Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Even without knowing the final outcomes, the focus shifts to the halls of Congress and state legislatures, as well as to the White House and executive mansions around the nation. What it all means for US climate policy is an unfolding story.
The main story, to me, is that the deep polarization pattern continues to stymie our political system.
The state of federal climate policy is a good news, bad news story. The bad news will likely come in on the developing red tide that looks to flip one or both chambers of Congress to Republican control.
In the world of politics, the request for the facts is as often a prelude to prevarication as it is an entrée to enlightenment. What are facts, anyway?
A Republican House majority is not simply about gross numbers. It is also about individual political philosophies and loyalties. In an age of very slim majorities, a relatively small group of members can have an outsized impact on what does and doesn’t get passed into law.
Will the 2022 midterms be like 1994, 2006, and 2018? Or will they result in narrow majorities like those of the 117th Congress, no matter the victors?
Perhaps sooner than most think, major legislative action regulating greenhouse gas emissions will finally be possible. But that moment will not arrive without deep struggle, organizing, and collective persistence.
After decades as a climate and clean energy activist, I can’t help but feel that we’ve been here before. Wash, rinse, repeat.
It is certainly true that this is the largest investment in renewable energy in US history, but that’s really not saying much.
Next time let’s hope it’s far bolder, just, global – and finally pisses off the fossil fuel industry.
Like the brave women in Cedar Rapids, we must neither surrender the public square to the extremists nor allow them to bestow rights on vehicles and fossil fuels while revoking rights that belong to us and to the rest of nature.
But the current juncture has created a moment loaded with potential, in which the unprecedented alignment of evangelicalism with the Republican right is being shaken — at least at the margins — and new possibilities are emerging.
At a time when rights hard-won in past struggles are being wrested away from us, we can draw strength from the knowledge that if people-power has prevailed in so many such struggles before, it can prevail again.
