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Life’s most persistent and urgent question

Build or burn, Clean Energy Corps, and ugly men

Author

Brad Johnson
January 14, 2022

PRESENTED BY RED STRIPE

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“Build or Burn!” Hundreds of ecosocialists rallied with New York assemblymembers Marcela Mitaynes and Robert Carroll in a sit-in on Third Avenue to demand Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) pass the Build Public Renewables Act and put the state’s power grid under public control and move to 100% renewable energy. Several of the candidates on the DSA For The Many slate—Illapa Sairitupac, David Alexis, Sarahana Shrestha, and Samy Nemir-Olivares—joined in. Weirdly, this peaceful protest, ending in multiple arrests, was not covered by The New York Times or so far as I can tell any other NYC press (a UPI fotog took some good shots).

Climate activists also rallied outside of the Colorado state capitol as fiddler-while-Boulder-burns Gov. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) gave his State of the State address.

“Black and brown people are being pushed to live near oil and gas in this state,” Shaina Oliver, a Mom’s Clean Air Force organizer, told reporter Sam Brasch, “and we have a governor who wants to reduce taxes.”

In his address, Polis talked about “meeting the climate crisis head-on” but managed not to mention fracking or any other fossil fuels once.

REPORTING FOR DUTY: The The U.S. Department of Energy received $62 billion through the recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and is establishing the Clean Energy Corps to hire over 1000 new staff with the “mission of supercharging the clean energy revolution.” Now they need people to flood their site with résumés!

A Message From Our Sponsor:

Hooray beer!

Congratulations to Celina Scott-Buechler, now Data for Progress’s Senior Resident Fellow for Climate Innovation. She wrote a report for them on a progressive vision for carbon capture and removal last year. It’s good!

From the Department of We’ll Be Hearing About This Later:

At Lael Brainard’s confirmation hearing to be Fed vice chair yesterday, ugly man Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) found his gravestone quote:1

“There is no reason to believe that global warming poses a systemic risk to the financial system.”

Unlike Toomey, Brainard has read her Marty Weitzman:

“To be honest, I think it is very important for us just to understand the potential implications of tail risks. Tail risks are risks with very very low probability of happening, but have extreme damage. And of course, I wouldn't have expected us to need to study pandemics five years ago either. And yet a lot of our policymaking over the last two years has been under the cloud of a set of economic conditions and financial risks associated with a natural event.”

Point to her!2

Among other things, it’s Friday. I’m off to go hunting and bake a math cake. Thank you for the subscribes, likes, and shares; you’ll definitely hear from me again on Tuesday, though there may be a special Climate Politics Almanac entry coming this weekend on Sarah Bloom Raskin. —@climatebrad

1.To paraphrase: “Don’t look up.”

2. Although, if pandemics really weren’t on her radar and if she really thinks climate catastrophes have a very very low probability of happening, I recommend Brainard read some Andreas Malm as well.

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