent on ignoring the many analyses – including several from the treasury department itself – showing that Build Back Better would actually reduce the deficit. And that’s not to even mention the fact – still rarely mentioned, somehow! – that climate disasters cost Americans $1.9tn in 2020 alone.Even if their concern about the deficit is genuine, it’s grounded in a fundamental misapprehension of contemporary macroeconomics, which is undergoing a revolution in how it understands national debt and deficit spending. It’s as if they made some sort of superstitious pact, circa 1980, to admit no additional research from either economists or climate scientists. Even the former chief economist of the CBO made it clear that their insistence on a CBO score is ludicrous. “This is a really important package that will change people’s lives, and that should be the guiding principle,” she said in reference to Build Back Better. “The 10-year window [for CBO scoring] is arbitrary. Aiming for deficit neutrality is arbitrary – it’s arbitrariness on top of arbitrariness.”But despite all of these red flags, most of the self-styled House “moderates” – with a few notable exceptions, including Spanberger – have promised to eventually vote for Build Back Better in its current form. It is hard to overstate how much rests on that single-paragraph promise. A failure to pass Build Back Better would, at this point, amount to a betrayal so large it would disillusion an entire generation of young voters, and potentially fracture the Democratic party itself. The muted applause for BIF would be completely drowned out by recriminations, and the party would stumble into the midterms in open civil war, having failed to pull us back from the brink of worldwide catastrophe.Maybe Abigail Spanberger would hold on to her seat, but she would probably find herself isolated and ineffectual in a Republican Congress, desperately clinging to her fantasy of “normality” as she cranked up the A/C on another blistering summer day.Meanwhile, President Biden’s legacy would be sealed. For all his adulation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he would have failed to live up to the one test that cemented his predecessor as a hero. It’s worth remembering that FDR passed the New Deal over the violent protestations of Wall Street bankers, some of whom tried to stage a coup to replace him. Biden faces a similar test on Build Back Better: can he discipline the wealthiest and most dangerous industry in history, who will stop at nothing to make the “moderates” kill the bill? Can he wrest the helm of history from the fossil fuel executives, who would just as soon watch it all go down in flames?If he fails to pass Build Back Better, China’s taunts will ring true, though for the wrong reasons. The American political system will have proven itself incapable of passing extremely popular policies to address the climate crisis – not because it was too democratic, but because it was never democratic enough.With stakes this high, it’s no wonder the Progressive Caucus leader, Representative Pramila Jayapal, asked each “moderate” to look her in the eye as they signed their name to the Build Back Better promise. That look might have contained the anxiety of my entire generation. Not only our fear of being played, not only our dread of inheriting a squandered planet, but our ongoing hope – despite all evidence to the contrary – that our leaders may actually choose to lead.
      Daniel Sherrell is the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin Books) and a climate activist
      TopicsClimate crisisOpinionDemocratsUS politicsJoe BidencommentReuse this content More