End the Oligarchy, Save Our Future

PRESENTED BY THE BAD NEWS BIRDS

Personal disclosure: a loyal Hill Heat reader told me that yesterday’s newsletter felt like “reverse therapy.” I suppose some of the content was a wee bit grim. So today, let’s put the good news first!

Tonight, Sunrise launches End the Oligarchy, Save Our Futures, a new campaign to make Big Oil pay for the rising costs of climate disasters. Speakers in the national broadcast include Sunrise head Aru Shiney-Ajay, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Sunrise LA’s Nico Gardner Serna, Fridays For Future NYC’s Keanu Arpels-Josiah, and actress and climate activist Hannah Einbinder. Sunrise DC is hosting a watch party near Capitol Hill.

June has been a pretty amazing month at the ballot box as well.

In San Antonio, Texas, 24-year-old climate hawk Ric Galvan won a run-off election to serve on the city council by 25 votes, joining fellow Big Oil opponents Jalen McKee-Rodriguez and Teri Castillo. His victory was powered by Lead Locally, the grassroots powerhouse that supports local climate hawks in pivotal races across the nation.

In last week’s New Jersey primaries, climate champions Katie Brennan and Ravi Bhalla overcame $500,000 in dark money to win the primary for the two seats in State Assembly Legislative District 32, which encompasses Hoboken and part of Jersey City. Bhalla, the mayor of Hoboken, defeated incumbent Jessica Ramirez by fewer than 200 votes. Brennan and Bhalla were also backed by Lead Locally.

Also last week, Lead Locally-supported clean-energy candidates Erin McKittrick, Mark Mastellar, and Katherine Jernstrom won seats on their rural electric cooperative boards in the fastest-heating state in the nation, Alaska.

In yesterday’s Virginia primaries, clean energy champion Jay Jones won the Democratic nomination for Attorney General, beating Shannon Taylor, who was backed by $650,000 in campaign spending from Dominion Energy. And every candidate for Virginia House of Delegates backed by Lead Locally won their primary.

Interviewed by Michel Martin yesterday, DNC Chair Ken Martin spoke movingly and unflinchingly about Minnesota Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated by a right-wing extremist over the weekend:

Martin also reiterated his demand that elected Democrats start standing up against the Trump agenda and stop trying to play nice with Republicans.

Warning: Hill Heat is now sliding back into the bad news. So first, a bird.

Senate Democrats continue to ignore Martin’s message.

Led by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who had been thrown to the ground and handcuffed by Trump’s paramilitary thugs, 18 Senate Democrats finally took a powerful stand on Tuesday against the authoritarian violence of the Trump regime by voting for the final passage of the crypto-scam GENIUS Act. Collaboration is resistance!

After the chance to stop the oligarchic bill had passed, the woke-busting New York Times published economic historian Barry Eichengreen’s now-useless warning that the act will bring “chaos and financial ruin.” On the other hand, it will fuel demand for fracking-powered data centers and help fill the campaign coffers of those corrupt enough to vote for it.

At today’s Senate energy budget hearing, Secretary and climate denier Chris Wright argued Trump’s proposed cuts to Department of Energy labs go too far, though he is ideologically committed to restricting research to fields like AI, quantum computing, and fusion. He recently illegally cancelled two dozen clean-energy demonstration projects.

Hill Heat looked briefly at the Senate version of the Big Brutal Bill yesterday. Looking more closely, it gets uglier.

New language courtesy of Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) would create a giant loophole for oil and gas drillers from the Inflation Reduction Act’s corporate alternative minimum tax, David Dayen reports. This is a major carveout for some of the biggest drillers in the country and a significant expansion of the subsidization the industry enjoys. United to End Polluter Handouts wrote a report on this in March identifying which companies stand to benefit the most.

The notoriously abused 45Q tax credit for Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage is made more generous for operations that capture CO₂ in order to stimulate oil production. The limits on tax credit transferability proposed in the House version are gone here. This is pretty sharp departure from the House version which raised revenue by cutting the tax credit.

The new biofuel tax credit has gotten worse. The likely result is going to be a baseline subsidy for corn ethanol produced without any changes to the current production processes. The Senate language follows the House by eliminating any consideration for land use effects in calculating the benefit. Where the Senate is a little laxer is on the question of imported feedstocks. Refiners importing often fraudulent used cooking oil from China will be able to claim the credit at 80%. The biogas language is also quite bad and would require biogas as a vehicle fuel to be treated as a negative emission. Cow shit is about to become massively more valuable based on an accounting gimmick.

Evan Halper has the dirty deets.

Senate Democrats, who under Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have demonstrated their commitment time and again to folding to Trump, are now pinning their hopes on the Senate parliamentarian standing in the way of the Trumpist Big Oil agenda.

Dammit, the bad news birds have arrived:

Now that Elon Musk is no longer a main character in the Trump show, the rise of technofascism has stopped! Hurrah! Oh, wait:

The chief technology officers from Palantir and Meta Platforms—Shyam Sankar and Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, respectively—are joining Kevin Weil and Bob McGrew of OpenAI as specially commissioned lieutenant colonels in the U.S. Army. Don’t worry, they got exempted from any training or the Army fitness test, so they don’t need to stock up on Phorm.

“We are having conversations about whether the military will save us from the actions of a dictator, for God’s sake.”

“The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust.”

“The key to the administration’s technofascist turn was that you could start from either direction and end up in the same place. Tech was a means to impose fascism; fascism was a means to unfettered tech.”

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
     Surface Transportation, Freight, Pipelines, and Safety Subcommittee
  Modernizing America’s Rail Network

• 10 AM: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
  The President's Budget Request for the U.S. Department of Energy for Fiscal Year 2026

Climate Action Today:

• 7 PM: Sunrise DC
  DC Watch Party for End the Oligarchy, Save Our Futures Campaign Launch

• 8:30 PM: Sunrise Movement
  End the Oligarchy, Save Our Futures Campaign Launch

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.