When will the climate bullies stop saying mean things about coal and oil and gas?

The Trump regime is in full climate denial mode, killing greenhouse pollution rules for power plants because “any potential public health harms are too uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted to tie specifically to the U.S. power sector.” And trying to kill international climate finance on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly. Stop saying mean things about coal and oil and gas, climate bullies!

Wait a minute—I’m getting an update—the climate “bullies” are, in fact, nerds.

The climate nerds in Congress (complimentary) today released the Thriving Economy Project report, the culmination of a multi-year effort organized by the Sustainable Energy & Environment Coalition (SEEC) Institute’s Max Frankel, and the Grove Climate Group’s Eric Fins, formerly Deputy Staff Director of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which was chaired by Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.-14). The organizers held hundreds of roundtables around the country and sifted through thousands of policy ideas (the acronym glossary runs to four pages).

Each chapter has a different member and policy expert attached:

This morning, each member connected the report to the climate disasters degrading the livability of their own district—wildfires, droughts, sea level rise, hurricanes, floods, and relentless heat waves—and to how the fossil fascism (my words) of Trump is sending electricity and fuel and food prices skyrocketing while killing livelihoods.

Most of these members of Congress are policy wonks—Ross and Levin were clean-energy lawyers, Casten a clean-energy businessman, Stansbury a climate-policy staffer, Dexter a pulmonary physician, Budzinski a green-jobs organizer. (Whitesides, by contrast, is a space-privatization guy beholden to the military-industrial complex, emphasis on industrial.)

The full report has a blizzard of highly detailed recommendations, restoring and expanding the infrastructure of Biden’s Build Back Better legislative legacy (IRA, IIJA, and CHIPS).

Some of the more interesting ideas include such as taxes on Big Oil windfall profits and data centers that feed into emergency payments funds like LiHEAP, letting wildfire smoke events qualify as federal disasters, and guaranteeing free electricity service for part of the day to all Americans.

They’re still hunting the “bipartisan” chimera, which is almost always code for “supported by corporate lobbyists.” As Castor told Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo (who was mostly interested in the report’s rhetoric): “This effort is driven by solving problems ASAP where we think there can be bipartisan support.”¹ So the report does have some nonsense, like support for hydrogen pipelines, and is way too friendly to data centers. The biggest red flag is the presence of fracked-gas hack Ernest Moniz on SEEC Institute’s board.

The report could have been much more robust, of course. I can’t find much on antitrust, high-speed rail, or even unionization, for example.² And it lacks the unifying scope of the Green New Deal, which integrates health, education, and new urbanism as core to climate policy. It should be considered the rightmost end of the reasonable policy spectrum!

Again, the most important takeaway is that the Democrats, no matter their policy preferences, are committed to helping their constituents fight the onslaught of fossil-fueled global warming. Because it’s the real world we live in.

It’s book release day! If you pre-ordered End Times Fascism — And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, you should be receiving it! And if you haven’t yet, now is the time to order a copy!

Congrats to Will Lawrence, the Sunrise Movement co-founder and data-center fighter running for Congress in Michigan’s 7th, now named to DCCC’s Red to Blue program.

Hannah Story Brown: The EPA’s dark embrace of AI industry.

Anika Jane Beamer: As power demand rises, a clean-energy state falls back on coal.

Kate Aronoff: The big greedy data center next door.

Molly Taft: AI agents are thirsty for power.

Brian J. Chen: After the data centers.

Hearings on the Hill:

Climate Action Today:

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