A President is a Trojan Horse

What will happen if the climate work this administration has set in motion comes to a halt?

Dear friends,

A few weeks ago, I attended a conference with people working within California’s local governments to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and mitigate the effects of the climate crisis. It was a gathering filled with conversations about heat pumps, gas line decommissioning, and energy efficiency. I felt a little out of place, as much of this territory is new to me, and I had to ask several strangers to decode the acronyms being used on the stage.

Meanwhile, outside the confines of the conference center, a multiweek heatwave had just begun. The unbearable temperatures outside reminded us at every turn that this work is urgent, that without it the periods of heat that many can’t survive without air conditioning will likely get longer, hotter, and more frequent.

People were there from all over California to discuss the wonky nuts and bolts of the energy transition in a rapidly changing state—such as how building codes can support electrification, how Indigenous tribes can afford solar panels, and how low-income neighborhoods can be outfitted with e-bikes. And beneath all that planning was a widely shared assumption: that this moment is unique within our lifetimes, and it’s one that is being shaped by an unprecedented set of investments by the federal government via the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Much of that money hasn’t yet been distributed, and I heard many people talk—as if with all their fingers were crossed— about all they might do if the money flows their way. According to a detailed Politico investigation published in April, the Biden administration had spent less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion it has set aside to execute “the four laws that make up the Biden legacy,” for direct investments on climate, energy, and infrastructure.

And of course there was also an elephant in the room even larger than the heat: I heard almost no mention of what might happen to this funding stream—and the work it’s making possible—if Trump is elected in November. And yet surely everyone in the room knows that it’s possible—even likely—that the agencies doling out the money, such as the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, could be debilitated or functionally dismantled if a second, more organized and considerably more planned out Trump administration were to pick up where the last one left off.  The Politico article reads:

If Trump wins, “from day one” he could—and probably would—halt all pending grant approvals and applications until the new administration can scrutinize them, predicted Mandy Gunasekara, who was chief of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency during his presidency.  “Anything that has not yet left the door is going to be paused and then reviewed and then acted upon,” she said in an interview.

I bring all this up not because I think all the climate investments that stand to be funded by the IRA make sense. They don’t. And, like many right now, I am not particularly interested in or wedded to Biden as a candidate.

But I’ve seen how many of the people working hard to prevent the worst-case climate scenario are responding to the Biden administration’s investment. They’re taking it seriously and rising to the occasion. And either a Biden or a Harris administration would most likely continue that trajectory.

I admit that I don’t have very high expectations of our political system. Until we have less money in politics in general, we’ll likely continue to have a system shaped more by corporate interest than the will of the people. (Although I have been heartened to watch the campaign finance reform movement come back to life recently, with bills limiting campaign contribution size put forward this year in states like Oregon, Virginia and Maine). But I still think the work the Biden administration is doing on climate is worth fighting for.

Photo by Ayşe İpek.

Despite all the bluster and churn of the day-to-day media landscape, we don’t really vote for presidents, we vote for administrations. And I have come to think of presidential administrations like human-shaped Trojan Horses filled with thousands of people. 

Yes, most of those people work slowly, and many have a vested interest in the status quo. But in the case of the current administration, some appear to see the writing on the wall when it comes to the existential threat the climate crisis poses, and they have their sleeves rolled up.

To me, that seems worth voting for, regardless of the name attached. Especially considering the fact that the other Trojan Horse in the race is filled­—wall to wall­—with fire.

Climate news you may have missed

Hurricane injustice

Scientists know that the temperature of the ocean plays a role in the development of hurricanes, and the waters off the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico have been breaking temperature records for months. So it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Hurricane Beryl—the storm that hit Granada and other parts of the Caribbean on June 30 before downgrading into a tropical storm and then gathering steam again and hitting Texas—was the earliest storm to become a category 5 hurricane in history.

But it doesn’t appear that anyone was anticipating the need to support the Caribbean islands in a moment of crisis.

Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines—where the storm wreaked havoc, ripping up trees and mangroves and tearing the roofs off the majority of homes—took the opportunity to comment on what he sees as a lack of climate action on the part of wealthy countries. He called the United Nations Climate Change Conferences “largely a talk shop,” and added that, “For the major emitters of greenhouse gases…you are getting a lot of talking, but you are not seeing a lot of action—as in making money available to small-island developing states and other vulnerable countries.”

At a press briefing, Grenada’s prime minister, Dickon Mitchell said, “We are no longer prepared to accept that it’s ok for us to constantly suffer significant, clearly demonstrated loss and damage arising from climatic events and be expected to rebuild year after year while the countries that are responsible for creating this situation—and exacerbating this situation—sit idly by.”

AI carumba

The staggering amount of energy that emerging artificial intelligence AI technology requires—and the staggering emissions it causes—was all over the news this week after Google announced its emissions had climbed 48 percent in the last five years due to its expanding use of AI, and it has no serious plan to bring them back down.

Microsoft is no less invested in AI. In May it released a report acknowledging that the company’s emissions have gone up by 30 percent, largely due to the construction of new data centers to power its AI product. According to tech industry critic Paris Marx, “The company now has more than 5 gigawatts (GW) of installed server capacity, which is more than Hong Kong or Portugal’s annual energy consumption, and it set an internal goal of significantly accelerating new capacity to an additional 1 GW in the first half of 2024, reaching an additional 1.5 GW to be added in the first half of 2025 alone.”

These companies are investing billions in building new data centers and expanding existing ones. And they seem to see AI as key to an inevitable “march forward,” even if that means sending global emissions off a cliff. Both companies claim that AI will eventually come up with its own solutions — most likely bioengineering—that would zero out their carbon emissions. And of course, that causes me to wonder what will happen if and when the chatbots eventually determine, based on the existing science literature, that we need to move away from fossil fuels entirely?

As Marx put it in his recent response, “The tech industry wants to head off public opposition before it becomes a real threat to its bottom line, but the fight against data centers and the generative AI tools they power is gearing up to be essential to determine who gets to chart our social and technological future.”

A cry from inside the belly of the beast

On a related note, I was surprised to see the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, publish a column called “Market forces are not enough to halt climate change.” In it, he points to the fact that despite growing efforts to decarbonize the global economy using electrification, the overall use of electricity—and therefore greenhouse gas emissions—are still going up due to the growth of the middle class in so-called developing nations.

And while he calls the degrowth movement “politically irrelevant,” and politically unacceptable, he then goes on to argue—to some readers’ amazement—that climate change is evidence of market failure and growth on the current trajectory must be stopped.

“The returns today’s investors seek imply that the welfare of future human beings is close to irrelevant,” writes Wolf. “This only makes sense if one can assume that the future will be fine. But what if the decisions investors are taking ensure it will not be? Then institutions—governments, evidently—must influence, if not override, those decisions.”

That last ditch turn toward “government, evidently”—a realm that Wolf and others like him have been working to minimize and weaken for generations—as the solution is the biggest tell in the piece. It reminds me of a child who, after years of claiming they don’t need to be parented, looks toward their parents to rescue them from disaster. And it’s a rare acknowledgment that the rubber may finally be hitting the road on the so-called free market.

The pushback

1.  Bill McKibben was arrested on Monday with 45 other protesters after participating in a mock funeral procession in front of Citi Bank headquarters. Members of McKibben’s group, Third Act, have been turning up in front of Citi Bank branches all over the country in recent months to protest its investments in the oil and gas industry. “We are demanding that #WallStreet banks and financiers stop using our hard-earned retirement savings to fund the #climatecrisis,” read a post on the group’s official Twitter account.

2.  Twenty-seven supporters of the U.K.–based group Just Stop Oil were arrested in their homes last week after it was reported that the activists were planning to interrupt activity at London’s airports. Most reported that their homes were raided at 6 a.m. As one activist put it, “This was just the police going out and trying to hoover up as much information as possible, basically just a big phishing expedition…they were also looking to intimidate us out of action this summer.”

3.  Ten members of environmental activist group Mother Nature Cambodia were sentenced to six and eight years in prison after being convicted on charges of plotting against the government and insulting the king. The group’s members—which have a massive social media following and have received multiple international climate awards—were staging a mock funeral for natural resources in Cambodia—when the event was interrupted by the police.

The group’s co-founder, Alejandro Gonzalez-Davidson, told CNN that he believed the effort would backfire. “This week, a new generation of Cambodian activists was born —one that did not exist back in 2012,” he said. “Many young Cambodians are very engaged in the next steps and public campaigning must continue. There have been (arrests and jailings) before and each time, we come out stronger.”

4.  Young activists are sitting in trees in Oregon, where the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Rouge Gold Timber Sale project targets more than 2,000 acres of land, including a sizable number of old-growth trees.

On the brighter side

1.  The U.K.’s new Labour party prime minister, Keir Starmer, has reappointed Ed Miliband, the former energy and climate change secretary under Gordon Brown. The party’s manifesto on how to shepherd the country toward a zero emissions future was key to the Labour party’s win and now he’ll be tasked with following through.

“The public has just provided an enormous climate vote of confidence behind Labour’s ambitious policies, including for clean power by 2030, to end domestic production of oil and gas and to set out an expansive Warm Homes Plan to fix our leaky homes,” Juliet Phillips, a policy expert from the thinktank E3G, told Bloomberg—which called the election “a rare win against anti-climate campaigns.”

2.  The Biden administration took a step toward safeguarding 28 million acres of public lands in Alaska from oil and gas drilling by releasing an environmental impact report on the region with strong recommendations for preserving the land. The region—which is home to critical species, Indigenous hunting and fishing grounds and Bristol Bay, a key watershed and salmon fishery—was marked for development by the Trump administration. The report is an interim step, but according to the Washington Post it signals that Interior Secretary Haaland will likely release a final decision in the coming weeks.

3.  A new, fairly detailed study on climate change coverage in German media found that the “media prominence” of climate change has been on the rise due to coverage of United Nations Climate Change Conferences [COPs] as well as climate protests, which researchers found “generated more than three times as many articles on climate change than on the protests themselves.” That’s in sharp contrast to what happens here in the U.S., where the news tends to focus exclusively on the protests themselves and protesters of all kinds are increasingly being targeted by law makers and media alike. None the less, it’s heartening to see that when people take to the streets, it can impact the larger dialogue.

4.  The 13 teenagers who sued Hawaii’s department of transportation for failing to take action to lower greenhouse gas emissions have reached a settlement with the state. The agreement requires the state to “develop a holistic road map to transform its transportation system to achieve net-negative emissions by 2045.” (Watch an interview with two of the young people involved.)

Take care out there,
Twilight