A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Senator Joe Manchin | Chip Somodevilla/Getty |
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Five hundred billion dollars in climate spending may yet survive the Capitol Hill negotiations to whittle down and pass the White House budget proposal, Axios reported Tuesday. “Everything else is getting a massive haircut, but this isn’t,” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii told Axios. “This will be, just as a matter of fact, the biggest climate bill in human history.”
So … good news? Well, it’s complicated. To say the White House is hungry for a win on climate policy is an understatement. Senator Joe Manchin’s blocking of the Clean Electricity Performance Program was a huge blow—the program was the biggest and most direct emissions-reducing policy in the package and would have incentivized the power sector to transition to renewables. Meanwhile, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, is starting in Scotland on Sunday. If President Biden shows up in Glasgow empty-handed, boy, is that going to look bad.
If the climate spending really does get approved by Congress (and that’s a big if: Manchin, apparently eager to out-Manchin himself, told the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday that he also opposes the plan’s electric vehicle infrastructure spending), that would be huge. The White House would be eager to say how huge it is. At the same time, “the biggest climate bill in human history” needs to be sized up against what it’s setting out to fix, which is arguably the biggest crisis in human history. Of course, the bill needs to be big. It needs to be, in fact, a lot bigger than it is. |
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{{#if }} Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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{{/if}} As The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff pointed out last week, current expert estimates suggest that the U.S. needs to spend something like $1 trillion every year actually to meet Paris Agreement emissions targets. (Worth noting: This $1 trillion annually is far cheaper than what it will cost to deal with climate change if we don’t meet emissions targets. One study suggested the total damages could cost $551 trillion—more money than currently exists in the world.)
As the White House and Congress continue to hash out a deal, five young climate activists are on day eight of their hunger strike in D.C.’s Lafayette Square Park, to demand that Congress pass the full slate of climate policies, as originally proposed. Meanwhile, G20 countries are scaling back their original pledge to phase out coal—the “lowest-hanging fruit” in the energy battle, as Kate wrote this week. And severe weather is battering both East and West coasts, all while the new Fox Weather streaming app doggedly ignores global warming’s contribution to these events.
Kate will be reporting from Glasgow and COP26 next week. In the meantime, check out Eleanor Cummins’s review of Fox Weather’s debut day. As Eleanor points out, weather coverage could actually have the potential to change minds about climate and climate policy. If the U.S. is to generate the political will to pass unprecedented amounts of climate spending regularly, it might be time to demand more from weather services. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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(Or 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit.) That’s the new estimated level of global warming by the end of the century if all of the nationally determined contributions are “fully implemented” (which is hardly guaranteed), according to a new U.N. Environment Programme Emissions Gap Report. If you factor in net-zero pledges, as well (which mostly aren’t attached to policies to achieve their goals), that number falls to 2.2 degrees Celsius.
All of these estimates fall way above the goal outlined in the Paris Agreement of limiting global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius—ideally 1.5 degrees. |
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Dutch pension fund ABP, one of the largest in the world, announced Tuesday its intention to divest $17.5 billion from fossil fuels by 2023. |
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Greenhouse gas concentrations hit a new record high in 2020, according to a report released Monday. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Consider this your seasonal reminder that leaf blowers really do blow: |
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Nearly everything about how Americans “care” for their lawns is deadly. Pesticides prevent wildflower seeds from germinating and poison the insects that feed songbirds and other wildlife. Lawn mower blades, set too low, chop into bits the snakes and turtles and baby rabbits that can’t get away in time. Mulch, piled too deep, smothers ground-nesting bees, and often the very plants that mulch is supposed to protect, as well. But the gasoline-powered leaf blower exists in a category of environmental hell all its own, spewing pollutants—carbon monoxide, smog-forming nitrous oxides, carcinogenic hydrocarbons—into the atmosphere at a literally breathtaking rate.… A 2011 study by Edmunds found that a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower spewed out more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck. Jason Kavanagh, the engineering editor at Edmunds at the time, noted that “hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor.” |
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