Hi there.
Before we get into today’s main topic, I want to briefly discuss what’s going on in Afghanistan. This morning, a terror attack at the Kabul airport left dozens dead, including at least four American Marines. I’ll have a lot of links on the situation tomorrow, but for now, I want to zero in on one thing: the group believed to be responsible, and what we call them.
Now, we don’t know for sure who is responsible. This is a situation that is still unfolding. But early signs point to a terror group commonly known as ISIS-K, the Afghanistan chapter of the notorious terror network commonly referred to in the media and by most politicians as ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) or ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). In this newsletter, I will never refer to them by those names. The beliefs and practices do not reflect Islam, and referring to these thugs as an Islamic state only serves to legitimize their mission.
Rather, I will always refer to them as Daesh, as John Kerry did during his tenure as Secretary of State, and as I encourage you to do. As NBC News explains, “Daesh” is a rough English transliteration of the Arabic acronym for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but it has other meanings, including “bigot,” making it a useful sort of doublespeak in the Arabic-speaking community. And that’s why, importantly, members of Daesh loathe the term. They consider calling their organization Daesh a crime punishable by cutting out the offender’s tongue. That’s reason enough for me to call them Daesh.
Now, moving on to our main topic.
For the next few weeks, I’ll be dedicating Thursdays to looking at different aspects of the $3.5 trillion spending bill slowly working its way through Congress. It’s a bill not without controversy.
We recently saw a standoff between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and moderate House Democrats who are eager to pass the bipartisan infrastructure package, but skeptical of this separate spending bill.
Those moderates were led by Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who, in a maddening interview with The Atlantic, tried to make the case that progressives are holding the infrastructure package hostage by insisting that it be passed in tandem with the larger spending bill, what he and his fellow moderates were trying to do— ensure that the infrastructure bill was passed before even debating the spending bill— was not holding one bill hostage for the sake of the other. Any rational observer could understand that what the moderates were doing was actually worse.
Luckily, as Politico reports, Pelosi managed to work her magic (as she almost always does), and the moderates folded. But many obstacles remain for the spending bill, particularly in the form of moderate Senate Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who remain insistent that they won’t support the bill at its current price tag. On the other hand, Senator Bernie Sanders is on a national tour, according to Politico, making a very strong case for why moderate, blue collar voters should be ecstatic about this bill.
But enough about the political maneuvers. I want to talk about climate change, and how this bill will fight it.
One of the bill’s biggest proposals, which will almost certainly survive the moderates’ chopping block, involves offering major subsidies for solar, wind, and nuclear energy, as well as (perhaps a bit less likely, given Manchin’s ties to the coal industry) imposing new financial penalties on some fossil fuel companies (although it’s also unclear whether natural gas will be included). The hope is that this will finally bring clean energy mainstream— more precisely, the goal is to bring the United States to 80% clean energy by the end of the decade. A recent column from Paul Krugman in the New York Times shows that we’re already well on our way—President Obama oversaw major subsidies that brought solar energy from being prohibitively expensive to being one of the cheapest sources of energy, and European leaders did the same for wind energy.
The other major climate-related spending will be helping consumers go green— specifically, creating new tax credits and federal programs to aide American households in buying electric vehicles and improving energy efficiency within their homes. Plus, there’s a little-talked-about (and thus non-controversial) plan in the current proposal to pour money into researching exciting new technologies that could help reduce American pollution. Some climate activists are also hoping to see some sort of carbon tariff— a tax on imports from countries with major carbon footprints, like China— but that’s far from a sure thing. It’s an expense that would ultimately be absorbed by consumers who would face rising prices on those imported goods, which means that no matter how good it may be for fighting climate change, it’s a bit of a political third rail.
Ultimately, there should be no cost considered too high to fight climate change. We’ve discussed the UN’s dire diagnosis, and Elizabeth Kolbert talks more in the New Yorker. Tens of millions of Americans in the Western United States are facing a new water shortage. A North Dakota drought is wiping out livestock. Europe has suffered horrible floods due to climate change. So has Tennessee. In the NYT, Greta Thunberg and other young climate activists make an impassioned plea for adults to finally do our part in fighting the climate crisis with every tool at our disposal, lest we make life worse than it needs to be for the next generation.
With all of this in mind, who can look at the climate portion of the spending bill and say with a straight face that it’s just too much?
Thank you for caring enough to read.
Be safe. Drink water. You are loved.