At 8 pm tonight, the Green New Deal Network is holding a mass call on what’s next for climate with Kaniela Ing, Bill McKibben, Aru Shiney-Ajay, Ali Zaidi, Margie Alt, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), and many more elected officials and movement leaders.  RSVP now.

Donald Trump is officially the President of the United States again, having taken the oath of office without placing his hand on the Bible. Billionaire neo-fascist Elon Musk celebrated Trump’s return to power with the “awkward gesture” of a Sieg Heil salute; one of Trump’s first acts was to pardon the violent insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020, to the cheers of a throng of Proud Boys on the streets of Washington D.C. The other tech titans—Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, Sam Altman—stood in allegiance to the new Golden Age of America.

Trump is beginning to implement the Project 2025 agenda through a flurry of executive orders. On climate alone, Trump issued orders to declare a national energy emergency to suspend environmental rules from air pollution to endangered species, stop leasing for offshore wind, withdraw from the Paris Agreement, open the Alaska wilderness to more oil and gas drilling, restart LNG export terminal permits, reverse the Biden administration’s limits on offshore drilling and on automotive pollution, and reverse Biden administration’s energy-efficiency regulations for appliances, environmental justice programs, and all other climate-related initiatives. Many of these extreme orders will be challenged in the courts.

The toxic Los Angeles fires continue to smolder. Historic heat waves are broiling Australia, Mexico, west Africa and the Caribbean—really, pretty much the entire globe except the lower 48.

At 10 am on Wednesday, the Brookings Institution hosts a timely conversation on domestic climate migration at its D.C. headquarters and online, with ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten, Georgetown Law professor Shana Tabak, and climate resiliency expert Beth Gibbons, moderated by Brookings senior fellow Vanessa Williamson.

DNC Election Update

Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor chair Ken Martin has announced a commanding lead in the race to be Democratic National Committee chair, with 200 committed supporters in the approximately 450-member body. New York Times reporter Reid Epstein relates how Martin built support not through celebrity or wealth or bullying, but through organizing on behalf of his fellow state parties:

Wisconsin Democratic chair Ben Wikler’s campaign communications director Brianna Johnson tells the New York Times that Wikler has about 170 supporters.

Late-entry candidate Faiz Shakir makes his case with the American Prospect’s David Dayen and Mother Jones’s Abby Vesoulis that the DNC should do more to engage supporters in policy fights like strikes.

Tonight and tomorrow, the Young Democrats of America, Voters of Tomorrow, and the DNC Youth Council are holding forums with vice chair candidates. Tonight’s forum at 7 pm features candidates from the Eastern and Southern regions, including Gen-Z anti-gun and electoral politics activist David Hogg from Florida. Tomorrow’s forum at 8 pm features candidates from the Western and Midwestern regions, including climate activist Michelle Regalado Deatrick from Michigan and Washington chair Shasti Conrad.

Veteran Democratic digital fundraising and media consultant Tim Lim has made a late entry as a candidate for National Finance Chair. The incumbent, bundler Chris Korge, had been running unopposed after he garnered the backing of vice finance chair Chris Lowe, a clean-energy financier. Lim, a regular at Netroots Nation, is the founder of Blue Digital Exchange, a trade association for progressive digital professionals. He wants to significantly change the DNC’s current system of fundraising, and move the grassroots and bundling programs under one system.

On The Hill

Democrats in Congress—in particular the members of the corporate-aligned New Democrat Coalition—are finding as many ways as possible to fall in line with the MAGA agenda.

Tuesday, January 21

At 4 pm, the House Rules Committee sets up the floor debate for H.R. 471, Rep. Bruce Westerman’s (R-Ark.) and Scott Peters’s (D-Calif.) Orwellian “Fix Our Forests” Act. The “fix” is cutting the forests down; the bill removes environmental safeguards on behalf of the timber industry. In a particularly galling move, Peters is justifying his support for this timber-industry bill, which does nothing to reduce the risks of wildfires, by citing the deadly wildfires in Los Angeles.

As the John Muir Project explains:

Unfortunately, H.R. 471 is backed by a bloc of anti-environmental Democrats led by Peters, including Californians Ami Bera, Luis Correa, Jim Costa, John Garamendi, Adam Gray, Josh Harder, Kevin Mullin, Jimmy Panetta, Mike Thompson, and George Whitesides. Peters, Bera, Correa, Costa, Gray, Harder, Mullin, Panetta and Whitesides are corporate-aligned New Democrats; Thompson is a Blue Dog; Garamendi is a member of the Progressive Caucus. Kevin Mullin is a member of the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Project 2025 calls for the enactment of the policies in this bill. Garamendi, Mullin, and Panetta are members of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition.

The Rules Committee is also pushing for a final floor vote on the demagogic anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act (S. 5), which passed the Senate with 12 Democratic votes, including freshman Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), the Harvard-educated “working class Latino” who championed the bill last year as a member of the House. The initial House version received 48 Democratic votes, 38 of which are New Democrats.