Democrats win control of the White House, Senate, and House. In the new president’s first year, he announces a climate bill with fanfare: it’s America’s plan to lead the world again. The largest environmental NGOs cheer and hope with bated breath. Then, against broad corporate opposition, the climate bill dies in quiet misery, never given a Senate floor vote, and our planet keeps cooking faster toward disaster.

That’s the story not only of Joe Biden’s climate failure in 2021, but also of Barack Obama’s in 2009. The biggest difference between the two scenarios is that the 2009 bill met failure even with sixty Democrats in the Senate, undermining the idea that Joe Biden’s bill would have passed if only we had put a little more elbow grease into electing Democrats.

Pushed by Green New Deal activists on the campaign trail, Biden proposed a climate law with a few feints in the Left’s direction. Abandoning 2009’s focus to make a federal “cap-and-trade” market for climate pollution, Biden’s Build Back Better budget instead planned public payments for corporations to build cleaner energy and transit infrastructure, paired with expanded social spending. A few programs for cleaning up toxic sites and special grants to poorer, less white cities gestured toward environmental justice, even though they fell far short of Green New Deal visions to guarantee universal, tangible benefits like housing and transit. By packaging climate measures in $3.5 trillion in federal spending, Biden’s plans were trumpeted by some progressive commentators as a “a watershed in US economic doctrine,” poised to end austerity’s reign.