69: Base camp

by

A critical threshold has been crossed

Snowy Owl, Coloured figures of the birds of the British Islands. London :R. H. Porter,1885-1897

I got a late start on the old newsy today, and I’m still trying to get my head around the Biden administration’s spree of climate change-related executive orders and cabinet appointments, so I’m going to take this week’s newsletter as an opportunity to catch up on what has been happening and do kind of a link extravaganza, including hitting on some climate philanthropy news that I was working on at my day job this week.

I do think, in short, that we should be pretty happy at the moment. And not because Joe Biden is proving to be the hero Gotham needs/deserves but because climate justice activists have been hammering away for years at improving the framing and priorities around climate change, and made a big, successful play at moving the issue out of polar bear territory and into the world as people experience it—all tangled up in health, housing, labor, exploitation, structural racism, social safety nets, etc. They also moved the issue firmly into the political arena, as climate groups, but really a growing coalition of youth, Indigenous activists, communities of color, and others who experience climate change as an intersectional issue, are becoming a stronger political and electoral force. (Remember, Sunrise alone contacted 8 million voters.)

Now, we’re finally just starting to see it pay off at high levels of government, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the 2020 election was, both directly and indirectly, a climate election. And the Biden presidency is starting to look more and more like a climate presidency, with environmental justice explicitly a part of its agenda. So that’s huge, even if you don’t really love Joe Biden, I mean I don’t really love Joe Biden after all, but what he and his people are doing now is the product of a lot of people’s efforts and that work should be celebrated. So I don’t know maybe instead of applauding Biden you can just applaud an organizer. Applause, organizer, applause.

We obviously shouldn’t get too excited though, because what is happening is just the federal government for the first time in four years deciding to do something about climate change, rather than making the problem much worse. In that context, anything at all would look like incredible progress. As Katharine Hayhoe said recently, we have made it to base camp. And as you’ll see in some of these links, promises and pledges are cheap, and nobody is more skeptical of the execution of the administration’s plans than the EJ communities who fought for them.

All that as preamble there was a lot of extremely encouraging stuff rolled out over the past couple of weeks including:

  • directing agencies to end fossil fuel subsidies (though he only has authority to cancel some of them)
  • halting all new oil and gas leasing on federal land
  • using the federal government’s purchasing power to buy EVs
  • halting the Keystone XL pipeline
  • establishing a White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council
  • establishing a Civilian Climate Corps
  • creating a Climate Task Force and Office of Domestic Climate Policy
  • embedding climate consideration into every agency’s decision-making, including national security and foreign policy

And here’s a roundup of some related news and insights:

* One thing that keeps coming up in praise of Biden’s early climate action is that he and/or his people seems to be doing a good job of listening. Eric Holthaus notes, for example, that the Civilian Climate Corps idea seems to have come directly from AOC and Varshini Prakash. I wrote about this process previously, and how the post-primary agenda-setting was a really encouraging move from an uninspiring candidate. As a result, the administration has been more aggressive than I think anyone expected on climate. “The industry is aghast.” Sing to me your sweet music and I will dance to it.

* As climate change takes the foreground, one tension that has been going on forever, but seems to be drawing more attention right now, is between the old guard environmental movement and the more diverse and intersectional climate justice wing, which seems to have all the power and momentum right now. This is evidenced by some clutch cabinet nominees like Debra Haaland and Michael Regan, decisions driven by EJ groups, but also some key Senate wins and early executive orders. This divide has always been around, and to some extent is a natural conflict within a coalition, but it also feels like we’re seeing a high-profile culmination of a decades-long backlash against a “white, cautious, and out of touch” environmental movement.

* The shift is far from a done deal though. The Biden administration, in its first round of executive orders, pledged for at least 40% of the $2 trillion in planned climate spending to the most vulnerable communities. Right now, officials are working with a range of mainstream groups and climate justice groups to figure out what that might look like, and people are um nervous. As one EJ advocate put it, “I’m very concerned about how that 40 percent is administered.”

* I mentioned some articles at Inside Philanthropy I was working on in my editing job this week, and in the funding world, which is both shaping and being shaped by the goings on noted above, there was some big news that is both exciting and serves as a reminder that the climate justice community is by no means holding all of the cards, and especially is not holding all of the money. Inside Philanthropy’s fantastic reporter Michael Kavate covered a new pledge challenging climate philanthropy to give at least 30% to justice groups led by people of color. It is much, much lower than that currently, like 1.3%. Here’s an excerpt:

Colette Pichon Battle founded the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In the 15 years since, she has received just one multi-year grant large enough to pay for more than one staff person.

It’s made it hard to hold onto employees. It’s meant simultaneously serving as accountant, staff manager, communications director and more. And it also has not stopped her organization from making change, most recently helping form a five-state climate equity coalition that is soon to expand to cover the entire South and that has informed similar movements in New England, Appalachia, the U.K. and beyond.

“We were created out of complete disaster, necessity and need—and we’re still here, and we’re still fighting, and we’re leading the way around the Green New Deal and climate equity,” Pichon Battle said. “We’re leading that with no investment. What could we do with deep investment?”

* In a separate hard-hitting opinion piece on this same topic that we also ran this week, Michel Gelobter says enough is enough:

The centrality of racial and economic justice to the Biden administration’s climate agenda and to vital policy platforms like the Green New Deal represent a profound shift in the direction of climate policy and activism. The shift has largely occurred despite concerted efforts by much of climate philanthropy to stifle or to neglect the participation of Indigenous communities and communities of color. Unless a long era of climate philanthropy apartheid comes to an end, the prospects for climate policy success are grim.

* Elizabeth Kolbert is still uncertain whether the Biden administration will be able to make a significant impact on climate given GOP obstruction in Congress, noting that they haven’t approved a major environmental bill since 1990. But in her column “A New Day for the Climate,” Kolbert also says “a critical threshold has been crossed. For decades, politicians in Washington have avoided not just acting on but talking about warming.”

* Nick Estes, scholar of Indigenous resistance and citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, calls the scrapping of the Keystone XL permit a huge win, but is holding his applause for the administration, noting Democrats’ mixed-at-best record on climate change, Indigenous rights, and fossil fuel infrastructure.

None of these victories would have been possible without sustained Indigenous resistance and tireless advocacy.

But there is also good reason to be wary of the Biden administration and its parallels with the Obama administration. The overwhelming majority of people appointed to Biden’s climate team come from Obama’s old team. And their current climate actions are focused almost entirely on restoring Obama-era policies. …

A return to imagined halcyon days of an Obama presidency or to “normalcy”– which for Indigenous peoples in the United States is everyday colonialism – isn’t justice, nor is it the radical departure from the status quo we need to bolster Indigenous rights and combat the climate crisis.

* Climate scientists are feeling a sense of, dare we say, hope. Hayhoe notes that the Biden administration is already doing a better job on climate in some respects than the Obama administration did.

* Biden’s team still has a shitload of work to do, even just to get back to the place we were at in January 2017. More than 100 environmental rules were weakened or rolled back during the Trump administration and undoing all of that damage will take years that we simply do not have.

The Senate held its first climate change hearing of 2021 this week and as Emily Atkin points out it was nnnnnot good, full of a “kinder, gentler type of climate change denial,” from senators claiming to be part of a bipartisan effort to take the crisis seriously.

Barrasso’s opening statement at yesterday’s hearing, however, showed that claim to be hot bullshit. It was a master class in oil industry-shaped strategic language that will allow the Republican Party to act like they’re concerned about climate change while still denying basic scientific reality: that fossil fuels are the primary climate problem, and must be significantly reduced to solve it.

* And Sen. Joe Manchin, the worst Democrat, is already demonstrating how not helpful he is going to be in ending the burning of fossil fuels, which is the thing that stops climate change not any other thing.

“I have repeatedly stressed the need for innovation, not elimination. I stand ready to work with the administration on advancing technologies and climate solutions to reduce emissions while still maintaining our energy independence.”

Energy independence means extracting and burning coal and oil and innovation means making it seem like it’s OK to burn coal and oil in case you did not speak Manchinese. One time Joe Manchin ran a campaign ad where he shot a climate change bill with an actual gun.

More Links

Comics

The precision of Max Baitinger’s Röhner is soothing and funny and upsetting.

Röhner by Max Baitinger

Crisis Palace classic today. Fast one. On the messy side.

I had to go to a doctor’s appointment at a place called the Boston Sports Performance Center, which is funny considering it was to have someone look at my shoulder that is messed up from doing absolutely nothing. I’ve gotten really bad at going places and doing things over the past year so I was a whole 20 minutes late. I showed up all winded and frazzled and was apologizing to the doctor and she said, you were late? I was just going to apologize, I was late. Which just goes to show that everyone’s shit is all messed up, even orthopedic specialists, and we just have to go easy on each other.

Other highlights include when she asked me how many hours a day I’ve been sitting down, and I said all of them, and then also when she said, “40s are fun, aren’t they?”

Anyway, my C6 or C7 spinal nerve I can’t remember which is squished, but it’s not a big deal. I just have to take more breaks from sitting and she wants me to get a treadmill for more stupid little walks and instead of a chair I have to sit on one of those giant balls like some kind of dipshit. And this is where I say, well it could be worse, grateful for what I have, take some ibuprofen, etc. For real though, I am just fine, gotta go blow up a giant ball now.

Tate