The factions of the Democratic coalition have come into alignment on climate change.
Source: Democrats’ new climate change policy platform could unite the left – Vox
By
After the ignominious failure of the Democratic climate change bill in President Barack Obama’s first term — the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that narrowly passed the House but never came to a vote in the Senate — what little unity there was on climate change within the Democratic coalition fractured. Everyone went their own way, furious at everyone else.
Democratic members of the House were angry at Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was angry at the climate movement, which was angry at the big mainstream green groups, which were angry at Obama, who was reduced to addressing climate change through regulations that President Donald Trump wound up repealing.
In all, the decade of climate politics from 2008 to 2018 netted frustratingly little progress at the federal level or consensus about the path ahead. No one was happy, and no one agreed on what to do next. Robinson Meyer captured it well in a 2017 piece in the Atlantic: “Democrats Are Shockingly Unprepared to Fight Climate Change.”
But something different has been happening lately, as groups across the left come together to hash out their differences on climate policy. It turns out they agree on quite a bit. In fact, for the first time in memory, there’s a broad alignment forming around a climate policy platform that is both ambitious enough to address the problem and politically potent enough to unite all the left’s various interest groups.
Leave a Reply