I’m still very much processing the fact that the Senate just passed the first climate legislation in the history of the United States!!!! 51-50 w/ VP Harris breaking the tie and then a hundred million hours of debate on amendments. This comes 57 years after the first climate change warning was issued to a sitting US president.
Amazingly, that same year, the president of the American Petroleum Institute cited the report in a speech to members, saying, “The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out…”
It’s almost impossible to believe those words were ever uttered in light of the massive pivot in the 80s to sow doubt in climate science, with PR tactics from the people who said cigarettes were safe.
I recognize that the Inflation Reduction Act is both deeply flawed and also a piece of legislation that will generate momentum we need to hasten the clean energy transition. Those things co-exist. It’s not the bill we wanted, but it’s the bill we got.
Although there were many players to make this policy a reality, I see this legislation as a movement win and an example of how policy often follows social movements.
When Sunrise Movement held a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office five years ago to demand a Green New Deal, getting arrested for doing so–and when AOC decided to risk her political career by JOINING them during her orientation to Congress instead of falling in line with her Democratic leadership–it created a new era of centering people, jobs, and justice in the climate movement.
Of course the climate justice movement didn’t begin with today’s youth climate movement, but the youth accelerated the progress with help from environmental justice and climate movement elders, climate scientists, the Progressive Caucus in Congress, energy policy analysts, accountability journalists, and climate denial historians. They built on decades of organizing in the midst 40 years of targeted climate disinformation funded by the fossil fuel industry and dark money.
Now, finally, this victory puts momentum on our side to go after more robust environmental justice and energy policies. It’s the floor, not the ceiling. Keep dreaming, pushing, voting, and organizing for a better world.
P.S. Manchin can all it whatever he wants, but it’s a climate deal, and it’s not nothing! I’m shocked, honestly, but celebrating nonetheless. (What is this strange, hopeful feeling?!)
Élan Young 