This diary isn’t just about climate change, but it starts with this twitter thread from David Roberts comparing Inslee and Biden on climate.
1. All right, I haven’t communicated this clearly, so lemme do a thread. Biden (along with Bennett, Beto, Gillibrand, & a few others) has issued a climate proposal that targets net-zero US emissions by 2050. Inslee is targeting 2045 or sooner.
— David Roberts (@drvox) August 1, 2019
The whole thread is here, and Roberts goes into more depth in this story for VOX.
Roberts says the big difference between Inslee and Biden is not their target date for net zero (although, obv, Inslee’s 2045 is better than Biden’s 2050). Meeting either deadline would require the same kinds of radical, likely unpopular, measures required to avoid even more radical consequences.
Roberts on Vox:
For the US, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 [Biden’s target] would be an absolutely titanic feat, one of the greatest things human beings have ever done together (that’s to say nothing of the whole world doing it).
For any realistic chance of pulling it off, the US would have to start immediately on a crash course of phasing out fossil fuels, massively expanding clean energy, and rapidly developing and scaling up carbon-negative technologies. It would require an effort on the scale of war mobilization. Policy radicalism is baked into — implied by — the target. (Original emphasis)
The difference, Roberts notes, is that Inslee spells out what those radical measures must be, while Biden does not. Inslee gets it; Biden’s understanding “is not in evidence” (tweet thread).
Moderation in the pursuit of survival is no virtue
(or is it?)
So (and this is my take, not Roberts’s) some and maybe all of these things are true:
- Biden is not tied to particular climate-change positions that are decidedly not moderate and may be unpopular. Which is arguably smart, politically
- But if elected he would have nothing like a mandate to immediately start doing those radical things, which are absolutely necessary.
- And maybe he doesn’t mean to start right away. Maybe he isn’t serious at all. Maybe it’s just political boilerplate. In which case, we are literally cooked.
- Inslee’s take on what’s needed is correct, but it could render him unelectable.
- On the other hand, Inslee winning on climate change would make achieving that goal likely.
In other words, if a Biden victory cannot deliver the radical changes that are needed, then Inslee is the better bet even if his chances of winning are not as good.
And also racism, equality, and the rule of law
Once I absorbed this, I saw it as a template for the party and the election as a whole.
The problems we face, such as white supremacist terrorism, racism, and economic inequality and predator capitalism, today require measures that are as radical, in their own way, as the environmental measures needed to avoid radical environmental disruption.
Again, some candidates get it, while others apparently don’t.
Who is willing to campaign on those measures? No one wants to nominate an unelectable candidate, but a hobbled or clueless moderate would just be the wrong person for the job today. (I would characterize that job as “pulling us back form the brink of fascism,” and I do not use the F word lightly.)
I am torn between the argument that on these issues those vying for the nomination should keep their powder dry (and mouths shut) for the general election, versus the observation that only by running hard on the important issues can we hope to save our country.
What does the Blue Mass Mind think?
You’ve articulated my anxieties about nominating Biden in a manner better than I have. I like Joe, I really do. I’ve also grown tired of digging up old stuff he’s said or done to embarrass him. It was sort of fair when Harris did it, but it’s jumped the shark.
My anxiety is that we just lost an election (in the Electoral College) running on the idea that America was already great and we didn’t need to do anything drastic to change it. Veep was not wrong that continuity and change are competing goals. It didn’t work.
I also share the anxieties of Fred and Terry about nominating a candidate to the left of the median electorate, but I also think the median of the electorate is hungry for radical change on wages, on climate, on trade, and possibly on health care. We need to do something for the America left behind by far too many previous presidents.
I agree with the moderates on some stuff. Now is not the time to redefine gender or decriminalize unlawful entry to America. It is the time to do stuff Americans want that Trump has failed to deliver on. Someone running on real and relevant change and not a return to the past is the best person to beat Trump.
I’m disappointed that Inslee is not at least in the top tier. He’s done maybe the best job I’ve seen both connecting climate to other issues, thus insulating him from the charge of being a single-issue candidate, and also projecting a can-do, rise to meet the challenge attitude as opposed to all gloom and doom.
The thing that surprises me about climate change as an issue is how is it we are not already further along in ameliorating it. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts I’m pretty sure both predate me, and discussions of global warming go back at least to the 1980s so pretty much my entire memory if not quite my entire lifetime. Seems to me there is some very low-hanging fruit in terms of solutions which would not actually require huge sacrifices.
Just as a meta comment – this is the 5th diary posted today on BMG. I wish that would be the norm again!
I really appreciate this thread, because I think it is emphasizing something that’s REALLY important — the difference between leading and lagging. Representative democracy, by design, lags the electorate. Changes in the electorate drive changes in its politicians — not vice-versa.
One of the more egregious harms that the GOP has already done is to politicize climate change and science, so that tens of millions of Americans are both willfully ignorant and also completely unable to face the difficult facts and challenges that confront us.
This is a wound to our representative democracy that has already happened and that may prove mortal. Humanity was already far along the catastrophe curve when Al Gore first began to publicize climate change in 2006. Even if America had accepted the science and embraced the challenge, we still would have faced a dauntingly difficult task. America, led by the GOP, chose to instead willfully deny the reality. The consequence is terrifying. We have not only not made progress, we have lost ground. Worse, the electorate now distrusts scientists and science more than it did in 2006 and FAR more than it did in the 1960s and 1970s.
It is already too late to avoid many of the devastating consequences that climatologists warned us about. As we get more and better data, we learn that most of the errors that we’ve made in the analysis and predictions of climatologists are that predictions were too optimistic. The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting much faster than predicted. The Arctic region is warming far more rapidly than expected, and the consequences of those changes are more immediate than anticipated. Our scientists made VERY conservative predictions in order to avoid being seen as “extremist” — the result is that the reality is MUCH worse than predicted.
Worse than all this, the GOP has politicized science itself. A few short decades ago, only a handful of religious extremists embraced variants of anti-Darwinian dogma (“Young Earth”, “Creationism”, etc). It is no accident that Climate Change deniers — and the GOP — embrace both.
This is all to say that politics is a lagging, rather than leading, indicator. Radical change happens in the electorate first, and then in the political process that governs the electorate.
That means that NO candidate can successfully lead a climate change fight, because a majority of the electorate doesn’t accept the science. If a majority of the Massachusetts electorate actually understood the reality of climate change, Massachusetts would not be investing ENORMOUS amounts of money in the Seaport district — which will almost certainly be under water during the expected lifetime of the buildings and infrastructure we are putting there.
It appears to me that our challenge today is to identify the impacts of climate change that are already inevitable and begin planning for them while revolutionizing our cultural attitudes towards science and scientists.
I am old enough to remember when JFK launched the Apollo program. I was in grade school, and the emphasis on STEM that resulted from the Apollo program transformed my education and me.
I think we need a similar embrace of science and scientific thought today. I don’t think the labels we choose matter too much (“Critical thinking”, for example, is fine with me). I do think we need reset our electorate so that most voters understand (in no particular order):
– What peer review is and why it works
– How bias is identified and minimized in science
– The basics of climate science
– Enough abstract science to actually understand the basics climate science.
Too many voters do not understand basic logic, basic physics, and how they relate to climate change. Too few journalists are able to understand why the absurd claims of climate deniers are so spurious (“It isn’t possible for a trace gas to drive macroscopic temperature changes”). Because those journalists don’t understand it, they don’t write about it.
I don’t think very much of this can happen in the next year — the changes I’m talking about take decades or even generations to happen.
But if the GOP can successfully lead in the wrong direction why can’t we lead in the right one?
Climate is becoming a politicalliability for the GOP. Along with racism, it is making them totally toxic with under-40 voters. Even among younger conservatives. The time for action is now and making this an issue in the general is a winner.
We absolutely CAN follow the GOP model — they began their drive to transform our culture when Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide in the 1964 election.
It was 1980 — a full sixteen years later — before the right wing of the GOP won a Presidential election. They have dominated American culture since then.
My point is that we started, in 2016, where the GOP started in 1964. We at least did not lose in a landslide. Nevertheless, the it takes decades and generations to change direction on the issues identified in the thread-starter:
– Climate change
– White supremacist terrorism, racism
– Economic inequality
– Predator capitalism
I would add the following to the above list:
– Misogyny/sexism
But Tom, it’s a moving target.
The change that is inevitable today was not inevitable 20 or even 10 years ago. The change that will be baked in in 10 or 20 years will depend on the choices we make today.
We’re spending billions today on climate resiliency that could have been avoided by millions yesterday. And the billions are not enough.
We missed the painless way to do this–the ounce of prevention–but the principle still applies. Today pounds of prevention will surely be painful, but they would forestall tons of damage–damage possibly beyond the ability of human civilization to remediate.
Understood and agreed.
My point remains that I think we must focus more on education, cultural change, and young people and less on debates, party platforms, and candidates. I think the political aspects of what needs to happen take place at the hyper-local level — building codes, zoning regulations, school committees, and so on.
I think there is very little we can do to forestall the tons of damage that you describe — we already have lung cancer, it has already metastasized, and we are already coughing up bloody tissue.
It is FAR too late to quit smoking — the damage is done.
It’s never too late to quit.
Understood, and agreed.
The point, though, is that if you already HAVE lung cancer, then quitting is not going to prevent it.
This is perhaps where the analogy breaks down. If we continue on the path that the GOP is taking us, things really will go from bad to VERY MUCH worse.
I think that we need to put to bed the happy-thinking myth (or lie) that we can somehow “innovate” our way out of this without massive pain and massive expense. We won’t.
The problem I have with political solutions is that they inevitably lead to these pie-in-sky assertions that we’ll create millions of new jobs and bring prosperity back to the heartlands and everything will be glorious as we move into a net-zero America. It just isn’t going to happen like that.
Americans are going to die from thirst, disease, and starvation. Enormous losses are going hit America as our coastal cities are swallowed by rising oceans. The tunnels under downtown Boston used every day by the Boston subway system were built more than a century ago. Those tunnels, and any new tunnels we build today, will be part of Boston Harbor in 2119 (a century from now).
Even our Democratic leaders are unwilling to admit the reality of where we are today.
“only by running hard on the important issues can we hope to save our country.’ That’s where I’m at. The only thing that gives us a chance at survival is strong leadership. If you take too long to “bring people along”, that’s a. wasting time, and b. a sign of lack of commitment.
Weakness and hesitancy will not bring persuadable people along, and will confuse and discourage the base. If ever there were a time for moral clarity, this is it.
Radical? I don’t think so.
It’s pretty straightforward.
1. Stop issuing new leases on Federal land for oil, gas, or coal mining.
2. Stop selling gas-fired and oil-fired space heating equipment by 2025. This will require substantial effort — we’ve got to help low and less-than-moderate income homeowners transition their heating systems, but it’s really a simple extension of existing energy efficiency programs and programs like MA’s MassSave.
3. Stop selling gas-fired or oil-fired residential water heaters any time, but by 2030 the latest. Air source heat pump water heaters are much more efficient than traditional resistance, and will dominate the market quickly if people can’t blindly swap like-for-like.
4. Stop selling gasoline-powered automobiles by 2030.
5. Stop building “baseload” (combined cycle) gas power plants. The coal is on its way out, and we would do well to keep up the pressure. With solar, storage, and offshore wind costs dropping, you’ll see renewables continue to grow. With a reduction in fossil fuel extraction, you’ll see price pressure encouraging utilities to continue to expand into RE. With beneficial electrification with dispatchable load (the EVs and water heaters) as well as storage, we’ll find integrating intermittent renewables even easier.
For (1), there would be zero immediate impact and it wouldn’t prohibit extraction writ large, just dampen it. For (2), (3), and (4) there are plenty of opportunities for job training, supply chain building, zoning and building codes to drive down costs of new installs, and more. For (5), there are more jobs building and operating RE than building and operating fossil plants (including resource extraction), and we’d do well to continue ratcheting up state and federal policy to push in that direction.
But none of this is radical. These are relatively gentle curves, market evolutions, and improvements in technology. I’m not arguing that this transition will happen on its own, or that it won’t take an awful lot of work. But the fact is, it won’t cost any more in infrastructure or fuel costs than the path we’re on now, and 25 years from now we’ll still have automobiles, electricity, and space and water heating. That’s not a radical change, not by a long shot.
You missed one IMO obvious item in your litany of stops above, which is stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and transfer those subsidies to cleaner sources.
Sorry, Tom., Those won’t do it. Good steps to take though.
The situation is more dire than I think you think.