Lucy has taken the football home

PRESENTED BY NEWS THAT IS OLD

The big “news” is that the coal baron Sen. Joseph Anthony Manchin III (D-W.V.) chose Bastille Day 2022 as the day to publicly oppose a reconciliation deal that includes any climate or clean-energy incentives, finally forcing climate lobbyists to admit defeat, 251 days after the moment they definitively lost. I guess he got tired of pulling away the football.

In September, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) warned that Build Back Better, President Joe Biden’s signature climate-justice initiative, would die if it was unlinked from a business-as-usual, corporate-lobbyist-friendly infrastructure bill also under consideration.

She was right.

In November, the Biden White House withdrew its support for keeping the bills together and the Congressional Progressive Caucus—except for the Squad—folded to ExxonMobil lobbyists, allowing the infrastructure package to pass without Build Back Better.

In December 2021, Manchin went on Fox News and said he could not vote for Build Back Better. The Squad was not surprised. As Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) responded:

Beltway climate advocates—a tight network of White House officials, Congressional climate hawks, and advocacy groups—have wasted this year (and their impressive-for-the-climate-movement budgets) insisting that some version of Build Back Better’s climate components would pass, while Manchin cheerfully fed them tar-sands sandwiches, time and again.

As I wrote on the ides of March:

Sadly, the climate groups didn’t listen, wasting another four months by coddling Manchin in the vain hope of some kind of woefully inadequate deal.

And now the politically inevitable consequence of this fool’s errand has arrived, Marianne Levelle reports:

As have the policy consequences. The fossil-friendly Rhodium Group projects that “the nation is projected to drastically undershoot its goal of reducing emissions 50 and 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, part of its commitment to other countries as a member of the 2015 Paris Agreement.”

I get it—most of the foundations and ultra-rich Democrats that finance these organizations only are interested in certain kinds of campaigning, favoring polite deal-making over ideological confrontation. At the end of the day, too many of them prefer the current make-up of the Democratic Party coalition—with the populist green left moderated by corporatists—to a Democratic Party capable of achieving its popular mandate.¹ And so any strategy built on recognizing the obvious, that Manchin is a cowardly, bullying, fossil-funded coal baron who represents the interests of billionaires and has contempt for everyone else, was off the table.

It was true in April and is true now: the only reasonable course of action now for advocates is to stop chasing phantoms, denounce the Maserati-driving coal millionaire polluting the Democratic caucus, and fight for more climate champions.

It would be great if the Biden White House, now standing alone as the only branch of government not definitively run by the fossil-fuel industry, now took aggressive, emergency climate action, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is suggesting. Though that would require more chutzpah than Whitehouse—who dares not say a bad word about Senate Energy Committee Chair Manchin—himself has.

The climate coalition working to shut down the corporate lovefest that is the Congressional Baseball Game has the right idea. It’s time for the fun and games to end.

Now for some real news.

On Tuesday, the D.C. city council passed a suite of landmark climate legislation, with one bill banning natural-gas hookups in all new construction and requiring net-zero building codes by 2026, and another bill “committing to making the entire city carbon neutral by 2045.”

In “As alarm over plastic grows, Saudis ramp up production in the U.S,” Mark Schapiro describes the firing up of the Saudi-Exxon petroplastic plant in December 2021:

Los Angeles Times photojournalist Luis Sinco—pushed not by his editors but by his own sense of dire urgency—traveled the full 1500 miles of the Colorado River during breaks in assignments over two years to document its hastening anthropogenic decline. Presented with Sinco’s fait accompli, Times editors have put together an impressive presentation of his journey, a visual saga of the mundane, profane, and the sublime. Depending on the choices we make together, Sinco’s work will stand either as a prophetic warning or an apt epitaph for the American experiment.

Violence against women and people from gender minorities in the aftermath of extreme weather events is on the rise amid global warming.

Europe is frying in devastating heat, yet is burning more coal.

Hearings on the Hill:

• 9 AM: House Climate Crisis
  Climate Smart from Farm to Fork: Building an Affordable and Resilient Food Supply Chain

Today’s last word comes from Luis Sinco:

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. DMs are open—@climatebrad

1 Conservative funders have no such aversion to enforcing ideological purity within the Republican Party through confrontational politics. Of course, right-wing billionaires have it easy—the collapse of a pluralist secular democracy through figuratively and literally scorched-earth politics is their goal.

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