Newsletter

Warms some poor name that never felt the sun

Hi fam, I had a good week and we’re up to 63 degrees here in Boston today so I decided to give myself the day off. No thinky stuff up top but I wanted to send you something just so nobody freaks out and sends out a search party or anything. So here are some links and other bitlets. I will say briefly that, regardless of any specifics of the bill or your feelings about either party’s lawmakers and their actions, the sheer size and scope and overwhelming popularity of the stimulus seems to be an encouraging sign that, at least mid-pandemic if not post, we may have found a greater appreciation for the need to take care of each other and the limits of America’s go-it-alone mythology. Maybe! Regardless, a lot of people are going to get some of the help they need and that is a good thing let’s allow ourselves to be happy about it for a sec.

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Links

• Arizona legislature introduced two dozen measures to restrict voting, including one that would allow legislators to overturn election results. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”
• Readers may know my feelings on “cancel culture” and this is a strong argument that part of the ridiculous hysteria is carryover from adolescent Gen X sentiments of free speech absolutism during the early days of the web.
• Continuing with Biden admin’s approach to putting a little of climate into everything, the stimulus bill is kind of a climate bill too.
• Fighting Putin is becoming increasingly dangerous. “Femdacha” is a secret getaway outside of Moscow for feminist protestors to decompress. A dacha is a weekend country house.
• One recurring theme that is emerging post-Texas blackouts—investor owned utilities have way, way too much power.
• Why the pandemic is making us all stupid.
• Mars is a hellhole and Elon Musk’s obsession with colonizing it is dumb.
• Chicago residents are on hunger strike, protesting a planned scrapyard in an already overburdened Latino neighborhood.
• Zillow maps inadvertently show “ghost neighborhoods,” outlines of lots that no longer exist after neighborhoods were razed for urban highways.
• I love this 5-year-old’s description of why he likes to play Breath of the Wild, which is mainly to make Link eat gross food.
• I liked WandaVision but of course I love Kathryn Hahn. This interview isn’t that great tbh, but her vibe in the photos are worth the price of admission.
• NASA named a Martian landing site after Octavia Butler.
• I found this profile of Soleil Moon Frye to be delightful.

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Watching

Still on You’re the Worst. This is purportedly a show about awful people but really it is a show about empathy. I love it.

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And here is a poem I like by Emily Dickinson:

Glory is that bright tragic thing

1660

Glory is that bright tragic thing
That for an instant
Means Dominion—
Warms some poor name
That never felt the Sun,
Gently replacing
In oblivion—

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Listening

Slothrust Boston represent.

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That’s all do something nice for yourself, be safe, let yourself feel good about something. See you next week.

Tate

The ability to assert control over other people may satisfy in its own way, but it is a slow-dripping poison

One of the eternal frustrations in trying to make any kind of widespread change is that people with even a teensy bit of power or control generally do not want to fuck with the program if it means they might have to give some of that up. Not only that, they are so terrified about having to give something up, they will often refuse to even interrogate whether the way things are set up now is serving them very well in the first place. Whether it’s in climate change, housing, transportation, education, public health, whatever, these sentiments seem to rear their heads at the end of practically every story of failed attempts toward progress.

It’s the reason rich parents will campaign for desegregated public schools and then send their kids to a private school. It’s the reason white people will march in the streets for Black lives, but won’t challenge police with much more than a body cam. It’s the reason liberals support affordable housing in theory, but not anywhere near their own neighborhoods, no thank you hard pass. It’s the reason public transit is considered a burden and free parking is considered a right. It’s such a stubborn tendency, in fact, that the inherently conservative principle that people will always act in their own best interests steers even progressive organizing efforts, wherein we identify and leverage the pockets of power where individual interests overlap.

There is a statement that I believe originated with author Lauren Morrill in 2017, that goes, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” and has since been repurposed and reattributed, most recently to Anthony Fauci and you can even get it printed on a mask which I’m sure would make you very popular in your local grocery store. It’s become a kind of refrain for people frustrated by a lack of empathy in American policy and politics. As much as I understand that frustration and am generally a fan of empathy, team empathy over here, there is something about the sentiment that feels disjointed to me, like it’s establishing this split between a person who cares and a person who needs to be cared for. When to get the really big change, you know the good shit, we have to take it a step further than that, to the point where we realize that caring for other people is actually the the same thing as caring about ourselves.

I did not make this idea up as many of you will be well aware, this is more or less a social justice 101 concept of collective liberation. But I feel like even for those of us who intellectually understand this fact, it can be a challenging concept to fully take in. That is why I really loved a book I just read that masterfully explains this idea, called The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks, from 2004.

It is based on the premise that all of us are steeped in patriarchy—that it hurts everyone regardless of gender, it can be perpetrated by everyone regardless of gender, and it can’t be dismantled without men being willing to take up the work. It is a beautiful response to the false but stubborn notion that feminism is pro-woman and anti-man; hooks writes lovingly about the men in her own life, how much she needs them, and her painful struggles with them. She makes the important distinction, “The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.” What exactly does that mean? Here you go it means this:

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.

Again, that patriarchy hurts people of any gender is an idea you hear a lot, but it’s not always an intuitive one. (And I will acknowledge for a moment here that the gender binary is a tool of patriarchy in the first place.) Personally, it’s hard to dwell on or talk about myself as a victim of patriarchy, mainly because of all of the surface-level ways that I benefit from it. It feels a little ridiculous to say “I, a man, am a feminist because I feel like us we men are really getting a raw deal and it is time we finally put an end to it.” hooks notes that even speaking openly about patriarchy itself often invites discomfort or even laughter. “The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism,” she writes. “It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named.”

But she breaks down what patriarchy really is, at the political, relationship, family, and psychological levels. She describes it as a violent construct that leads to both boys and girls being afraid of their own fathers, and hinders loving relationships in adulthood. It “demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples” and “denies men full access to their freedom of will” by forcing them to live within constraints of a harmful definition of masculinity. It also suppresses the potential gentleness that exists in all of us, and elevates the potential abusiveness that also exists in all of us. On this point,hooks quotes therapist and author Terrence Real:

Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.

Even when the idea of patriarchy is taken seriously, it’s often limited to its political dimension—laws and leaders that protect men who do harm or dole out human rights to women only as they see fit. These are the cruel, visible manifestations of patriarchy, but they don’t capture how all-consuming its harms are. And for men to find the will to change ourselves and the system, hooks argues, we must recognize that the power patriarchy has ostensibly given us is not serving us well. It’s a deep and nuanced book that I recommend in its entirety, but there is one other part on this topic in particular that I thought was so good I had to read it like three times.

Here, hooks is largely criticizing other authors (including feminist author Susan Faludi) on the topic of why men seem to be in crisis, including job dissatisfaction, drug abuse, suicide, depression and other problems plaguing American men, in particular. One common narrative is that men feel they are losing something they once had and have not been able to deal with that loss, and that is at the core of their modern struggles. hooks writes that this doesn’t adequately name the problem:

[Faludi] never considers that the notion that men were somehow in control, in power, and satisfied with their lives before contemporary feminist movement is false. Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others. To truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist. This violence was not created by feminism. If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming dissatisfaction most men feel in their work lives…would not exist.

The point hooks makes here (my emphasis above) is one of the most powerful in Will to Change: That well-being is not the same as feeling powerful because of the ability to assert control over other people. It may satisfy in its own way, but it is a slow-dripping poison. She goes on:

Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent caretakers and providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health. Patriarchy promotes insanity. It is at the root of the psychological ills troubling men in our nation.

So what does this all have to do with climate change, or housing or policing or all those other things I mentioned earlier? Well, an underlying point here is that hooks is not merely talking about the struggle to end sexism or gender inequality. Rather, patriarchy is tangled up with all iterations of dominance that control and subjugate others, the “one-up, one-down” world view that you must not get something so that I can have it.

The root causes of climate change—extractive fossil fuel industry, colonialism in pursuit of resources, even the ever-expanding tonnage of our personal vehicles—are deeply rooted in this underlying system of control and domination. As Eric Holthaus once wrote:

Climate writers often slip into a war metaphor. But climate change is not a war, it is genocide. It is domination. It is extinction. It is the most recent manifestation of how powerful men throughout history have sought to steal from the less powerful, and dismiss them as merely inconvenient. Understanding climate change in this way transforms everything.

In addition, the way hooks describes men as both victims and necessary allies in the fight against patriarchy strikes me as an enormously powerful way to think about people who are opposing necessary change and our own role in either challenging or upholding current systems. That includes considering the damage often being inflicted on people by the very systems they may be a part of or are currently trying to protect. It also means reconsidering what existing power structures we all are reluctant to abandon because of the false sense of control they instill in us, and how, by letting them go, we might become fuller, freer human beings.

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Links

• Stockton’s UBI experiment confirms large body of evidence that just giving people money helps them out of poverty, makes them happier and healthier, and expands the workforce. Countries all over the world use programs like these.
• “You’re probably going to feel exhausted when you want to feel exhilarated, panicked when you thought you’d feel safe, combative when all you want is to feel soothed.” AHP’s version of last newsletter’s theme, but better because it’s AHP.
• For just $899,000 you can live in this luxe condo in Jamaica Plain where there are no walls around the shitter just a single frosted glass panel. It’s the latest trend in stupid housing, the “open concept bathroom.”
• The case for reparations from the Tulsa massacre.
• Evanston, Illinois is distributing up to $25,000 for housing, per eligible individual, in reparations for segregation and Black disenfranchisement.
• Speaking of segregation, Boston’s neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID have the lowest vaccination rates. Wealthy white neighborhoods (including the one with the exposed toilet condo) have the highest rates.
• Massachusetts’ governor is “making a big mistake” by easing pandemic restrictions now.
• The latest climate targets submitted by countries under the Paris Agreement would reduce emissions by less than 1% by 2030. People usually call the voluntary accord a flawed, but important step in the right direction, but it’s getting very difficult to be optimistic about it.
• Plastic is part of climate change.
• Petaluma, California banned any new gas stations, permanently. This is how you do it Montell Jordan voice.
• Cars are not welcome in Heidelberg, Germany. GTFO cars!
• Black cartographers have long practiced “counter-mapping,” using redrawn maps to convey injustice in geographic form.
• What Hanif Abdurraqib can’t live without. (I also keep a chunk of black tourmaline on my desk.)

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Super-Link

This week’s super-link is actually two links about net-zero emissions, one of those climate concepts that can be benign and useful, but quickly become malevolent. The dark side of net zero is really wreaking havoc, as big corporate and government pledges are being executed using basically bullshit math that frees them up to continue burning fossil fuels.

All that the major oil companies have done (with tacit support from many governments) is shift their public narrative about the climate crisis from denial to delusion. They’re no longer insisting there’s no problem, because they lost that argument. “Net zero” is their attempt to continue business as usual without addressing what they’re doing to people and the planet.

If it wasn’t so serious, the premise would almost be comical: oil companies are claiming that not only can they keep their current levels of production, but expand their operations that extract and refine fossil fuels. They would have us believe that by planting trees and using largely unproven, expensive, and thus far inefficient carbon-capture technologies, they can reach “net-zero” and solve the climate crisis – all while continuing to grow fossil fuel production.

Global oil companies have committed to ‘net zero’ emissions. It’s a sham

The climate crisis can’t be solved by carbon accounting tricks

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Listening

King Princess, Cheap Queen but really any song on this album of the same name or her EP Make My Bed. Heavy rotaysh.

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OK that’s it for today, a review of a 15-year-old book, classic Crisis Palace, chef’s kiss. I hope you enjoyed it or maybe it just got your hackles up for a few minutes there got the old blood flowing.

Anyhoo did I say I got a treadmill I did it’s alright. The other day I got on it after dinner and I had like a half a glass of wine left so I just walked on the treadmill and drank wine like some kind of parenting blog facebook meme. I call it “sip and stride” a new paradigm for home fitness. Honestly I probably wouldn’t recommend it, at least not very often. Just as a treat.

Well readers, I hope you are both getting your strides and your sips in, whatever form they may take. Sometimes you gotta stride, sometimes you gotta sip. And I believe you have the power to know when each is appropriate. Bless,

Tate

There seems to be something indelibly broken in the heart of this country that allowed us to get to this place

We’re now on the way to having not two, but three vaccines, pharmaceutical solutions to the pandemic that came both sooner and with greater efficacy than most optimists would have predicted. Some half a dozen or so of my friends and family have joined that growing-but-still-exclusive club of the vaccinated, and the people I was most concerned about—both of my parents and aunts and uncles in their age range—have almost all received at least one shot, which is an enormous relief. Public health experts are predicting some aspects of our lives to return to normalcy this summer. If things play out right, that will mean that myself and those closest to me will have made it through this period of global trauma, for the most part, physically and financially intact.

So I’m feeling pretty great, right? Waking up with a fresh sense of optimism, a triumph of the human spirit on the brink of its culmination. Resuming life’s plans and aspirations. Cause for celebration. That’s how you feel, right? Pretty awesome? No?

Yeah me neither. Truth is, I still feel pretty much like shit. And then I feel guilty for feeling like shit. And then I get up and do my work and respond to my emails and make dinner, all the while feeling like my hair is on fire with dread that we still haven’t made it through the worst, that over 500,000 people are dead in the US, 2.5 million in the world, gone, and that there seems to be something indelibly broken in the heart of this country in particular that allowed us to get to this place. To be one of the worst hit countries in the world in spite of all of our advantages. Wondering what in god’s name is wrong with us that we could let this happen. Seeing all the broken and jagged parts of the country in such harsh light and knowing that until we figure this out and fix it we will not fare any better when the next big bad thing happens.

That is bleak, I know, and you know what maybe that’s about some stuff that’s going on inside over here, and maybe most of you guys are actually doing pretty good these days. But I suspect a lot of us are probably feeling something like this. Stuck in a gloomy limbo somewhere between panic and hope, trying to start up the engine but it’s just not turning over yet. Can’t quite make those summer plans.

I think part of it is the fact that, while we grow ever more certain about the virus and how to beat it, whether we actually will still feels so far from a done deal. For one, the vaccine rollout is going not super great, even though in this case, we actually knew we were going to have to do this and had months to prepare. In Massachusetts, just 6.6% of the population has been vaccinated so far. Our governor is coming under increasing criticism and the only solution he seems to ever have for anything is to relax restrictions on businesses, when what they really need is a bailout.

Meanwhile, experts are bracing for a “fourth wave” of infections in March and April, with the virus morphing into scarier versions of itself. People living in isolation are being pushed to the brink, now uncertain about we can and cannot do. So those of us who have been waiting in the freezer ever so cautiously allow ourselves to think about a future outside, while knowing the next couple of months could be as bad as any. We’re not sure what the rules are now, and we’re afraid to leave behind the rules we’ve already set for ourselves, because after all, they got us this far.

We’ve gotten used to the rules, but we’ve also gotten used to these sad little compressed lives that would have had family and friends intervening in any normal circumstances. We’ve adapted to the ambient grief of daily death tolls and the knowledge that to go out and do things is to be in danger. Adapted, but still paying the price for it, whether that’s bodily aches and minor injuries, or fight-or-flight responses fried to the point that once easily managed challenges have us losing sleep and snapping at our loved ones. As one of my friends who has been going through the pandemic solo in his apartment recently said to me, “It’s going to be a while before I know how much this year has messed me up.”

If you’re like me, as much as we’ve adapted, there’s also been a troubling wearing down of the barrier between our daily lives and awareness of the impending reality of death. The wall between the day to day and the catastrophic is still there, so most of us are able to get by and still have happy moments and accomplish some things. But it’s been ground thin, and I’m getting worried that it will be like that for some time. After setting it down several times, I recently finished Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, which deals with questions about the lengths most of us go to deny death, an ultimately futile task. I keep thinking about this one part, a quote from Tolstoy in one of his darker moods:

They see neither the dragon that awaits them nor the mice gnawing the shrub by which they are hanging, and they lick the drops of honey. But they lick those drops of honey only for a while: Something will turn their attention to the dragon and the mice, and there will be an end to their licking.

I’m always ambivalent about this kind of pessimist philosophy, which feels to me about 60% truth and 40% Nine Inch Nails lyrics. After all, there’s still plenty of honey licking going on out there all the honey restaurants have been packed. What worries me more than the permanence of any psychic damage we’ve all incurred over the past year is the lack of lessons we’ve learned during the incursion.

I recently read an article, “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” by Ed Yong, one of the best science writers of our time, about what it is about America that caused us to fail so badly during COVID. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told Yong. He wrote it back in August—when the US had “just 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID‑19 cases and deaths”—so it’s still steeped in the Trump era and serves as a brutal indictment of the administration’s incompetence and cruelty. But he cites an abundance of factors, and while he notes that plenty of other countries made their own mistakes, ours give you the impression that that there is something deeply wrong with how the United States approaches many things, in public health and beyond.

Some of the problems are more systemic or technical, such as the ease with which social media allowed misinformation to spread, or the sprawling supply chains we rely on. Yong is concerned about the lack of trust in science and reason and a government that ignores expertise. But he also writes at length about how the country’s basic operating principles, at least in recent decades, have opened us up to mass death and suffering.

Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood.

He writes about our flawed approach to health care, which favors treating the individual instead of preventing sickness in the population, and “a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.” Our profit-driven system means we spend twice as much of our wealth on health care, but have the lowest life-expectancy of comparable countries and the highest rates of chronic disease. The pandemic laid waste to populations we have systematically and intentionally turned our backs on. People were asked to sacrifice, and those who did got little in return from a hollowed out government.

Of course, so many simply refused to comply, unwilling to compromise any personal liberty for the public good, even if that meant many would die. Parents packed into school board meetings, screaming at low level elected officials that they would rather die than wear a mask, quoting Thomas Jefferson, comparing it to slavery.

Over the past year, I keep thinking about how you’ll sometimes hear people call certain aspects of the American status quo a “death cult,” whether that’s capitalism, or the Republican party, or the NRA, and I always think I don’t know that’s pretty extreme. But after this year, it feels like a charge that needs to be taken seriously. Because what is it about this country that makes us so unbelievably tolerant of the suffering of others, if there’s even a slight chance it might serve our own interests? What is so broken in a society that takes such shameful care of its sick and poor and old? That operates on a built in political assumption that only people with gainful employment deserve to live and be healthy?

Ed Yong, of course, does not call the US a death cult. He is very reasonable in his assessments and recommendations. But he does call COVID-19 “a referendum on the ideas that animate its culture. Recovery is possible, but it demands radical introspection.”

As we come out of the pandemic, god willing, I feel like the only way we’re going to properly recover and move forward with any sense of optimism and hope in the face of future health care crises and the cascading impacts of climate change is to interrogate far more than our health care. I don’t have some kind of grand thesis about what that entails, but it includes challenging some basic American principles, some of which are carried over from the 17th century, others that have spun horribly out of control in the past 10 years or so. At their core is this obsession with personal liberty and self-reliance that has become darkly cartoonish, out of step with the reality of living in any society, but also, serving every one of us so, so poorly. This zero-sum idea that whatever good fortune the individual has is earned and deserved, and if the bill for that good fortune is death or misery of other people, well that’s just the order of life, the cost of our prosperity. It is literally killing us.

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Links

• States are proposing draconian laws targeting fossil fuel protests. Louisiana tried to make a mandatory three-year prison sentence for trespassing on fossil fuel sites. Kansas is trying to prosecute fossil fuel protestors like they would the Mafia.
• Meanwhile, Republicans are scrambling to pass state laws to suppress voting, with Arizona leading the way.
• The Biden administration is starting to untangle the Trump anti-immigrant machine, but still deported hundreds of Haitians this month. Abolish ICE.
• Many corporations have made big climate pledges, but if you look closely, there’s often not much substance. Moreover, firm-by-firm voluntary reductions are never gonna cut it.
• AHP: “You, yourself — you’re pretty perfect. The world itself, functioning as it is now under capitalism, it’s not.”
• Natural disasters lead to decreased crime in communities that are hit, increased philanthropy from outside.
• Malden, of all places, is doing an amazing job of protecting residents from eviction, through a combination of government action and a large network of charities and mutual aid groups.
• Housing with dedicated parking leads to more car ownership.
• There’s a very easy answer to the debate over when white journalists can use the n-word.
• Some of these tips for beating pandemic monotony are pretty good. Some of them are stupid.
• Eve Ewing says it’s time for the debate over K-12 education to stop obsessing over charter schools.
• To give demands for climate action teeth, make ecocide an international crime.

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Listening

The title of this week’s issue comes from a song by LA emo punk band Spanish Love Songs. This is not that song, but the themes are similar.

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Watching

The Americans, season 3. I’ll probably do an issue on this show someday.

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Kind of a dark one this week, but hopefully that is maybe useful to you and not a complete drag. I try not to make these things therapy sessions but I do want to be emotionally honest with you people so we’re not sitting around all welp did you read the news today while all of our hair is on fire.

Don’t worry my hair is only partially on fire, still getting up every day, doing the thing, reading the books, reading the comics, playing the Zelda, taking stupid little walks on my treadmill. If you are having a similar experience these days, and I know everyone says this, but you really are not the only one. Do the stuff you need to do and if it takes you a while to return an email or a text seriously who gives a shit. Not me that’s for sure.

Tate

‘Engineers ought to understand how complex systems can have feedback loops that go awry’

This week I read a bunch about Texas and Bill Gates, so I’m going to touch on both topics today. Let’s talk Bill Gates first bleh but stick with me I promise I’ll get some good burns in.

A big climate story this week was that Bill Gates released a book, called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which is his most extensive engagement in public discourse on the topic to date. In covering climate change funding over the years, I’ve written about Gates’s stances on climate a handful of times, and there is plenty to criticize in his philanthropy; if you want to read an entire book that does just that, I recommend No Such Thing as a Free Gift by Linsey McGoey, a pretty savage takedown. Now this is the “to be sure” part where I would normally say some nice things about all the good stuff Gates has done, but that’s not why you guys are here so let’s just pretend I did that and skip ahead.

So the main climate-specific case against Gates, aside from coming to the issue very late in the game, is that he is 100% fixated on innovation as the solution to the problem. He favors a narrow and overly linear set of climate solutions that lack any political, social, or power analysis. Now, this wouldn’t be such a terrible thing, because after all, new technology is important in the climate fight, but he’s also chronically dismissive of absolutely anything other than his particular set of preferred solutions.

Beyond Gates, this is reflective of a larger problem as more entities of power and wealth begin to engage with climate, but will only tolerate solutions that either reinforce or don’t threaten an economic status quo that has served them well. And because of the power of the people who prefer those solutions, if unchallenged, they’ll receive a disproportionate amount of emphasis.

Just to be clear, I have not read Gates’s book it just came out although goddammit I’m probably going to have to at some point, but I did read several interviews and reviews surrounding its release so that you don’t have to, and I have thoughts on many of his recent statements in the context of his overall track record on the issue so here we go.

To understand the book’s main argument, I thought Rob Meyer at The Atlantic did the best job of summing it up, and it is actually somewhat compelling. Meyer coins it the “Gates Rule: If given a choice of cutting emissions directly or reducing the cost of net-zero technology, the U.S. should choose the latter. American climate policy, in other words, should optimize for cost-reducing innovation, not for direct cuts in carbon pollution.” It’s not that Gates thinks direct cuts in pollution are unimportant, but given the United States’ unique position to create and lower the cost of new technology, that’s where we’ll have the necessary impact. In particular, he is preoccupied with the production of steel and concrete, which it’s true we do not have good carbon-free solutions for yet, but most people think of as kind of a “last mile” climate problem. Steel makes up about 8% of global carbon emissions, and concrete another 8%.

This argument is basically an extension of his past engagement on the issue. I think it’s safe to say that all of Gates’s climate mitigation funding has gone toward technology, mainly though his substantial personal investments in startups working on things like meat substitutes, better batteries, etc. His foundation’s climate-related funding (which until maybe five years ago was mostly non-existent) has gone mainly toward agriculture adaptation with a focus on, you guessed it, new technology to increase production. (Gates’s overall approach to agriculture in developing countries has drawn fierce criticism, including some from me.)

Again, these particular problems aren’t the wrong things to work on. But at the same time, Gates has, for years, gone out of his way to show contempt for climate activists, the divestment movement, the Green New Deal, basically any approach that is not the one he prefers—that is, solving the problem with technological breakthroughs.

He pays some lip service in this new round of interviews to the “passion” of activists, but belittles them in the same breath. As he told the Guardian, “Of the Green New Deal, the proposal backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that raises the goal of carbon neutrality in a decade, he is flatly dismissive. ‘Well, it’s a fairytale. It’s like saying vaccines don’t work – that’s a form of science denialism. Why peddle fantasies to people?’” This is, by the way, a frequent move that climate moderates make—casting those who make stronger demands than they are comfortable with as indistinguishable from the opposition. It is a dirty, dirty move.

Let’s see what else. Gates told Meyer that the best thing young people can do to fight climate change is “studying physics, chemistry, the economy, and the history of the industrial sector.” In TWO interviews, he made the same peevish joke denigrating climate protests:

“Well, what we need is innovation. So if they’re really strategic about what street they cut off, and some poor guy is blocked in traffic and he sits there and says: ‘God, I’ve got to figure out a way to make steel [carbon neutral]. I was being lazy, but now that I’m sitting here in traffic, I’m going to go home tonight and figure how to do this.’ Then it’s a very direct connection between blocking the traffic and solving climate change.” He smiles sarcastically.

“I don’t mean to make fun of it – in a way their passion is valuable. But it’s going to manifest in some ways that aren’t that constructive. So we need to channel that energy in a way that takes 51bn and moves it towards zero.”

He has clear disdain for any strategy that is non-linear or multidimensional, and I would argue, he is intentionally obtuse about the political and social dimensions of climate change. As Bill McKibben points out in his review of the book, Gates mocks the idea that “divesting alone” will solve the problem, as if any divestment activists ever thought that. “They understood that weakening the fossil fuel industry was simply one key part of the job of rapid decarbonization, just like engineering. That is, the activists were thinking multidimensionally, which Gates is so far not.” Further, for all of Gates’s obsession with lowering costs of carbon-free technology, McKibben points out that he seems to actually be behind the curve in understanding how far along much of this technology already is. Carbon-free energy sources like solar power are already on par with or cheaper than dirty competitors, and cost is not the biggest obstacle to lowering emissions.

So why aren’t we moving much faster than we are? That’s because of politics, and this is where Gates really wears blinders. “I think more like an engineer than a political scientist,” he says proudly — but that means he can write an entire book about the “climate disaster” without discussing the role that the fossil fuel industry played, and continues to play, in preventing action.

Political scientist Leah Stokes makes a similar point in her review, noting that “politics, in all its messiness, is the key barrier to progress on climate change. And engineers ought to understand how complex systems can have feedback loops that go awry.” Climate-change denial, she notes, is not mentioned in his book, and “Gates never makes the connection to his fellow billionaires Charles and David Koch, who made their fortune in petrochemicals and have played a key role in manufacturing denial.” Quite the contrary, Gates has had very kind things to say about Charles Koch in the past.

People often, too generously I believe, describe Gates as having a “blind spot” when it comes to politics. That he’s too much of an engineer. But I’d say there’s a bigger problem here, and it’s not limited to the founder of Microsoft. He is steering away from certain dimensions of climate change—either acting like he doesn’t understand them or brushing them aside when they don’t fit into his math problem—because they challenge an economic system that he plays a big role in, and that he has benefited from tremendously.

I suspect that Bill Gates doesn’t engage with the political barriers preventing climate action because those same political barriers protect status quo capitalism in which industry can behave pretty much however as it pleases. He may truly believe that capitalism is the solution to climate change and other social problems, but he also is entirely unwilling to entertain the arguments of people challenging the system that he sits atop.

As more corporations, billionaires, political conservatives, and even moderates become involved in climate action, we’ll continue to see this circling of the wagons. We’ve already seen it in the embrace of carbon dioxide removal by billionaire donors, Republican and moderate Democrats, and the oil industry itself (Brian Kahn wrote a great post on this topic recently). I get a lot of press releases, and I’m constantly getting pitches about some company’s commitment to tree planting or carbon capture technology. Carbon dioxide removal in some form is a component of most pathways to 1.5 degrees. But the idea that these technologies would be sufficient or should even be a main focus is ridiculous. And yet, those interested in protecting the status quo will give them a disproportionate amount of emphasis because they play by the rules of a game that they are winning.

And that is precisely why the power analysis that Gates dismisses is so important. Unless these powerful interests are dismantled, or drastically realigned so they share the rest of the planet’s interests, we will only ever broach a sliver of the work necessary while everything else remains entrenched.

my plan would involve hollowing out west virginia and using the slag to fill in lake ontario, completing a diagonal chain of now saltwater lakes across turtle island and linking the arctic & atlantic seas. this would benefit no one & cause untold damage. i will take no questions pic.twitter.com/IZfCptgpOE

— elizabeth 🌱✨ (@leafcrunch) February 25, 2020

Infrastructure week

OK, now on to Texas, where you may have heard, millions of people lost power, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities as usual, after atypical winter storms pushed their energy infrastructure beyond its limits. Here are a few thoughts that I found to be true and important while reading about this disaster.

This is another step along the way to a new normal in which there is no normal. While the connection is not as solidified and intuitive as climate change’s connection to fires, drought, heat waves, and some storms, there’s a growing body of evidence that extreme winter weather is connected to rapid warming in the Arctic. As Emily Atkins put it, “the climate is drunk again.”

Texas’s isolated, unregulated energy grid made it more vulnerable. There were many factors across every energy source that contributed to the massive outages. But one issue is that Texas is “the only state in the continental US where the grid is almost entirely independent from neighboring states, making it more difficult to import power in case of an emergency.” Why, you may be asking? To dodge federal regulations.

State deregulation was also a factor. Not only have unregulated energy markets not lowered prices for customers, they also run on slim, necessarily competitive margins. As a result, “without the guaranteed customers that come with a regulated market, investment in the sector has stagnated; since deregulation, the state’s overall power-generating capacity has not kept pace with growing demand (pdf).”

This kind of thing will keep happening, and not just in Texas. As extremes continue and more of our stuff becomes necessarily reliant on electricity, power grids will struggle. Setting aside Texas’s unique missteps, it’s shortsighted and also just gross to find satisfaction in infrastructure failures in a state whose politics you don’t agree with. California has had its share of blackouts, after all. Everyone’s number will come up, and the crises will be cascading, as the one in Texas is.

As one environmental engineer put it, “Grids cannot weather anything that comes at them,” Grubert says. “We need to think about this from a justice perspective, and make sure people aren’t dying because they don’t have access to energy.” That means, in addition to improving more centralized, capital-I infrastructure, we can look to places like Puerto Rico, and how they’re working to establish more nimble, green energy micro-grids, and establishing mutual aid networks that can respond faster than authorities.

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Links

• Of the City of Boston’s $2.1 billion in private contracts during the Walsh administration, just 1.2% went to Black- and Latino-owned firms. Advocates have filed a federal complaint over discrimination.
• Jessica Valenti points out that it’s not the pandemic forcing women out of the workforce; it’s fathers who don’t share the burden of domestic work.
• Two women in Florida dressed up like grandmas to try to get the vaccine. In another case, a wealthy Canadian couple tried to sneak vaccine doses meant for Indigenous elders.
• Men are more skeptical of COVID, masks, and vaccines, and that is especially true of men trying to “project masculinity,” according to research from Dan Cassino who is a friend of mine from college and also an excellent cook.
• Tons of fresh water and forests that are less prone to wildfire could attract millions to the Great Lakes during climate change.
• A lot of people are hitting the pandemic wall right now. Our fight or flight stress systems have been overloaded for months and are burning out, leading to emotional exhaustion and difficulty dealing with even little problems that accumulate.
• I loved this panel discussion that reappraises the nu metal genre. Whether you are a closeted fan of these bands or you take joy in shit talking about them (I’m in the latter category, although System of a Down and Deftones whip ass), there’s some super insightful stuff in here about male emotion in rock, whiteness in metal, and why we denigrate certain genres and subcultures.luke oneil @lukeoneil47My dentist Staind won’t stop emailing me February 18th 202119 Retweets316 Likes

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Super-Link

One article I wanted to call special attention to is from Jessica Kutz at High Country News, a nonprofit outlet that does amazing work covering the West. In “The fight for an equitable energy economy for the Navajo Nation,” Kutz profiles Nicole Horseherder, a Diné activist who has been fighting the coal industry on Black Mesa for many years. A big focus is the recent closure of the Navajo Generating Station, but the article gets into the damage extractive industry has done to the nation’s water supply, how coal has been a big part of the Navajo economy and identity since the 70s, and the push to now build new energy infrastructure that actually serves the Navajo Nation.

I especially like the focus on the desire to not merely replicate the extractive relationship between the Navajo and US economies, this time with renewables, but to actually break colonial patterns. Here’s a really good part :

Many residents of the Navajo Nation still lack electricity in their homes, but for decades their coal made the lights on the Las Vegas Strip visible from space. While the tribes’ water was depleted to slurry coal, the energy their land produced powered the Central Arizona Project, an extensive canal system, which used the electricity to move water from the Colorado River down to Phoenix and Tucson. Development was booming outside the reservation, but families like the Horseherders hauled water from community wells at chapter houses miles away to care for their homes and animals.

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Listening

Maybe everybody is already talking about The Weather Station, but I have been listening a lot lately and would go so far as to say that her latest record Ignorance, has to be the best music made to date that is explicitly about climate change. What it does really well is explore the topic as it relates to her life and emotions, avoiding the peril of being overly literal or maudlin. I do love one particularly direct line in Robber, a song that is about the oil industry’s climate disinformation campaign: “Permission by laws, permission of banks / White table cloth dinners, convention centers / It was all done real carefully.” Far more than a polemic though it’s just a really beautiful record.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/M_BRoP1yqjo?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0

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Watching

You’re the Worst. Aya Cash forever.

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What a smorgasbord of an issue!

Not a lot of progress on the radiator/pet bed drama, aka the ongoing tensions in the corner of the office we ironically refer to as the “cuddle corner,” because all three pets always wants to cozy up there without actually getting close to one another. Everyone hates the cat, the cat wants to be left alone, one dog wants to cuddle with the other, and the other dog is terrified of everything, so it’s a real delicate balance. To be clear, there is an abundance of resources available to all parties involved—three beds, up to five blankets, a radiator, a rotating cast of toys—but as always it’s the distribution of the resources that cause tension.

I mentioned last week that I tried to put up a cardboard wall between two of the pet beds and everyone hated it, and that there’s a real lesson in there. My friend and family member by law Josh pointed out that it could be a children’s book about how we build community, not walls, which is so true. But I would also make one addendum to the lesson of this book, which is that sometimes building community means getting close to those you do not even particularly like.

But you know what. I DO like you people and I welcome you to cozy up in this cuddle corner anytime, and just to be clear I mean virtually not in a creepy way this is only a metaphor.

Tate

Who we presume to be the heroes in this story, and who we presume to be merely obstacles in the way

So Politico ran this big article recently about tensions within the environmental movement, and I had tweeted some criticisms of it earlier, but wanted to discuss some of them here because it gets to a lot of important stuff about the way we think about climate change and the environmental movement and how that’s evolving, I’d say for the better. Much of this builds on themes explored here often about why the climate justice lens is a necessary one through which to view climate change, for both moral and practical reasons. But more broadly than that even, it’s about the assumptions we make about global problems and who solves them.

I do want to preface this by saying that I don’t mean this to be some kind of takedown of this particular article, because there is actually a lot of good stuff in there and some awesome people quoted. That said, I think it gets important parts of the narrative wrong. And it gets things wrong in ways that are extremely common and detrimental to progress on climate change. So it’s a good entry point into some of these larger debates.

The overarching narrative we are presented with is that the responsibility and capability to make progress on climate change lies in the hands of big environmental groups, which have an ambitious agenda, are ascendant in US politics, and have successfully pushed Joe Biden to become a surprise hero on climate change. The problem, the article poses, is a perhaps surprising obstacle to progress—the environmental justice movement, or as the article puts it, “Black, Latino and Indigenous critics.”

I would argue that pretty much the opposite is true, and this framing reflects a lot of old and thankfully dying stereotypes about who leads and who should lead on climate and the environment. It mistakes wealth and pedigree for power and leadership. It strikes an artificial divide between wanting to address “nuts-and-bolts” community impacts of climate change and wanting to solve the planetary problem. And it reaffirms a narrow perception of exactly whose problem climate change is to solve.

That said, much of the article is actually quite critical of big green NGOs, nonprofits in the mainstream environmental movement, which is called out for its historic ties to white supremacy, and its modern day white and male-centric leadership. The article rightly points out the way the environmental movement has ignored or been openly hostile to people of color, and the cultures of abuse within big greens like The Nature Conservancy. It also does a nice job of documenting the growing influence of environmental justice and modern attempts for the mainstream movement to reckon with its problems.

“For the last four years you’ve had a bogeyman and that bogeyman has placed a spotlight on the egregious things that were happening,” reasoned Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former career EPA official and environmental justice activist who now works at the mainstream National Wildlife Federation. “You have a new generation that is refusing — and rightly so — for the old paradigms to continue to operate. And as this new generation continues to gain power, you will see these organizations pushed even more to make this change happen.”

Pretty good right? The problem is the sentiment that enviros could really make a difference, could meaningfully reduce emissions and curb climate change, if only it could “satisfy” these outside critics. These “disaffected” non-white activists who are preventing climate heroes like Mary Nichols from getting the job done. Those who were “uninspired” by cap and trade, costing us a critical win.

As you may be gathering from my aggressive use of quotation marks, the big problem here is this depiction of people who are demanding environmental justice as an outside impediment, a stubborn obstacle, instead of a necessary and central plank of climate leadership.

For example, I agree in a broad sense (as do many others) that the lack of grassroots support behind cap and trade contributed to its failure. But it’s not because the grassroots failed to see the importance of the issue, or because large NGOs failed at “mobilizing and connecting with portions of the population that would directly benefit,” as one advocate said. It’s that leadership on the issue was hollow. Green groups had for years been casting the problem of climate change in a narrowly defined, antiseptic way that was out of touch with how most people would ever interact with it. As a result, climate change came across as an elite special interest instead of an authoritative movement grounded in human needs.

Specifically, the early movement had largely portrayed climate as an issue of protecting natural resources by way of engineering fixes and market adjustments. This is something of an oversimplification, and to be clear, I actually think we have a lot to thank mainstream environmental groups for over the years. But historic environmental leadership’s narrow framing and base of support have held back progress on climate.

You could make the case that the real reason climate action has been so slow is that, up until recently, climate impacts were not as tangible and unmistakable, so the public was just not sold on it yet. That’s probably true to an extent, although you can chalk up some of that to a failure at movement building. But even if big greens are not to blame for the lack of progress in the past, I definitely don’t buy the argument that they are the main drivers of the advances we are seeing now. And honestly, the Politico article is the first time I can recall hearing someone even make that claim:

Big Green groups have pushed Biden, whom most would never confuse with a crunchy activist, into crafting the most aggressive environmental platform in the nation’s history that calls for spending $2 trillion.

Really? I mean, if you quite literally look at the process that led to the $2 trillion dollar plan, the Unity Task Force on Climate Change, appointed by Bernie Sanders and Biden post-primary, included Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement (pretty big now, but definitely not a big green), Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who is most associated with Sunrise but is broadly supportive of the climate justice movement, and environmental justice leader Catherine Coleman Flowers. Then a couple Obama admin people and negotiators from the moderate wing of the party. But literally nobody from the big green groups. It was Jay Inslee’s run, but mostly the left flank of the party that pushed Biden’s hand on climate during the primary, and many have pointed out that the environmental justice movement has had Biden’s ear from early on. “It’s the first time in [the environmental justice] world that the candidate has reached out so early,” Cecilia Martinez of the Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy told Scientific American back in August.

But beyond the makeup of his literal advisors, does anybody really think that, say, the Environmental Defense Fund has been the main driver of the climate change conversation in the past five years or so?

I’d say it has far more to do with the way Standing Rock water protectors forced the world to take notice of the violence of fossil fuel infrastructure for months on end—and won. Or environmental justice networks that built power at the state level. Or the youth protestors who repeatedly got arrested in DC, and emotionally confronted out of touch Democrats who were compromising away their future. Or the architects of the Green New Deal who decided it was time to stop pretending climate change is isolated from issues like public health, housing, and labor. I would credit it to the millions of people who took to the streets in the 2019 Climate Strikes, led by multi-racial climate justice and youth organizers.

From everything I’ve seen, it’s the EJ community, along with youth, Indigenous activists and others well outside the scope of the traditional movement who have been instrumental in finally getting us to this point, where big greens have otherwise failed. I’m not saying big NGOs haven’t been in these rooms at all—this work demands a big ecosystem of actors, and they bring a specific kind of muscle. Some of these groups are also changing; a lot of environmental justice heroes now have jobs at the big greens, after all. It’s not always a clear divide. But the progress these groups are contributing to now is because they are being challenged to adapt to the moment, not in spite of it.

One more point I wanted to make is about the common depiction of the environmental justice movement as a kind of special interest group, one that ignores big picture needs in order to meet “their communities’” concerns. A more favorable, but still paternalistic way to put it is that these are people who need our help and we have a moral obligation to address “their concerns.” While it is the case that environmental justice groups fight for the needs of people who are often left behind due to economic inequality and structural racism, that doesn’t fully capture why this is such an important movement.

For one, communities of color, lower and middle-income families, working families, and advocates for social justice represent one of our deepest sources of power in the climate fight. This characterization also overlooks the importance of collective liberation or shared interest in justice work. It’s the idea that if you are not free, I am not free, and if we can win justice for the most oppressed, that leads to a just world for all. Nowhere is this more true than in climate change, in which all of our fates are connected. In that sense, the power of climate justice is not simply bringing issues like race and poverty into climate debate, it’s imbuing the climate movement with humanity and empathy.

In other words, the environmental justice community is not a box to check or a critic to appease, it is central to the fight in several ways. Which gets back to the larger problem with this article and the long held attitudes it reflects—the question of who we continue to presume to be our heroes in this story, and why. And who we presume to be merely obstacles in the way.

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Links

• Fossil fuels caused 8.7 million deaths in 2018—one in five.
• The Trump years launched the biggest protest movement in US history, and it’s not over.
• Monitoring weather at the edge of the world.
• Driving was down in MA last year, but deaths by car were about the same, because people just drove a lot faster.
• Chuck Schumer is starting to sweat.
• California is bastion of progressive ideals that doesn’t live up to them. “San Francisco is about 48 percent white, but that falls to 15 percent for children enrolled in its public schools… What we see at times is people with a Bernie Sanders sign and a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in their window, but they’re opposing an affordable housing project or an apartment complex down the street.”
• I know I said this issue wasn’t a takedown, but if you DO want to read a takedown, check out this article on alpha thread bro Seth Abramson.

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Watching

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 4. This show, like all shows on Netflix, was abruptly cancelled after a few seasons. It wasn’t perfect and usually was way over the top, but I loved it and there was nothing else like it on TV, even just the way it was shot all over saturated and almost like a fisheye lens. The rare case of a dark comedy/drama that is actually dark. I thought the final season was very good, even the musical numbers, and there’s a final boss called The Void that sucks everything up and can never be satisfied which I think is a subtweet at the streaming TV industry. The final episode is actually terrible I’m sorry to say but don’t let that deter you. RIP Sabrina, thanks for the chills.

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Podcasts

I recently finished Vann Newkirk’s Floodlines, a podcast mini-series which is wow now almost a year old but you know what a lot is going on. It covers a lot of territory, like the false information about looting and Superdome violence, why the levees broke, FEMA’s response, with some overlap with A Paradise Built in Hell. The production is beautiful, but I especially loved Newkirk’s interviews, which bring out all of these touching moments of honesty and humanity from the people who participated.

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Comics

The Cursed Hermit, by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes. In this sequel to the Case of the Missing Men, we now follow one of the most memorable supporting characters, Pauline, who investigates a new mystery at a remote private finishing school. Like the first installment, it’s creepy, heartwarming, funny, and Forbes brings life to the characters, especially Pauline, with his stark, dramatic facial expressions.

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Poetry as resistance

Hey if you enjoyed CP55: Poetry as resistance, you’ll remember that poet and friend of the palace Tamiko Beyer was preparing a radical alternative to a book launch for her latest collection. And guess what? That launch is now happening.

You can read about it here, and support the fundraiser that will allow Tamiko to gift two new books of poetry to organizers and activists working on climate, racial, and economic justice issues. Do it!

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It’s been very cold outside and the pets have been trying to get as close to a radiator as possible which means a lot of jockeying for position between these two pet beds that squish up against the radiator by my desk. Both beds are equally exposed to the radiator but Jacoby our little min pin hates the cat and hates it when the cat is in either bed, so he’s always starting fights and then nobody gets the bed. I keep trying to tell him like Youngbloodz said don’t start no shit won’t be no shit, but he cannot absorb this advice.

Eventually I tried to put a piece of cardboard between the two beds, to build a wall, if you will, but everyone hated that and they both immediately abandoned the beds. Anyway they are working out their differences and there’s probably some kind of lesson here, I guess that nobody likes a wall even if it means you get to be close to the radiator.

I hope you are finding your radiator and living in peace with the cat in your life, and if that’s not possible maybe finding a new radiator or a heating pad or a nice blanket.

Tate

A critical threshold has been crossed

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.

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pic.twitter.com/rEmsiS2x0D

— Sloane Crosley (@askanyone) February 4, 2021

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More Links

• This essay on gentrification and housing in horror fiction by Sam J. Miller is so good and so Crisis Palacey I can’t even stand it I hope he will come on the show some day.
• Heat killed a record number of people in Arizona last year – 494 people.
• Grist is running a climate fiction short story contest!
• Another good one from us this week – who are the private funders backing geoengineering?
• I love this little profile of this dumbest random dude who decided to run for mayor of Boston.
• A vaccination site in one of Boston’s neighborhoods of color is vaccinating mostly white people. The anecdote at the end is savage.
• Kill the filibuster.
• The pandemic has erased entire categories of friendship. I knew exactly what this article was about the second I saw the headline and I miss those friends so so much.
• “‘Haven’t you heard? It’s 1984!’ Then they locked him up in Thought Prison, by taking away his Twitter.”
• These Diné mechanics transformed an old military truck into a mobile repair shop that travels around the Navajo Nation fixing people’s bikes. Love this photo spread and article.

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Comics

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

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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

‘Don’t confuse what goes on in this building with democracy.’

So much happening in national climate news my goodness but today I’m actually going to talk about something happening here in Massachusetts—an effort to fix the lack of transparency in the State House. In part because it is a thing that occupied a good chunk of my week, but also because I think there are a lot of important analogs to stuff happening nationally in climate change and other areas. Namely, special interests and a more conservative minority blocking popular policy, thanks in part to anti-democratic rules.

The Massachusetts 2020 legislative session only recently ended, so there has been a lot of state-level news, including a major climate change bill that was able to clear both the House and Senate at the last minute, only to meet a shocking veto from our Republican Gov. Charlie Baker. Everyone was livid, so the House and Senate passed it a second time just yesterday, sending it back to Baker for what the political press likes to call “a showdown.”

The bill will likely become law and it is actually a good step, putting the state on a path to net zero by 2050 and notably requiring new limits on emissions every five years. Past policy on state reductions had 10 year milestones which is pretty ridiculous considering the strides that must be made by 2030 alone. And the veto seemed to come out of nowhere, as the bill mostly aligns with Baker’s own stated climate goals. So you might expect everyone to be cheering on the legislature and grabbing the pitchforks for Baker, and I guess they kind of are, but one of the big priorities right now for Sunrise Boston, Act on Mass, and a coalition of many other progressive groups and also me is actually trying to reform the way the State House works.

The reason is that the very special interests that twisted Baker’s arm to veto the bill are representative of the same forces that have been scuttling popular, progressive legislation for many years, taking advantage of the state’s arcane rules that allow pretty much everything to happen behind closed doors and with little accountability. Sometimes those special interests, in this case the real estate lobby, will water down legislation out of public view while it is in committee, and sometimes they will successfully convince lawmakers also out of public view to just go ahead and kill it. In this case, they had to make an end run at Baker, but it happens often in the legislature.

In the case of climate change, that has translated to 13 years going by without new major legislation, in a state that fancies itself a national leader on the issue. Out of 245 climate change-related bills introduced in the House from 2013 to 2018, 202 were quietly killed in committee. Only nine were ever voted on by the entire House, and almost every decision on every one of those bills happened in a secret vote, with no public tally recorded. That’s according to a recent, damning report from Brown University and the Climate Social Science Network, which also found that clean energy advocates were outspent by industry opposition (utilities, real estate, fossil fuel and chemical industries) 3.5 to one, and that the House Speaker wields tremendous control over what bills clear the House. For over a decade, that speaker was notorious conservative Democrat Bob DeLeo, who recently stepped down, and now it’s Ronald Mariano, who is not off to a great start!

The specific problems, or at least a few of them, are that in the Massachusetts House, committee votes are not publicly recorded. Neither is testimony in most cases. Not only that, even full House floor votes are also rarely recorded, due to some dungeons and dragons-like procedures that usually mean the Speaker just eyeballs the vote and calls it. In the rare case that a bill does get a vote, it happens just 24 hours after the committee releases it, which is infuriating to many lawmakers themselves. However, the vast majority of bills are merely “sent to study,” a quaint sounding way to kill a bill in which imaginary scholars will studiously sit down with their imaginary magnifying glasses and fountain pens and study the bill so hard for the rest of eternity and it is never heard from again RIP death by too much studying so tragic.

No public vote, no published testimony. When a bill is sent to study, the average constituent has no way to know how or why or whether their own elected official voted in favor or against. And if you’re wondering, Massachusetts is particularly dysfunctional in this respect. As an advocate once told a reporter at the end of a frustrating day, “Let me be clear. Don’t confuse what goes on in this building with democracy.”

All of this adds up to a nominally progressive state like Massachusetts regularly failing to pass legislation that has majority support. Two specific examples that got me interested in this campaign:

• In 2017 and 2018, I, along with many others, was a big supporter of a bill that would increase state level protections for immigrants called the Safe Communities Act. I attended two lobby days, met with my rep, etc., and it was a hugely popular bill. Record number of co-sponsors, endorsing organizations, great press. What happened to it? Sent to study! Why? Who knows! The bill has been stuck in the House for eight years. So much studying the poor thing.

• In 2018, a coalition of housing advocates worked tirelessly to pass the Jim Brooks Act, which would offer extremely modest protections to renters facing eviction (there is an eviction crisis in Massachusetts). The law was, again, hugely popular, and actually a City Council decision, but it needed to get signoff from the House, again, for arcane reasons. After packed public hearings in City Hall it passed the council 10-3. Then it went to the House and guess what happened? Sent to study! Who sent it there? Fuck if I know! But I do know the real estate lobby mounted a huge campaign to scuttle it, and apparently succeeded.

Both cases were devastating to the advocates who worked on the bills and the people who would have been protected by them. It actually fucking sucked.

So this morning, I went to a meeting with my state Rep. Liz Malia, who has been a great ally on many issues, but opposes the three House rules changes being proposed by the transparency campaign. We had a great turnout at the meeting and we got our message across, but honestly it was pretty frustrating for a set of reasons.

One thing that’s come up from a number of lawmakers, as the campaign has been quite successful at rallying people in its favor, is an implication that all these people must not be real constituents. Rep. Malia was not quite so dismissive, but I got a distinct sense that, perhaps because Sunrise was involved, she thought we were newcomers or outsiders, even though many of us in the meeting had been involved in any number of other community campaigns and groups, or moreover, were just concerned human beings living in her district. Others lawmakers have questioned the campaign’s legitimacy more explicitly and there’s even an apparent effort by the Speaker to restrict the activities of advocates in response.

You get the feeling that when democracy at the participatory level starts happening at a larger scale than is common, some elected officials get an uneasy feeling that something is actually going wrong. There’s a similar sentiment that comes through among those who are opposing the transparency amendments—that’s just not really how this whole thing works.

Which I guess says a lot about the work that needs to be done to create more meaningful kinds of democracy. It also says a lot about why, even in a place like Massachusetts, progress is so often blocked. For all the talk about tribalism and partisanship in this country, a state with an enormous Democratic majority—79% of both chambers are Dems—often can’t pass popular policy.

Yes, that’s often because of true ideological disagreements that must be worked out within the legislative body. But it’s also a result of serious power imbalances. That includes well-heeled special interest lobbying, but also anti-democratic features built into our political structures. Until those structures are made truly democratic—whether that’s knowing how your state Rep votes, or having proportionately representative federal decision-making bodies—we’ll face limits on accomplishing necessary action on climate change or any number of other issues.

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I am determined to turn this into a viable new meme format pic.twitter.com/UP8aV2ekLn

— Tom Neenan (@TNeenan) January 25, 2021

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Listening

I’ve been listening to a lot of Kate Bush around the house lately to the point that Jamie had to ask if I’m okay. The answer is no, I am not okay, but I also just love Kate Bush. Here’s a seasonally appropriate song. On this record there’s another song about doing it with a snowman. 😉

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And now I want to say a few things about GameStop. Lol just kidding I have literally nothing to say about GameStop. You got that vaccine? Nah me neither. When I think about the vaccine, sometimes I think of that En Vogue song that’s like “no you’re never gonna get it never ever gonna get it.” More people I know seem to be getting it though, so that’s a very good thing, and my parents have appointments set up in February. I can’t wait to feel the power coursing through my veins. For now I will settle for whiskey coursing through my veins.

The only other news here is that I resumed pickling, which longtime readers will remember was a fleeting hobby. I just made some cauliflower and peppers I’ll tell you how they turn out. No links this week I’m out.

Tate

‘I often wonder whether, a few years from now, we will really be able to remember what it was like these past four years’

On Wednesday, at the end of a very full to do list, because sometimes when working in media the moments when you could really use a time out are the moments when you’re also the busiest, I wrote, “BE HAPPY FOR A SECOND” (my longhand is all caps).

That is something far more earnest, far more likely to appear on a crocheted pillow than on my usual daily to do lists, which on that day also included “EMAIL LIZ.” But halfway through the day, I got concerned for logistic and neurotic reasons that I would find myself falling asleep and realizing that I never considered what it was like to have this farcical, blackhearted constant of the past four nightmare years finally extinguished.

And sure enough, at about 11:15pm, I realized I had almost done just that. So I went to Jamie who is, you may recall *my wife* and said I have a weird thing I have to ask you I need your help with something. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but we settled on sitting at the kitchen table and just listing some of our experiences from the past four years to force ourselves to remember what it was like, and then to think about what it is like now that it is over.

At the beginning of organizing meetings, sometimes you’ll do a grounding exercise where you take a few deep breaths and take stock of what is happening in the moment and sit with the associated thoughts and feelings. This was something like that and it only took about 15 or 20 minutes, but I feel like in some ways I am still working through a similar space. I’ve been reading so much already about immediate obstruction, reminders from the left that we need to challenge Joe Biden, reminders that the underlying problems that gave us the past four years haven’t gone anywhere and have probably gotten worse, the endless debate about unity and division, Biden’s pandemic plan, his climate plan, what climate action actually looks like (good and bad) under a US president that has made it a central plank in his agenda.

But I guess I still kind of feel like I need a minute. So I thought today I would write up what those reflections were during our 11th hour on Wednesday night, as a way to document them for posterity, and so I don’t know maybe you can get something out of it, do a purge of your own by revisiting what it was like for you and what it’s like now. As Susan Glasser, who wrote a regular column for The New Yorker about the administration, wrote in her Obituary for a Failed Presidency, “I often wonder whether, a few years from now, we will really be able to remember what it was like these past four years.” So here’s a list of things I thought about when reflecting on the last four years, though necessarily, vastly incomplete.

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1. First we think about election night. The disappointment and shame, the fear of how bad it was about to get.
2. Now we think about those first few days. The night after, going to the Common for an instantly formed rally and marching with Jamie and her cousin Joey through downtown. The waking up again and remembering, walking through Forest Hills Cemetery to get perspective.
3. Now we think about Inauguration Day 2017, DC a ghost town except for angry protestors, flash-bang grenades and riot gear, nonviolent actions blocking access to the mall, and a scattering of spooked tourists. Trump’s American Carnage speech echoing through half empty streets.
4. Now we think about the Women’s March the next day, getting on the Metro and looking out the window and seeing endless crowds packed into station after station, flying past as they waited for a train that wasn’t full, beginning to understand the scale of what was happening.
5. Now we think about the Muslim ban, and the thousands who flocked to airports across the country to protest as people were being detained, to say no we are not doing this, enough, even though it was really just the beginning.
6. Now we think about the protests that happened the day after that, and the next day, and the next weekend, and the next weekend.
7. Now we think about going to my aloof state rep’s office hours, which she never attended herself, and hearing panicked immigration lawyers asking her sympathetic staffers for any help at all for their endangered clients.
8. Now we think about the push to pass the Safe Communities Act, packing hearing rooms, a massive Immigrants’ Day at the State House, and a legislature that ultimately did nothing.
9. Now we think of his failure after dramatic failure. His horde would eventually pivot to behind the scenes rulemaking, hundreds of rules, chipping away and rolling back environmental protections, protections for immigrants and refugees.
10. Now we think of the thousands of children systematically separated from their parents at the border, many kept in cages, a fully intentional outcome of a “zero tolerance” policy. We think about the bottomless cruelty.
11. Now we think about Charlottesville and Unite the Right and when white supremacists planned a similar rally in Boston, and tens of thousands of people marched to the Common to drown out and chase away the tiny group, you are not welcome here leave.
12. Now we think about the people who didn’t survive these four years. We think about mass shootings, Tree of Life and Parkland. We think about federal executions. We think about wildfires and flooding and storms that wouldn’t end.
13. Now we think about the time lost that we didn’t have to lose.
14. Now we think about the 400,000 people with lives and loved ones, some unknowable percentage who died as a result of his ignorance and incompetence and pettiness. We think about how we knew something very bad would happen on his watch, but we couldn’t know it would be this bad.
15. Now we think about friends we lost, who would have loved to watch it all come to an end, but didn’t get the chance. We feel it now on their behalf.
16. Now we think about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Atatiana Jefferson, Botham Jean, Stephon Clark. We will never forget them.
17. Now we think about the largest protest movement in national history.
18. Now we think about Ayanna Pressley, Ricardo Arroyo and the leaders we helped elect who took office, not just to vote, but to fight.
19. Now we think about when he lost, again and again and again and again. And when he woke up one day and whimpered into a microphone and then he left. And how right now, he’s alone and watching TV, burning with rage and resentment, but can’t call a press conference. Can’t even tweet.
20. Now we think about the harm he can no longer do. We are proud and grateful and in solidarity with everyone who put an end to this.
21. Now we think about how everything everyone did over the past four years in resistance needs to be redoubled, because instead of just stopping the bleeding or bracing for the next abuse, we have new opportunities to respond to crisis and build a just world and dismantle the conditions that allowed it to happen in the first place.
22. And now we think about all of it, and we say goodbye.

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Big ska vibes in Biden’s speech. “I’m reminded of Operation Ivy’s timeless anthem Unity … and to quote the Mighty Mighty Bosstones Kinder Words…”

— Tate Williams (@TateJW) January 20, 2021

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Links

• “What stands out in hindsight is the stalking menace of these past few years.”
• Barbara Smith: White people now realize white supremacy is coming for them.
• The Civil War and Reconstruction teach us that accountability, not denial, is essential to healing.
• The Tiger King was inexplicably certain he was going to be pardoned.
• Goodbye Andrew Jackson, hello Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks.
• “No more broken treaties … We urge you to fulfill the United States promise of sovereign relations with Tribes, and your commitment to robust climate action.”
• Paris Agreement rejoined; Keystone XL pipeline canceled.
• Roxane Gay: “His children are exactly like him. His wife is exactly like him. I wish nothing but the very worst for them, for the rest of their days.”
• Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The temptation to look away is strong. This summer I watched as whole barrels of ink were emptied to champion free speech and denounce ‘cancel culture.’ Meanwhile, from the most powerful office in the world, Trump issued executive orders targeting a journalistic institution and promoted ‘patriotic education.’”
• An environmental rollback that sought to bind the new administration’s hands on climate was shredded in court.
• Instead of a Big Climate Bill, the Biden administration will make climate action a part of everything it does.
• The Boston Globe started a new initiative that will allow people who have appeared in its crime reporting (crime reporting is terrible) to appeal to have their names removed so they can get on with their damn lives.

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Bernie on his way to forest hills station #orangeline #MBTA pic.twitter.com/pvINDk3zti

— gamba (@kene_eric) January 20, 2021

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Super-Link

I linked to this last week, but I wanted to re-up this opinion piece, “Only Democracy Reform Can Stop Trumpism” by Waleed Shahid and Nelini Stamp, because the past week has seen a ton of takes about how Republicans must denounce x and commit to y to move forward or this is why the country must unite and work together now. They overlook the basic reality that anti-democratic structures in our electoral system provide zero incentive for Republicans to work in coalition with moderates or the left, and every incentive to cater to an increasingly extreme, increasingly isolated, all-white minority. It is well worth a read.

Democracy is how we resolve conflict through elections and laws. But the systems and rules established under a compromise with slavery in the late eighteenth century aren’t up to the challenges we face today. There are few ways to end our democratic crisis without dramatically changing how we organize our democracy. We find ourselves in a pitched battle between the forces of minority rule and multiracial democracy—and without updating the structures that shape incentives in our democracy, the antidemocratic forces may well prevail.

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This morning Jamie had zoom therapy and in the one hour she was in the other room, the cat spit up a hairball and one of the dogs puked and also shit all over the kitchen. It was as though they were manifesting her psychic energy as she talked out the emotions of the last four years or maybe the pets were just working through their own emotions coincidentally. I imagine it’s been tough on animals too even though they don’t know anything about politics and one of our dogs is a libertarian despite our best efforts.

I did watch some of the inauguration and the television special later on, which was one of the most bizarre, hokey, cornball things I have ever witnessed but also so comforting in its blandness that in spite of all my best efforts I sort of enjoyed it. There’s something so cloyingly inoffensive about Tom Hanks introducing the Foo Fighters and then a dancing montage of nurses and the president and a baby dancing to Demi Lovato. I guess I didn’t exactly like it, but I also didn’t hate it with the passion of 1,000 burning suns, and after these four years, I will take it.

Tate

‘Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice’

There’s this thing that probably always happens during big societal shifts, where for fleeting moments, the bulk of the public seems to share this remarkable clarity that something has to change. Injustice seems universally evident, and transformation unavoidable. But then there’s the backslide that happens either quickly or gradually, in which people become uncomfortable with how that change might affect them. For all of the people actively resisting, many others maybe don’t like the way the world is, but decide they are unwilling to risk disruption or the possibility of losing something to correct it.

Since the attack on the Capitol last week, this has shown up mostly in calls for unity and deescalation, which sound nice, but in practice equate anti-racist demonstrations with authoritarian violence, and demand coexistence with white supremacists. A lot of these calls are very obviously in bad faith, coming from people who stoked and enabled the attack. But in many cases we see Democrats who would just as soon not dwell on the violence and continued threat of violence—or correct the structures in our government that privilege white supremacy—because they are afraid doing so would sow further division or interfere with a particular legislative agenda.

Our annual remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr. arrives this year against the backdrop of this discussion and King’s work feels especially relevant right now. He wrote some of the most powerful denouncements of white moderates demanding peace without justice, even though his legacy is often twisted to suggest the opposite.

So I thought this week I would do something a little different and revisit passages from a couple of King’s works that comment on unity in the sustained fight against white supremacy. I know I wrote about Where Do We Go From Here back in September, but these ideas have been on my mind lately as I think about the state of the world and whether I’m committed enough to anti-racism in my own life and work, and it feels worth bringing some of them up again.

King’s best-known criticism of moderate calls for peace is in 1963’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, in which he responds from his jail cell to white religious leaders of the South who criticized the nonviolent resistance he was organizing as “unwise and untimely.”

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

That sentiment only grew and King wrote at length in 1967’s Where Do We Go From Here about his disappointment with stalled progress as the fight for equality shifted beyond segregation in the South.

White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro. When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared.

And later:

Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquillity to equality. In a sense the white liberal has been victimized with some of the same ambivalence that has been a constant part of our national heritage.

King writes a lot about this American ambivalence, which he sees at the root of the kind of backsliding I mentioned at the top. It’s a loosely stated dissatisfaction with injustice, but a lack of commitment to dismantling it, which, to the extent that it can be overcome, is the key to making actual progress.

It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism. America had a master race in the antebellum South. Reestablishing it with a resurgent Klan and a totally disenfranchised lower class would realize the dream of too many extremists on the right.

The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.

People who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality is pretty on the nose, right? There’s endless discussion of polarization and the two sides of America right now, often framed as an evenly split breach that must be closed. King instead describes polarization of American opinion differently, in a way that feels more like where we are at in 2021, although you could argue about whether he’s being too generous in his assessment that a great majority are merely apathetic. But however you cut the percentages, you’ve got one camp actively pursuing equality, one camp seeking the “reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism,” and some other swath of white Americans perhaps opposed to racism, but accepting it to varying degrees should it serve their interests.

The unity that King calls for is not some middle ground with extremists on the right, but drawing in more people from the middle to work toward shared ideals—“finding that creative minority of the concerned from the ofttimes apathetic majority” and forming a coalition working toward multiracial democracy. “America must be a nation in which its multiracial people are partners in power,” he writes.

But Americans must unite, not merely in working toward the goal of shared power, but also in the active weeding out of racism, expressly combatting people with evil purposes instead of merely waiting for their influence to pass like a thunderstorm.

The fourth challenge we face is to unite around powerful action programs to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice. We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.

We must get rid of the false notion that there is some miraculous quality in the flow of time that inevitably heals all evils. There is only one thing certain about time, and that is that it waits for no one. If it is not used constructively, it passes you by.

In this generation the children of darkness are still shrewder than the children of light. They are always zealous and conscientious in using time for their evil purposes. If they want to preserve segregation and tyranny, they do not wait on time; they make time their fellow conspirator. If they want to defeat a fair housing bill, they don’t say to the public, “Be patient, wait on time, and our cause will win.” Rather, they use time to spend big money, to disseminate half-truths, to confuse the popular mind. But the forces of light cautiously wait, patiently pray and timidly act. So we end up with a double destruction: the destructive violence of the bad people and the destructive silence of the good people.

Equally fallacious is the notion that ethical appeals and persuasion alone will bring about justice. This does not mean that ethical appeals must not be made. It simply means that those appeals must be undergirded by some form of constructive coercive power.

So those are some of the passages that are on my mind as Monday approaches, and as we hear speeches about unity and witness a maddening urge to settle back into business as usual. In all of these moments in which we’re asked to reach across to the other side and get back to the project of America, I’m reminded to always ask, in pursuit of what, exactly? What are we meant to unite behind? And if it’s not multiracial democracy that serves all equally, then it’s not a unity we should be pursuing. It’s not unity at all.

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Links

• The best, most clear-eyed response I’ve seen post Capitol attack. Waleed Shahid and Nelini Stamp on the structural flaws in our democratic systems that perpetuate Trumpism.
• Surprising nobody, participants and supporters of the Capitol mob include nearly 30 off duty cops from a dozen police departments, Republican attorneys general, several Republican state legislators, possibly Republican federal legislators, and an Olympic gold medalist who went to the same high school as my parents.
• Over 250 Black police have sued the Capitol Police since 2001 for allegations of racism. Also, Capitol police have absentmindedly left several loaded guns in multiple bathrooms, one of which was found by a small child. People also reported QAnon Shaman hanging around the Capitol a month ago and police said, eh he only has a spear seems fine.
• About half of Republicans polled dispute the election results. Almost a quarter of Republican elites also don’t accept Biden’s win, especially those who deny the existence of structural racism and are prone to conspiracy theories.
• The cosplay of the extreme right follows a long tradition of ridiculous symbols and dress up in political insurgencies.
• Trump did nothing during the Capitol attack and couldn’t even be reached because he was busy watching it on TV. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.”
• Historian Jill Lepore asks what we should call the sixth of January. One option? A race riot.
• You all saw that fucked up story about the Kushners not letting the secret service use their toilet, but Jamie pointed out the best part is that they were using the Obamas’ garage “until someone made a huge poop mess and the Obama secret service was like byeeee.”
• Ride hailing services increase car ownership.
• Even if you never get COVID, the pandemic is ruining your body.
• Do “elder Goths” hold the secret to aging successfully? Love the term elder goths, and also the answer is yes.

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Listening

Let’s do one more this one is quieter.

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Thank you for the nice feedback on last week’s issue. To be honest, responses to big awful news events are some of my least favorite things to write in the moment, but on the selfish side it can also be kind of therapeutic to work through them on the page.

Speaking of therapeutic, this has been a tough couple of weeks right? New strain, more cases, political violence looming.

I gotta say that article about how the pandemic is destroying all of our bodies (and minds!) really hit home for me. It was a tough read, but also kind of reassuring to see in print that, even for people like myself who are, relatively, extremely fortunate, what the world is going through has consequences for all, and they are not to be dismissed. It hurts everyone. Political violence, too, as AOC pointed out after the attack, has a way of stirring up personal trauma for many of us that we may not even realize.

I mentioned last week that I’m reading Zadie Smith’s Intimations, a series of essays written during the pandemic. She has this great part where she compares suffering to concepts like class and privilege, and the limits of mitigating suffering through awareness of others’ experiences. (My emphasis added)

Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating your conception of reality. But it can at least be brought to mind; acknowledged, comprehended, even atoned for through transformative action. By comparing your relative privilege with that of others you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside of your world—if the will is there to do it. Suffering is not like that. Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like “privilege.”

Not all of what we’re going through is necessarily suffering, as we know from reading Rebecca Solnit. There’s strength to be found, connections to be forged, joy to be experienced. But we are all experiencing pain on some level, and it’s important to remember that. And, of course, it’s also important to remember that it didn’t have to be this way.

Tate

Wednesday was not a blip or a culmination or a last gasp of Trumpism

There is much to be said about Wednesday, not the least of which involves what we should even call it. An insurrection, a coup, an attack, a violent mob, a failed assassination attempt, this last one surfacing with new photos of nooses and bundles of zipties in the crowd. White supremacy and toxic masculinity in the flesh, four years of smashing, looting, pissing and shitting on the floor of government made literal by these grinning men with wild eyes, high on the knowledge that there are no real consequences for people like them. That all sounds accurately descriptive in its own way, but also incomplete.

Wednesday was one of those moments like 9/11 or the early days of COVID that offer such an acute distillation of What America Is, such a dizzying flash of truth that even if it’s a truth you already basically acknowledge, if you look at it right in the eyes or the buffalo horns as the case may be, you’re going to eventually throw up and then your brain is going to explode.

Maybe we can try to understand Wednesday by what it was not. It was not the conservative version of Black Lives Matter demonstrations—not equatable in scale or strategy, much less intent, one an authoritarian display of violence stoked by disinformation, the other a mass revolt against authoritarian violence. It was not merely internet trolls. I’m also wary of deploying the term terrorism, not because it’s too harsh, but because, as Farhad Ebrahimi pointed out, that is a dangerous word, and as Luke O’Neil wrote, such violence is always used as an excuse to expand the police state under the banner of anti-terrorism.

It was also not a historic aberration or a mere fringe element. It’s been said often, but I think it’s important to consider the way in which this is the continuation of a history of white violence—protecting power and privilege in response to demands for basic human rights—and the way in which it is the consequence of an ecosystem of disinformation designed to protect that power. Because both factors suggest this kind of thing is only going to keep happening.

Part of me feels like these are pretty obvious things to say, but Democrats and Republicans alike quickly fell back on the narrative of “this is not us,” labeling this as part of the blemish of Trump and a relatively small number of his supporters and we need to push it aside and move on. Another way to cast this misinterpretation is that the country is tragically divided between two equal and opposite political viewpoints, and that Trump just pushed the fringe of one side over the edge.

This ignores the fact that the attack, which happened the very morning after the pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church was elected as the first Black senator from Georgia, is part of a long record of white violence in America—extrajudicial but often allowed or encouraged by authorities—in response to the expansion or defense of rights for non-white people. As Adam Serwer wrote yesterday, it was an attack on multiracial democracy, a “young, fragile experiment” that only dates back to 1965. White Americans have used violence to resist multiracial democracy as long as the country has existed, and continue to do so. Serwer points to the only coup d’état to take place on American soil, in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, when a former confederate soldier led a mob that killed dozens, shattered a Black middle class community, and overthrew the city government at gunpoint. It’s just one resonant example plucked from centuries that span slavery, Jim Crow, 6,500 lynchings, the Klan, the Proud Boys, the Trail of Tears, Tulsa, Birmingham, Boston schools, and on and on and on.

"During the Civil War, the Confederate Army never reached the Capitol. The rebel flag, to my knowledge, had never been flown inside the halls of Congress until Wednesday," @ClintSmithIII writes: https://t.co/BCTrvXRP0b

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) January 8, 2021

Violent white backlash in this current wave is owned and operated by the Republican Party, but it is in no way unique to the GOP, nor is it intrinsically a part of it, although it has thrived within the party’s narratives of personal liberty and government overreach. It doesn’t reflect the hearts of all Americans all the time, but none of us can wash our hands of it.

The other misrepresentation of what happened Wednesday is that it was merely an extreme expression of common, legitimate political beliefs. As Marco Rubio put it, “Millions of Americans had doubts about the election but didn’t sign up for a riot.” The rising extremism of Trump’s followers is dangerous, but the millions of Americans who had doubts about the election and didn’t sign up for a riot are at least as much of a problem for this country as those who did, as they are living in a manufactured reality in which violent resistance becomes a natural outcome. That reality was corroborated by 147 Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn a legitimate election based on nothing, a thank you and a pat on the back for the mob that was smashing in the building’s windows just hours earlier.

Good time to revisit this thread of ~1000 videos of cops beating the shit out of peaceful protestors https://t.co/6OAfDinkXC

— jake!!!! (@jek_tx) January 6, 2021

Yesterday, I was reminded of post-2016 election research on the media ecosystem that led to Trump’s victory in which the authors found that, contrary to common belief, social media does not inherently lead to polarization or belief in false information, nor are the left and right evenly divided up into their own custom realities. They did find significant media polarization, but it was asymmetrical, with one pole consuming a broad mix of mainstream and left-leaning media. The other pole was far to the right, isolated, and hyperpartisan, “an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community,” which researchers found was driven by extreme outlets like Breitbart that pulled other right-leaning media like Fox News into their orbit. And that orbit is full of shit.

So what you end up with is a significant chunk of the American population that believes that the true tragedy that occurred on Wednesday is—not that a nauseating pack of conspiracy theorists ransacked a government building—but that Democrats and immigrants and corrupt, majority non-white cities stole an election. While bullets were flying in the Capitol, our mild-mannered conservative family members were mourning on Facebook this sad day in which Democrats stole the United States from them.

As history professor Timothy Snyder wrote yesterday, “The claim that Trump won the election is a big lie. A big lie changes reality. To believe it, people must disbelieve their senses, distrust their fellow citizens, and live in a world of faith. A big lie demands conspiracy thinking, since all who doubt it are seen as traitors. A big lie undoes a society, since it divides citizens into believers and unbelievers. … A big lie must bring violence, as it has.”

There is, of course, a connection and a warning here about climate change. Another big lie—that climate change is not real—has been perpetrated for decades through a similar ecosystem of disinformation, as a way of similarly protecting power and wealth. And if this sounds like a reach, remember that for vulnerable communities and disproportionately for non-white people, climate justice is a fight for the right to exist. And for people who have not found climate change knocking at their door yet (keeping in mind nobody will escape it), the demands of those communities to exist are often viewed as a direct infringement on their own freedom and way of life. If there is any doubt of that, we only need remember the violence unleashed on the Standing Rock Sioux and other Native communities who defended their right to clean water as opposed to a new piece of fossil fuel infrastructure.

As we watch Trumpers storm the capital with guns. Just a reminder, this is what America did to Native protesting for clean water. pic.twitter.com/TzNyBWnB47

— Lucas Brown Eyes (@LucasBrownEyes) January 6, 2021

These parallels aren’t unique to the climate fight, but what we saw on Wednesday was not a blip or a culmination or a last gasp of Trumpism—it’s representative of a pervasive struggle in America for basic human rights across many interconnected issues, including climate and environmental justice. And when these struggles continue to come to a head in the future, and a large part of the population continues to be told relentlessly that something that rightfully belongs to them is being stolen, Wednesday will show its grinning, wild-eyed face, again and again.

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More people were arrested in the non-violent 2018 climate change protests at the Capitol than were arrested in the violent insurrection at the Capitol in 2021.

— Dr. Jacquelyn Gill (@JacquelynGill) January 7, 2021

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Links

• “Trump supporters across the country now believe that the nation has been stolen from them. Whether they rule by force, fraud, or law, their rule is the only acceptable outcome.”
• Police are more than twice as likely to attempt to break up a left-wing protest than a right-wing one, and when they do intervene, they are more likely to use force.
• These 147 Republicans voted to overturn a presidential election.
• “White supremacy was on full display. The world saw it.”
• “These guys were intent on inflicting suffering and punishment on other people — it’s the opposite of civil disobedience. And oddly, it was met with the opposite reaction.”
• “Tomorrow, these hundreds of MAGA sycophants and the millions who support them will take off their stupid hats and Punisher cosplay attire and walk among us again.”
• “It is America if you know any history deeper than the United States’ greatest hits. This coup deeply echoes the end of Reconstruction, the defining political realignment of our age that the vast majority of us knows nothing about.”
• Capitol rioters planned for weeks in plain sight.
• The U.S. Capitol police force has 2,300 officers to protect 16 acres of ground, almost three times the number of officers in the entire city of Minneapolis. “Was there a structural feeling that well, these are a bunch of conservatives, they’re not going to do anything like this? Quite possibly.”
• AHP on how to work through a coup.
• Emily Atkin’s fantastic defense of Sunrise Movement against dudes like Matt Yglesias who believe that climate reality is too politically radical.
• “Let’s be honest: Crime coverage is terrible. It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism.”
• Communication and cooperation between trees within a forest challenge ideas of cutthroat competition for resources in nature. (ht to my friend Pat who forwarded this one to me)

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Listening

Svalbard, Listen to Someone

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Comics

Dirty Plotte, The Complete Julie Doucet

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Reading

Zadie Smith, Intimations

“What we were completely missing, however, was the concept of death itself, death absolute. The kind of death that comes to us all, irrespective of position. Death absolute is the truth of our existence as a whole, of course, but America has rarely been philosophically inclined to consider existence as a whole, preferring instead to attack death as a series of discrete problems. Wars on drugs, cancer, poverty, and so on. …

Untimely death has rarely been random in these United States. It has usually had a precise physiognomy, location and bottom line. For millions of Americans, it’s always been a war.”

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I know this is everyone’s favorite part when I tell a fun little story or a joke or something, but I’m out of steam. I do want to give some space here to celebrate the Senate race in Georgia, especially Raphael Warnock’s historic win. One of the many tragedies of this week is that the voter turnout and amazing work that organizers have been doing there was overwhelmed by the devastating news. I know this was a bleak issue, but our better natures really do win sometimes. We’re not doomed and we can learn and change. We can be angry and sad and hopeful at the same time. Lot of things true at once. Lot of emojis (which is my nickname for emotions) swirling around in there. Get some sleep.

Tate