Ken and Ben

PRESENTED BY THE NEEDLE MOVERS

The race for Democratic National Committee chair, who will be elected by the DNC membership on February 1st, has gotten serious. The DNC candidates participated in private forums with members of Congress yesterday, and have their only in-person forum before the election meeting this afternoon in Detroit, moderated by the American Petroleum Institute-backed Politico. You can watch it live:

The top candidates are Minnesota state chair Ken Martin and Wisconsin state chair Ben Wikler.

Ben has taken off the gloves, attacking Ken on Morning Joe as a failure in his role as the president of the Democratic state parties.

“He's gotten the title,” Wikler said, “but he hasn't taken responsibility and state parties haven't gotten the resources they deserve."

This is a strange argument, given that Martin’s base of support within DNC membership is state party chairs and vice chairs thankful for his successful negotiations with the national DNC to greatly increase support for state parties. When Martin became the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, the DNC was deeply in debt and was giving state parties only $2500 a month. He helped restore national fundraising and negotiated state-party funding to $12,500 a month for blue/purple states and $17,500 for red states.

Martin, who straightforwardly backed universal healthcare when asked about the issue during a forum organized by progressive DNC members, graciously pushed back on Wikler’s attack when pressed by MeidasTouch content creator Adam Mockler at a content-creator forum, praising all of the candidates for DNC chair.

Outsider candidate James Skoufis, a N.Y. state representative in a pro-Trump district, was running against the consultant-class dominance of the Democratic Party. He has dropped out and endorsed Ken Martin:

Meanwhile, Faiz Shakir has made a last-minute entry into the race. Faiz, who ran ThinkProgress at the Center for American Progress (I worked for him then), worked for Harry Reid in the Senate, was ACLU political director, and was Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign director, now runs the progressive news and activism outlet More Perfect Union. Faiz is unhappy with the current contenders to lead the DNC:

Streetsblog’s Kea Wilson reports that anti-gay Fox Business host and climate denier Sean Duffy got softballs at his confirmation hearing for Transportation Secretary yesterday.

Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick for Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, is a climate-denier-for-hire; after leaving Congress he was paid tens of thousands of dollars to write op-eds criticizing climate policies and responsible investment practices, even comparing ESG to the FTX fraud.

At today’s confirmation hearing, he showed off his mastery of bureaucratic doublespeak. Here, for example, is how he responded to a question about protecting Americans from PFAS and other forever chemicals:

As we’ve discussed many times at Hill Heat, one of the greatest threats to climate stability is the fracking to AI pipeline, in which Big Tech data centers’ insane energy demands are fulfilled by fracked gas. In today’s confirmation hearing this morning, Gov. Doug Burgum (R-N.D.) has an even grander goal—to use weirdo technoprophet Sam Altman’s promise of a gleaming AI god to bring back dirty coal (or, as Burgum prefers, “clean coal” and “baseload”) and kill renewables:

State Fair dumped fire insurance for the homeowners of Pacific Palisades just months before their houses burned to the ground.

A polar vortex is coming to freeze Trump’s inauguration.

The global economy could collapse between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonize and restore nature, reports the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in their new report, Planetary Solvency.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 10 AM: Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
  Nomination of Lee M. Zeldin to be Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency

• 10 AM: Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
  The expected nomination of Doug Burgum, to be Secretary of the Interior

Climate Action Today:

• 1:30 PM: Democratic National Committee
  Politico
  Midwest DNC Officer Forum

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.