The Bad News: We’ve Been Here Before

At its core, the climate crisis is a product of bipartisan corruption and greed. Politicians bankrolled by oil and gas interests ignored scientists’ warnings and financed a fossil fuel economy knowing full well that it would destroy the ecosystem that supports all life on the planet.

Republicans were more explicit about their corruption, actively denying the scientific facts and resurrecting their own version of a Flat Earth Society that reassured voters that nothing has to change and everything will be fine. Democrats settled on a different, but similarly pernicious, form of climate denialism: They acknowledged the science and issued progressive sounding press releases about the environment, and then they continued supporting fossil fuel development.

This strategy worked for many MSNBC-addled liberals, who seem to most value rhetorical flourish. Focused on the red-versus-blue war, they want politicians who deliver inspiring speeches that make them feel smart, smug, and superior to the troglodyte Republicans — but they seem to care far less about whether the words eventually become legislation, policy, and law.

The cynical formula crescendoed in the presidency of Barack Obama, who campaigned in climate poetry and then governed in fossil fuel prose.

When Obama won the 2008 election, liberals lauded him for declaring: “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

Little noticed was the concurrent Obama-Biden pledge to “promote the responsible domestic production of oil and natural gas,” “prioritize the construction of the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline,” and extract “up to 85 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil remains stranded in existing fields.”

And so four years after that campaign, Obama delivered a speech in Cushing, Oklahoma which perfectly summarized his actual legacy — and which future post-apocalypse historians (if any survive) will likely see as one of the pivotal moments in the cataclysm:

“Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years,” he said in a speech promising to boost pipeline capacity to flood the world with even more fossil fuels. “Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline[s] to encircle the Earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place — right now.”

You can try to tout Obama’s support for stuff like the Paris Accords and electric vehicles, but his own boasts illustrate a record of climate denialism, as did Obama’s 2018 declaration one month after an IPCC report warned that the world only had a dozen years to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

“American energy production, you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president,” Obama told a Texas audience then. “Suddenly America is like, the biggest oil producer — that was me, people,” he said, adding: “Just say, ‘Thank you,’ please.”

Obama: "Suddenly America is the largest oil producer, that was me people … say thank you." pic.twitter.com/VfQfX1SR0x

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 28, 2018

The self-congratulation came only two years after Obama tweeted: “Climate change is happening now. Denial is dangerous.” And in that contrast, we see the fundamental formula at work.

Obama, like so many politicians, seems to believe that regardless of what’s happening in the physical world, he and his fellow elites can just tweet, Instagram influence, and speechify their way through it, and nobody will care. And that calculation has not been wrong. Indeed, Obama’s continued popularity shows how in the age of climate denial, liberal politics has anchored itself in its own form of reality denialism whereby good enough rhetoric with a self-serious tone from telegenic, well-educated politicians deters culpability for policies that jeopardize millions of lives. Just start making streaming content, put out a cool summer reading list, throw an oceanside gala with celebrities, deploy a shock-and-awe social media presence, and it’s all good.

But this isn’t merely a sleight of hand. There’s also an ideology here — or, more accurately, a sociopathy. Obama’s presidency was an eight-year quest to secure the vaunted “pragmatic” label from corporate media’s bipartisanship fetishists, no matter the human cost of that pursuit.

From the all-too-small stimulus, to the watered-down Wall Street reform bill, to the Heritage Foundation–originated health care legislation to the push for Social Security cuts to the approval of toxic chemicals to the Oklahoma speech’s embrace of drill-baby-drill, most major Obama initiatives represented an attempt to appease the Right and punch a left that the Democratic president’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called “fucking retarded.”

The Obama administration’s top-line goal was to prove to Washington pundits and corporate donors that the Democratic Party will always prioritize compromise — even when it means compromising the lifespans of millions of people.

All of this was enabled and fortified by Democrats who enjoyed giant majorities in Congress — and yet did nothing to change the dynamic. On climate in particular, that was most obvious: the Democratic House did pass a cap-and-trade bill, but Obama abandoned it in yet another effort to reach out to Republicans, and therefore it went nowhere in the Democratic Senate.

Obama and congressional Democrats then helped the GOP lift the crude oil export ban, and Democrats’ support for natural gas was so aggressive, one oil and gas law firm said it was a “case of policy continuity from Obama to Trump.”

The Good News: A Line in the Sand (Maybe)

Joe Biden, congressional Democrats, and Democratic primary voters were not innocent bystanders in all this. Biden was the vice president and had his name on the original initiatives to flood the world market with American fossil fuels during the climate crisis. Primary voters rewarded him with the presidential nomination as he was lauded by the fossil fuel industry for campaigning against a fracking ban — just as those same voters continue rejecting progressive climate candidates in favor of corporate-friendly incrementalists.

Colorado’s 2020 Senate primary was the iconic example of that trend: A reliably blue state’s Democratic electorate obediently followed orders from party leaders in Washington and gave its US Senate nomination to one of America’s most ardently pro–fossil fuel politicians — all while the local media and political class scoffed at his progressive primary opponent for airing an ad rightly predicting that climate change would prevent Coloradans from safely going outside.

That past was a prelude to the last few months, which have seen Biden begin to pull an Obama.

On the public stage, he’s offered climate poetry, telling America that climate is the “number-one issue facing humanity,” insisting that “we can’t wait to tackle the climate crisis” and doing photo-ops driving an electric truck. But like Obama, he’s breaking all sorts of campaign promises and governing in fossil fuel prose, increasing drilling permits on federal lands to George W. Bush levels, backing Trump-era fossil fuel projects, touting auto-emission rules weaker than Obama’s, and deploying his Energy Secretary to promise that fossil fuels still have a future.

Now, Biden is championing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that omits major climate initiatives — and that legislation is moving through a Congress whose most powerful Senate Democrat profits off the coal business, and whose most powerful House Democrat laughed at the “green dream or whatever.” It doesn’t help that the Democratic Party is run by a gerontocracy that can laugh off the emergency, knowing they won’t be around to suffer through the worst consequences of its climate compromises and capitulations.

Clearly, if nothing fundamentally changes in our politics and for the donor class that is disproportionately driving the climate crisis, then everything in our natural world is going to change for the worse, with ecocidal consequences on a scale that our species has never experienced, and might not survive.

Thankfully, that reality seems to finally be seeping into the consciousness of at least a handful of lawmakers — and even more thankfully, the narrowly divided congressional chambers mean only a small group of legislators are needed to actually alter the legislative dynamics.

In recent weeks, progressive lawmakers from Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-NY, to Sen. Ed Markey, D-MA, have promoted a simple mantra: “No Climate, No Deal.” The idea is that they will vote down any bipartisan infrastructure bill until it is coupled with legislation that could be the last chance to mobilize the country for the epic battle against climate change, before Republicans win back Congress.

This ultimatum is required in order to prevent Biden, Republicans, and corporate Democrats from doing what they clearly want to do: Simply pass an infrastructure bill that props up the fossil fuel industry with subsidies and road infrastructure, and then leave for vacation without any new climate initiatives as the world incinerates.

Up until now, progressive lawmakers have made a lot of noise and a lot of sententious declarations about the need for bold action and fearlessness — and then they’ve refused to follow up that sound with the fury of withheld votes. Most notably, they did not withhold their votes on the COVID relief bill in order to force the inclusion of a $15 minimum wage — and now that much-promised initiative has been surgically erased from the discourse, like the memory of an old flame in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

So yeah, it’s fair to remain circumspect that these Democratic lawmakers would actually follow through on their new ultimatum, for fear of being labeled seditious traitors to the party — which is now considered the highest form of treason in American politics. Such skepticism is especially warranted since these legislators have not made clear what they consider “climate” and exactly what they are demanding for a deal.

Then again, what ultimately constitutes “climate” in any agreement may be somewhat vague, but it’s kinda like the obscenity standard — you know it when you see it. Plus, Democratic lawmakers even threatening to act as a climate voting bloc is already providing far more pressure on Biden than Obama ever faced from his own party when he was bragging about his unrelenting support for the fossil fuel industry. And that pressure has at least produced an initial reconciliation proposal that is somewhat serious. So that’s something.

As the IPCC report suggests, whether or not these Democrats follow through and force a climate confrontation in Congress — and whether or not their own constituents demand they hold out for legislation that genuinely meets this moment of crisis — could be the difference between a livable planet and a hellscape.

It’s the difference between Democrats in ten years bragging “That was me, people!” about rescuing the world from disaster, or them hunkering down at their Martha’s Vineyard compounds after they’ve laid waste to the planet.