A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Over the past week, Congress’s chaos-as-usual approach to the budget bill and debt ceiling negotiations has intensified to hurricane-force proportions. There’s a lot at stake, including unprecedented funds to help keep the planet habitable. I’d like to highlight a few key pieces by TNR staff writer Kate Aronoff that are crucial to understanding what’s going on, from a climate perspective. (We’ll return to our discussion about dietary ethics, as promised in last week’s newsletter, next time.)
In the past few days, President Biden and his congressional allies have started to back away from their $3.5 trillion reconciliation budget, which contains record amounts of climate spending (albeit not enough to halt the crisis). The president is now saying the plan may have to be scaled back to win moderate votes in Congress, insiders told The New York Times. Exactly which programs may be reduced or cut remains to be seen.
This latest twist comes largely in response to two conservative Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have said the budget bill is too expensive. Manchin, as Kate recently wrote, “made half a million dollars last year off his son’s coal company, meaning that coal paid him roughly three times the $174,000 salary he made last year as a public servant.” He has also “earned more than $4.5 million from Enersystems Inc. and Farmington Resources Inc., two coal industry companies he founded in the 1980s,” and “his top donor so far for the 2022 cycle is Tellurian Inc., a gas company.” |
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There’s a material consideration in play for Sinema, too, Kate noted last Thursday: |
Sinema has raked in $932,065 from the industry groups leading the charge against the reconciliation bill, primarily because of its tax provisions. Her main sticking point in negotiations has been making sure any deal doesn’t include tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy. |
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For those concerned about the unfolding disaster currently playing out in Earth’s ecosystems and weather patterns, this kind of lobbying flex on one of the first bills to take climate change remotely seriously is worrisome. And if this bill fails, it could discourage repeat attempts: When the cap-and-trade bill failed in 2010, thanks in part to, you guessed it, corporate lobbying, it pretty much killed enthusiasm for serious climate legislation for the rest of the Obama administration.
In the final piece I’d like to highlight, Kate laid out the case for ditching the word “moderate”—one the media uses ad nauseam to describe lawmakers like Sinema and Manchin—in our political conversations. In a world already hurtling irreversibly toward some degree of catastrophic warming, all ways forward are to some degree radical. The question, Kate argues, is whether politicians pursue radical levels of death and destruction or radical levels of emissions reduction. Those opposing big spending to curb emissions cannot be termed “moderate” simply because they would have been considered so in 1950. The full article is well worth your time. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s the amount of money fossil fuel companies get through subsidies, according to new analysis from the International Monetary Fund. |
480 Otis has won Katmai National Park and Preserve’s annual Fat Bear Week contest. He gained the edge thanks to “mellow personality,” patience with other bears, and perseverance, according to his supporters. (Not so good news: Coastal brown bears and the food they depend on are threatened by rising temperatures.) |
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From 2009 to 2019, the world lost 14 percent of its coral reefs, according to a newly released international report. |
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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. |
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—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
The fossil fuel industry is spending scads of money trying to convince people that the budget bill will raise everyone’s taxes and tank the economy. These companies and interest groups are targeting lawmakers as well as their constituents, through Facebook ads attacking the bill and praising Senator Joe Manchin (who also receives a lot of money from fossil fuels) for waffling on it: |
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In the first six months of this year, [the American Petroleum Institute] spent more than $2 million directly lobbying Congress on issues including taxes, according to federal disclosures. API, whose members include Exxon Mobil, Chevron and BP, has also run a seven-figure TV campaign opposing various measures in the reconciliation package.
And on Facebook, API has spent almost half a million dollars to run hundreds of ads attacking the bill since Aug. 11, when the Senate passed a budget resolution, according to advertising data analyzed by InfluenceMap, a London-based think tank that tracks corporate influence on policymaking. Those ads, which include at least 286 that targeted individual members of Congress, have been viewed at least 21 million times.
API’s average daily spending on Facebook ads attacking the budget has surpassed the group’s previous peak spending, set after then presidential candidate Joe Biden announced his climate plans in July 2020, the data show. (Detailed Facebook data on political ad spending is available only since May 2018.) |
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