US gas is very cheap by global standards! It's costly for people for reasons that have to do w decades of bad planning + fully privatized production

You don't solve the problems caused by higher US gas prices by handing a notoriously wasteful sector more blank check subsidies

https://twitter.com/KateAronoff/status/1527317096002072576

The US already intervenes extensively in energy markets to keep prices low at the pump.

More subsidies for drilling doesn't change the pretty hard ceiling on US oil production, refinery capacity, commodity trader behavior or producers charging the highest prices they can get

One of the more eye-opening things I've gotten to write in a bit: on the bizarre Rube Goldberg machine through which renewable tax credits are often used, and the extremely easy fixes that could make it better newrepublic.com/article/162444… If you think that a centerpiece policy intended to drive decarbonization should probably not exclude 30 percent of retail electricity customers or funnel billions of dollars in rent off to a small handful of investors, you would be correct!

Hard to overstate this: extremely grateful for every wonk who's clarified what's actually happened and extremely distressed that Reuters, NYT and CNN all helped feed the misinformation the right cooked up on this almost immediately

https://twitter.com/saikatc/status/1361790687423959042

I love and need the wonky details about this stuff, but the job of translating that into a direct challenge to "wind turbines froze and people are dying" takes a different type of work. That's not on the academics who study this stuff of course, but needs to happen

Legitimately depressing how few prominent climate folks recognize Blackrock as a supremely bad actor and a threat to democracy on any number of fronts, including climate There are folks I really respect who disagree on this, but I think it's extraordinarily dangerous to let a shadow bank that's fought regulation at every turn run one of the most important economic bodies in the world's largest economy newrepublic.com/article/158263…

IMO any remotely equitable shift off fossil fuels requires big, social democratic policies that most Democrats have lost the ability to compellingly articulate. There's not much reason for ppl who stand to lose the most to believe they won't be thrown under the electric bus

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1319007862496972801

Of course it's bad politics to talk about banning fracking in a vacuum, when you have no credible answer for how people are going to get healthcare or make up lost tax revenue. Instead of coming up with an answer to the latter, it's been easier for politicians to drop the former

I wrote about how both parties seem to be denying what's happening in the fossil fuel industry right now, and how easy it'd be for Biden to avoid walking into a War On Oil-sized trap newrepublic.com/article/159017… Climate plans still focus mostly on building more of the stuff we want. But transition is already happening. Building more renewables is no substitute for well-managed decline. The alternative is chaotic decline that a Biden WH will likely get blamed for axios.com/newsletters/ax…

My expectations for Planet of the Humans were very low and it's somehow worse than I ever imagined it could be 🙃 I'm reviewing it and in honor of May Day am not gonna scab on myself by tweeting out a take but good lord is this dumb

Earnest thread: Bernie helped mainstream ideas considered fringe lefty nonsense 4 years ago, and got tens of thousands if not millions of people involved in the work of politics: canvassing and phonebanking, but also organizing their workplaces and neighbors 1/ There should be plenty of serious reflections about what could have gone better, but that a democratic socialist came within striking distance of the White House *twice* and overwhelmingly won voters who are pragmatically speaking the future of the party is a big fucking deal 2/

washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019… Maybe most concerning about the Warren pay-for discussion around Medicare for All captured here is what it means for how her team thinks about the Green New Deal. This kind of thing really won't cut it if Trump starts going after the GND in the general... washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019…

This is a cool piece, but I think the extent to which doomsday bunkers, Martian colonies and other escape hatches are cast as the 1 percent's plan for the climate crisis can get a little overstated 1/ bloomberg.com/features/2018-… On climate, what's the point at which a doomsday is declared? It's a slow burn, so we're a little more like boiling frogs and some places are boiling way faster than others. I don't think we'll reach any moment, all of a sudden and altogether, of declaring climate apocalypse 2/

A goal isn't an alternative to an economy-wide mobilization? nytimes.com/2019/07/23/cli… Is this a joke or did I have an aneurysm and wake up in 2015?

Good morning! The fossil fuel industry should be publicly owned and scaled down as quick as humanly possible

https://twitter.com/1nicetownbean/status/1141991802888708096

FYI these are the kinds of things a refinery explosion like the one that happened in Philly early this morning can put into the air. By design, these sorts of facilities tend to be built in working class communities of color thedailybeast.com/big-oil-says-y…

There's a lot to dig into and like in Inslee's climate jobs program. But this kind of narrow means testing seems like a weird basis for a just transition policy thinkprogress.org/inslee-2020-ca… If we're serious about an economy wide mobilization for decarbonization, that's going to means a lot of people taking on new jobs, getting into low-carbon work & out of high-carbon work, whether in mining or as part of carbon-intensive supply chains (McDonald's, Wal-Mart, etc.)

Fossil fuel companies have spent $1 billion since the Paris Agreement was signed on greenwashing their image.

Lamar Alexander has taken $1.2 million from them, and his "Ten Grand Challenges" look an awful lot like that industry's greenwash wishlist.

https://twitter.com/SenAlexander/status/1110287637842182151

The biggest fossil fuel industry players are multinational corporations. Formal climate denial has been largely a US phenomena, and one they're very happy with. But on the world stage they've long had a different approach than funding junk science and crackpot deniers

Fascinating FERC hearing happening, talking about Trump's coal bailout plan: energy.senate.gov/public/index.c… …

tl;dr There is no free market for energy, and the proposal on the table here is for ratepayers to bail out inefficient and carbon-intensive coal plants, against market forces. This is pretty nakedly a favor to coal operators, and FERC struck down a very similar plan late last year that Bob Murray had a hand in: inthesetimes.com/features/murra…

If I'm counting right, the NYT has had 3 op-eds about Roseanne and none about 4,645 people dying in Puerto Rico. The Washington-appointed Fiscal Control Board just released a new fiscal plan for the island, blaming Puerto Rico's problems on...the fact that essential services aren't being controlled by private companies juntasupervision.pr.gov/wp-content/upl…