A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

“Bipartisanship is dead, and centrists killed it. Every single time Democrats try to meet Republicans in the middle, they spring further to the right,” Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote this week. As the American right has radicalized, she argued, “liberals have sat on the sidelines either willfully ignoring their new reality or, worse, pointing and laughing. Over and over, they fall victim to bad-faith arguments, mistaking pure shamelessness for stupidity. And that leaves Democrats asking themselves two constant but conflicting questions: How are they—i.e., the right-wingers—so stupid, and how do they keep beating us?”

Mary was writing about Democratic fecklessness on climate change. But barely 30 minutes after the wording on her piece was finalized—before it was even published—news broke that made her argument look prescient for an entirely different reason: Politico reported that the Supreme Court, based on a draft opinion by Justice Alito, was likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, making abortion illegal in many U.S. states whose “trigger laws” could come into effect.

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Close watchers of the American legal system and of abortion politics have been predicting this for years. Many advocates for abortion rights are now incandescent with rage that Democrats and pro-choice Republicans—like Susan Collins, for instance, who claimed to have voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court only after he convinced her he would not vote to overturn Roe—have done so little to guard against this eventuality. President Joe Biden has famously not said the word “abortion” out loud in public since his inauguration. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer didn’t use the word even in their response to Alito’s draft opinion. “That communicative failure,” Rebecca Traister wrote in New York magazine today, “points to one of the ways that Democratic leadership has been repeatedly outstripped by their opposition.” Not only has the right been better at the long game, she argued, but “what the right has also been far better at is telling stories”—the kind of stories that persuade and galvanize people.

There are a number of ways in which the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade mirrors and magnifies the climate crisis. First, it intensifies the asymmetric generational warfare represented by the country’s current politics: At a time when children and teens are already begging politicians to do something about global warming—when 75 percent of young people in an international survey said they found the future “frightening,” and more young adults than ever are saying they would hesitate to bring a child into a potentially unsafe and even violent climate crisis, and U.N. figures suggest 80 percent of people displaced by climate change are women—it’s almost a little too on the nose for a judicial body with the average age of 65 to pave the way for criminalizing one of the most fundamental expressions of bodily autonomy for those born with uteruses.

Abortion and climate politics are also similar in that polls show a majority of voters want what the powerful minority is intent on blocking: 65 percent of Americans think the federal government is doing too little to fight climate change, and 58 percent think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

While durable change would indeed require congressional action, there’s quite a bit that could still be done on both of these issues without the participation of Republicans or perennially obstructionist Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. For Self magazine, reporter Christine Grimaldi recently outlined a number of steps the Biden administration could take to expand abortion access, despite statewide bans. These might include suing states whose restrictions conflict with federal regulations for abortion pills, increasing “telemedicine access in digital deserts,” and even allowing abortion providers onto federal land that might be exempt from some state laws.

Similarly, TNR’s Kate Aronoff recently laid out five different ways the Biden administration could fight climate change without Congress: directing FEMA to build renewable energy installations that can function when fossil fuel grids fail in bad weather, reinstating the crude oil export ban, restricting new development in the Permian Basin via an emergency declaration, and canceling pipelines. That’s to say nothing of the vast powers granted to Biden via the Defense Production Act, which could be deployed to mass-produce items crucial to both renewable energy and energy efficiency—or the influence Biden could exert in multilateral finance institutions to help developing countries face the climate crisis.

In the coming days and weeks, many people, both in and out of power, will talk about their fear of the future, their frustration at the present, and their anger at past inaction. One thing that’s important to remember, however, is that politicians still have quite a few options.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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