Joe Manchin Squanders an Opportunity and Ushers In Despair
“There isn’t a 12-year deadline or a one-year deadline,” Trembath told me this week. He argued that advocacy that leans on such deadlines is bound to provoke nihilism, and that a better way to talk about climate change is as a long-term issue that we will have to keep dealing with for as long as we live.
!!d)); })(); ]]> Opinion Conversation The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?
Trembath also pointed out that some of the most effective American environmental regulations were passed “quietly” — that is, they were small, boring-seeming rule changes and tax credits hidden in bigger legislation. Rather than pushing for a sweeping climate bill, perhaps Democrats can now aim for passing many such small measures in future legislation.
There is also executive action. On Wednesday, Biden announced several steps that his administration would be taking on the climate — for instance, he’ll direct the Interior Department to allow the installation of offshore wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico.
I don’t want to dismiss these efforts out of hand. “With climate change, everything we do matters,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies environmental politics. “Every ton of carbon pollution we can cut is a good thing.”
But even though Stokes is pushing for strong executive action, she was careful to note the limits of this strategy. By pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable fuels and infrastructure, Biden’s legislative plan would have accelerated the creation of a clean-energy economy in the United States. Regulation, on the other hand, might curb the worst excesses of the fossil fuel economy, but it would do little to build something new. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves,” Stokes said. “It’s not as powerful as investments in Congress.”
Stokes was also skeptical that “quiet” climate policy will continue to yield benefits. “The way that we have gotten climate policies in the past is absolutely through quiet politics,” she told me. “You stick something in a bill, people don’t really pay attention to it, and boom, years later it ends up being really important and it builds a whole industry.” But the fossil fuel industry has become wise to this game. “That ship has sailed,” Stokes said. “The fossil fuel industry is not stupid. They know what we’re up to. And they will fight every little thing we try to put anywhere.”
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