The Climate Crisis Newsletter- Bill McKibben on IPCC Report 

Source: The Climate Crisis Newsletter

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In time, historians will conclude that the concerted effort to slow our reaction to the threat of climate change underlay much of the damage that the social world has suffered in past decades: from the pre-Murdoch News Corp (then News Limited), which was aligned, from the start, with Australia’s coal industry, to the billionaire influence network that sprang in large part from the Koch brothers’ opposition to carbon regulation, our social world has been as thoroughly polluted as our physical one, and a great deal of the divisiveness that now clouds every issue can be traced to this battle for the energy future. In that light, the climate movement has essentially been fighting for one thing: to build a conscious consensus among people that the world is in danger, and, in the process, to weaken the hand of the carbon industry. It’s a fight for mental clarity, amid the vaguely toxic mental fog that has shrouded this life-and-death question for decades.

The I.P.C.C. has gotten better at its job over the years, and so have movements: the message that we face implacable deadlines is clearly getting through, and public opinion is shifting. But, again, delay is victory for the oil industry. Eventually, sun and wind power, being cheap, will topple fossil fuels—but every year the industry can hold that shift off is a win for it. And every hundred billion dollars that the government spends on cat’s-paw schemes, such as carbon sequestration and natural-gas based hydrogen, is a hundred billion dollars not spent on doing the essential work of energy transition.

The I.P.C.C. has documented—with terrifying precision, employing all the tools that human cleverness can conjure up—the predicament of our physical world. But, at this point, that’s not where the fight really lies.

Passing the Mic

This summer has seen the most important series of climate-adjacent proposals that Congress has ever considered: first, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which passed in the Senate, on Tuesday, with nineteen Republican votes (and which, thanks to the Republicans, delivers on as many wish-list items for Big Oil as for environmentalists), and then the Democrats-only reconciliation budget resolution, currently set at $3.5 trillion, which passed in the Senate on Wednesday morning, but is awaiting approval from moderates. It’s a complicated legislative tangle, so I asked Leah Stokes to elucidate. Stokes is a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of “Short Circuiting Policy,” a classic account of lobbying over energy bills. (You can also listen to her incisive podcast with Katharine Wilkinson, “A Matter of Degrees.”) She’s currently working with the nonprofit Evergreen Action to help pass climate legislation. (Our conversation has been edited.)

There’s a bipartisan infrastructure bill working its way through Congress. What’s in it that’s good, and what’s missing?

The bill is not a climate bill. It has some important investments in clean water, public transit, and our energy grid, but it lacks policies that target carbon pollution across the economy. The scale of spending is also inadequate for many critical climate issues. While President Biden proposed around fifty billion dollars in spending to build five hundred thousand electric-vehicle charging stations across the country, this bill has around five billion dollars for this effort.

Similarly, when it comes to electrifying school buses—a policy that would protect children’s health—the bipartisan bill falls short. Biden proposed spending twenty billion dollars, an investment that would have electrified around twenty per cent of the school-bus fleet. Yet, the final deal only includes $2.5 billion in funding, which will only replace around eight thousand school buses, or less than three per cent of the national fleet.

That said, it is important that this bill pass, as it seems crucial to securing the necessary votes for the package that will move through Congress using budget reconciliation.

What should we be looking for on climate in this second, bigger package?

The reconciliation package contains the climate and clean-energy plan we have been waiting decades to see. To cut carbon pollution, we need investments in three key areas: clean energy, clean transportation, and clean buildings.