Interesting to read @KateAronoff's latest about progressive efforts to make sure Biden's executive branch is staffed with climate hawks (newrepublic.com/article/158198…) alongside a Reuters report on intra-party conflict over a report issued by the DNC's Climate Council. Key quote👇
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It seems painfully the case that the Democratic party is divided over the need for climate action, pulled in one direction by progressives and in another direction by finance and fossil-fuel labor.
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Of course, polling shows that the majority of Democratic voters agree with progressives on climate and support policies implied by the #GreenNewDeal. But the DNC doesn't think that majority is solid or big enough to help them win in swing states.
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Couple that with the DNC's reliance on big money from blue-leaning finance, which is itself ambivalent, at best, about decarbonization, and you have a party and a candidate guaranteed not to do enough about #ClimateBreakdown.
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Some of the tasks ahead, then: how to sweeten the deal for fossil-fuel labor, so their workers retain jobs paying $60 an hour or more, and how to use moral and economic suasion to get finance on board with the 1.5C target rather than the 3C one a la Nordhaus.
I'm currently on vacation, but I must pop in to say: the DOE letter calling increased LNG exports “neither sustainable nor advisable" is a VERY, VERY BIG DEAL.
This is the first time a Dem administration has come out against expanding a fossil fuel.
"The letter is expected to accompany a study of the economic, national security and climate effects of approving new natural gas export terminals to be issued within days by the DOE."
According to the letter, the study finds three things...
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First the study finds that, although it generates “wealth for the owners of export facilities” and jobs across the supply chain, exporting more LNG causes domestic wholesale methane gas prices to increase an estimated 30%.
I am baffled by this opening claim in @TimothyDSnyder's New Yorker piece on Trump's fascism.
Trump's entire campaign was fueled by empathy for white men. It explicitly advanced the promise to improve their lives through his power as Leader ("I will fix it.")
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The US *has* been destroyed — economic inequality, lack of eduction or culture outside churches, crumbling infrastructure, the slow poison of social media in the body politic — has made town after town a decaying shadow of its former self.
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Yes the neoliberalism that catalyzed this decline was introduced by Reagan and best advanced by Republican policies, but, of course, the truth is not the point — especially because in this case it's a half truth. Clinton and Obama are both neoliberals.
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I am very proud that Ted Nordhaus, @mattyglesias, and right-wingers like Judy Curry are attacking my book. It means they feel threatened by my analysis of their rhetoric in favor of expanding fossil fuels. This is good!
I must say, however, that their attacks are spurious.
@mattyglesias This week The Breakthrough Institute published a blog post written by some guy I blocked on Twitter for misogyny years ago, who claims that errors he found in my text prove my research is faulty.
@mattyglesias This post did find two errors in my book. Thanks for that!
But its other claims are incorrect, perhaps because its author has no understanding of scholarly responsibility and striking problems with reading comprehension.
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Last month I spoke to @350NYC about William Nordhaus and economics of decarbonization, using material from *The Language of Climate Politics*.
TL/DR: all too much discourse about the “cost” of climate policy is bullshit.
🧵
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A prime piece of fossil-fuel propaganda is that resolving the climate crisis will “cost” Americans too much.
But the truth is rather the opposite: NOT halting global heating will, within decades, cost Americans way more than creating a net zero economy.
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In fact, phasing out fossil fuels and creating a net zero, ecologically integrated economy will make 90% of people on this planet, including most Americans, way better off than they are now.
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