A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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A large American flag is displayed on the side of an oil refinery at night. Mickey Strider/Loop Images/Universal Images Group/Getty |
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The Inflation Reduction Act is done: On Tuesday, President Biden signed into law the biggest raft of climate spending initiatives the United States Congress has ever passed. This newsletter has previously discussed some of the tradeoffs in this deal, like tying renewable energy provisions to further drilling auctions, or expediting the environmental review process for some pipeline projects. Apocalypse Soon will be publishing more in the coming weeks and months about how some of the climate spending is implemented, too. But with the legislation quite literally signed, sealed, and delivered, perhaps the most interesting question for the climate concerned is: What’s next? Given that more climate policy will need to be passed in order to avert the worst of the crisis, how should climate activists, politicians, and concerned citizens proceed from here? Aaron Regunberg offered one answer in an essay published Tuesday. “If this process has proven anything,” he wrote, referring to the long, tortuous path from the unveiling of the Build Back Better agenda to the passage of the IRA, “it’s that we’re never going to get the climate bill we need—one that actually tackles climate pollution—until we break fossil fuel capital’s stranglehold on our political system.” Aaron sees breaking fossil fuel capital’s “stranglehold” as coming down to a few key steps, including “naming and shaming” fossil fuel “enablers” and suing the fossil fuel industry at every turn for its role in climate change and climate denial. Also, he wrote, “we need to invest in the frontline communities that are taking on the fossil fuel industry in real time,” and carry out wide-scale divestment campaigns that target and stigmatize “every bank, pension fund, state treasurer, and insurer that directly or indirectly supports fossil fuel expansion.” When climate change comes up in conversation, he says: |
We all need to be naming the fossil fuel industry as the cause of this crisis in every single statement we make about climate change. From Big Green orgs on down, we have to get used to repeating that the disasters we’re experiencing are their fault, that they are the reason we’re in this nightmare. We need to name hurricanes and tropical storms and heat waves after fossil fuel majors, not just in sassy Twitter posts, but as a sustained communications strategy. We need to hang the suffering of this climate crisis around the fossil fuel industry’s neck in our every word and deed. |
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Apocalypse Soon will be publishing more commentary soon on what comes next for climate policy. In the meantime, read Aaron’s full piece here. — Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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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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Remember when the Biden administration paused new oil and gas drilling in federal lands and waters, and then a judge sided with the states, saying halting leasing requires congressional approval? (If not, read the story here.) Now, a federal appellate judge has reversed that lower court’s ruling and upheld the pause. Of course, the IRA included provisions for new drilling as a compromise to get Joe Manchin to support the renewable energy investments, so it’s unclear how much this court decision will actually change drilling policy going forward. |
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Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming missed a deadline this week to agree on future water usage cuts to address the ongoing water shortage along the Colorado River reservoir system. |
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That’s the wildly high heat index that a new report predicts 107 million people in the U.S. will be dealing with in the summers by 2053. Read the Earther writeup here. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
The Inflation Recovery Act, with its multitude of climate provisions, passed without a single Republican vote. But once upon a time back in the early aughts, climate change policy actually had several Republican champions. Elizabeth Kolbert looks at what changed, and comes up with one possible answer: |
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How did caring about a drowned or desiccated future come to be a partisan issue? Perhaps the simplest answer is money. A report put out two years ago by the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis noted, “In the 2000s, several bipartisan climate bills were circulating in the Senate.” Then, in 2010, the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United decision, ruled that corporations and wealthy donors could, effectively, pour unlimited amounts of cash into electioneering. Fossil fuel companies quickly figured out how to funnel money through front groups, which used it to reward the industry’s friends and to punish its enemies. After Citizens United, according to the report, “bipartisan activity on comprehensive climate legislation collapsed.” |
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