A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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President Biden’s in Pittsburgh today to unveil his $2 trillion infrastructure plan. In addition to repairing roads and bridges, updating the electrical grid, investing in broadband, and eliminating lead pipes, the plan would also fund $35 billion in climate change-related research and development, $50 billion in infrastructure resilience to help adapt to severe weather, “expanded” tax credits for clean energy generation, the use of federal procurement to “jumpstart clean energy manufacturing,” and an unspecified amount for the “western drought crisis” and Tribal Water Settlements (an undercovered issue The New Republic’s Nick Martin wrote about here and here). It also, tantalizingly, promises to “eliminate all” subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, which Kate Aronoff will have a piece on later today. There are a few broader things we already know about this package in addition to the dizzying list of individual spending bullet points that go beyond those listed above. First, it’s going to be funded in part by corporate tax hikes. The politics here are complicated: Corporate tax hikes are certainly a more progressive option than, say, cutting social spending. But as Kate observed in a piece this morning, prompted by a Washington Post endorsement of a carbon tax, all tax hikes can become a sticking point in getting bills passed, and “debating what sorts of tax policy are ideal and politically feasible … begs the question of whether Democrats actually need to raise taxes to fund a climate bill in the first place. The GOP rarely bothers to specify how it wants to pay for new fighter jets or tax cuts for the wealthy.” Kate succinctly put it: “The U.S. dollar is not a scarce resource. The time we have left to take on the climate crisis very much is.” |
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Another thing we already know–climate activists and progressives within the Democratic Party think Biden’s plan is too small, particularly the portion dedicated to climate spending. They’ll soon be highlighting their own counterproposals, which Kate wrote about on Monday. Expect to see a lot more on these topics in the coming weeks. On a different note, Nick Martin’s piece last Thursday on a pro-fracking marketer who’s managed to secure himself a weekly column in multiple local newspapers in shale country is wild, and I’d really encourage you to give it a look if you missed it. The columnist suggests, among other things, that because his golden retriever played on a fracking well and still lived a long and happy life, fracking doesn’t cause health problems.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor
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We may soon have an answer to a vital question about Covid-19 vaccines: whether, in addition to preventing people from getting really sick, they can also prevent people from giving Covid-19 to others. A new study is set to track infections in over 12,000 vaccinated college students. |
The Massachusetts Department of Health released a report last week that “strongly suggested” a link between water contamination and childhood cancer. |
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Deforestation rates are 50 percent lower in territories controlled by indigenous groups in Latin America as compared to territories not controlled by indigenous groups, according to a new UN report. |
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| Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
| Block by block, he aims to fight injustice and save the planet |
| Donnell Baird grew up in a Brooklyn building with a bad heating system, leaving his family cold but with few options. He’s grown up to found a business that replaces old and dysfunctional heating systems in low-income neighborhoods with newer, energy-efficient options and solar panels. The Washington Post ran a profile on him last week and it’s a remarkable story. The idea is to fight inequality and climate change at the same time, with investors “paid back out of a portion of the utility bill savings.” Check it out. |
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