A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Senator Joe Manchin speaks to reporters about the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Anna Moneymaker/Getty |
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As news of the climate compromise broke last week, a lot of people experienced a sense of relief and hope for the first time in a long while. Several TNR contributors wrote to me that evening, delighted that they’d have to rewrite the gloomier essays I’d assigned to them. The bill, cannily marketed as the Inflation Reduction Act, is the culmination of over a year of frustrating negotiations between Democratic leaders and the noted coal baron and climate policy holdout Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The top-line summary is that it contains $369 billion of climate spending, with the bulk of that going to various programs to jump-start the energy transition—like clean energy tax credits and renewables investment. After months of hearing that U.S. leaders couldn’t even manage to agree on legislation to incentivize heat pumps and solar power, it’s easy to see why this is welcome news. There is, however, another side to this compromise. As TNR’s Kate Aronoff points out this morning, Manchin’s price for supporting this climate package has been steep: expedited environmental review processes for fossil fuel infrastructure, a go-ahead for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in his state, and the devastating requirement that any new leases for wind and solar in the next decade can only proceed if the Department of the Interior is also offering leases for oil and gas drilling. |
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{{#if }} Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help.
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—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Understanding this bill, in short, requires that we hold two contradictory concepts in our heads at the same time: Congress passing this climate package is a huge win for the security of life on this planet. But also, this package contains stuff that is unambiguously dangerous. Thus far, as Kate points out, “those who have criticized the bill for boosting, rather than curtailing, fossil fuels have been smeared as wreckers, or ignored.” At the very least, though, it’s worth honestly acknowledging the bill’s drawbacks. Pipelines—both the Mountain Valley Pipeline and others that could be approved under the expedited review process—affect the communities and ecosystems they cut through in multiple ways, in addition to increasing global emissions. “When it comes to pipelines,” Nick Martin wrote for TNR back in 2019, “the simple fact is that it is a matter of when, not if, a series of micro-fractures or a loose bolt or a lightning strike will send the pipe’s contents into the ground and potentially into the drinking water or farmland of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of citizens and wildlife. The maps and the data are all widely available to peruse for one’s own horror: As of 2016, the United States was averaging one crude oil spill every other day, or 200 barrels every 24 hours.” Fossil fuel companies are notoriously bad at not just stopping those spills, but even at reporting them accurately. We’ll have more coverage of the implications of the compressed environmental review process. But as Kate argued in her latest, that’s not the only issue here. “If the modeling on the carbon cost-benefit analysis [of this bill] is to be believed—that every additional ton of greenhouse gas emissions generated by the bill’s fossil fuel provisions would correspond to 24 tons of emissions saved—then this deal looks much better than nothing.” But with economic troubles looming, some of those benefits might disappear. Simply put, “fossil fuels stand on a stronger footing entering the uncertainty ahead,” and “this could drive a perverse trajectory: Rising energy costs and new subsidies for the fossil fuel industry could punt an energy transition further and further into the future, all while the clean energy ventures the IRA would spur along stand to simultaneously pad already high energy company profits. Actual clean energy companies, meanwhile, could face a reckoning in an economic downturn.”
None of this is reason for despair or for not “taking the win,” as the saying goes. As several TNR contributors have pointed out over the past month, the fight to save lives from global warming needs joy and good news and optimism. But there’s reason for caution—and for remembering that this fight is certainly not over.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Finally, the Biden administration has appointed a leadership team to respond to the monkeypox outbreak. (TNR regular Melody Schreiber talked to experts appalled by the lack of federal coordination on this issue last week.) FEMA administrator Robert Fenton will serve as national monkeypox response coordinator, while Demetre Daskalakis, who directs the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, will serve as deputy coordinator. Epidemiologists seem particularly pleased by the Daskalakis pick. |
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PFAS can now be found in rainwater around the world, and at levels exceeding safety limits, according to a new study conducted by researchers in Sweden. (PFAS are man-made chemicals that have been linked to a wide range of adverse health outcomes.) |
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Another bonkers precipitation tally—this one from southeastern Illinois, which received that much rain in under 12 hours. As The Washington Post notes, “It’s the third 1-in-1,000-year rain event in the Lower 48 states in about a week.” TNR regular Liza Featherstone wrote about America’s escalating flood risks and denial of the scale of the problem earlier this year—it’s worth a read as these examples accumulate. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
ProPublica has published a terrific feature on Barbadian former Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s campaign to change how the world perceives and deals with sovereign debt—and why that’s a battle for the nation’s very survival as the climate crisis accelerates. I can’t recommend this piece highly enough—especially if you’re skeptical of the argument that debt relief is a form of climate policy: |
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In poor nations around the world—from the deserts of North Africa to the low-lying islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean—rising sovereign debt is becoming a hidden but decisive aspect of the climate crisis.… In the zero-sum game of budgets, that means less money for shoring up infrastructure that is already in shambles. A recent analysis by Eurodad, the European debt-and-finance advocacy organization, found that over the last six years, Latin American and Caribbean countries have slashed what they pay on anything non-debt-related by 22 percent. As Mottley explained to me, “We always have to put aside debt money first.” The warming planet has turned this into a self-perpetuating cycle: Were it not for the disasters worsened by climate change, much of the region’s debt might not exist in the first place. Jamaica’s debt, for example, can be tied to the response to Hurricane Gilbert more than three decades ago. Grenada’s is in part because of Hurricane Ivan in 2004.... Throughout, the debts have been collected. They were collected as the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis lingered and as a pandemic decimated tenuous health care systems and tourist-reliant economies. They continue to be collected despite a climate crisis that is caused almost entirely by the copious fossil fuels that those same powerful creditor nations burned to industrialize and achieve their own wealth, the very wealth that undergirds the IMF. Caribbean nations are being asked, in a sense, to pay not only their own debts but the rest of the world’s debts, too, for all the progress it made while leaving the Caribbean behind. |
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What Subscribers Are Reading |
Eighteen months after he raised his fist to insurrectionists, the Missouri senator’s political project is stalled. |
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Red states are using the Dobbs decision to reach into blue states to try to change our way of life. They want a culture war? Let’s give ’em one. |
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