Betrayal

It's not the Sunrise Movement, it is the governor of New York

I had another piece planned for today, and I will get back to it soon—it will deliver a certain amount of good news. But events intervened. I try not to write out of anger, but on occasion it overtakes me, and yesterday’s actions by the governor of New York were so shockingly cynical that—fair warning—I’m indulging some of that fury.

But as I begin, a plea not to be angry with the youth. There was a mild kerfluffle on the climate interwebs yesterday, when the Sunrise Movement—the youthful progenitors of the Green New Deal—announced that they weren’t yet ready to endorse Joe Biden for president. The keyboard gladiators of the status quo—led as usual in their chivalrous charge by the reliable down-puncher Matt Yglesias—crackled with indignation at the young folks.

lmao — I hope everyone who gassed this institution up with money and coverage is proud of themselves

I am an unrepentant supporter of Sunrise, so let me explain. I knew many of their first generation of leaders, who had cut their teeth on the fossil fuel divestment campaign; wanting to fight on after college, they’d formed Sunrise, ginned up the Green New Deal, and used a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office, with AOC in attendance, to give it oxygen. Their tactics worked—they were a big reason that by the 2020 Democratic primaries ‘climate change’ was the number one issue for huge numbers of voters. They were obvious Sanders supporters, but when he lost they swallowed hard, and took part in the negotiations that produced a united Democratic front for Biden: indeed, Sunrise’s director, Varshini Prakash, was on the team that sat with a couple of key Biden aides to work out the essentials of Build Back Better. They didn’t endorse Biden, but they did work hard, and effectively, against Trump, as the youth vote in 2020 eventually demonstrated. And then they worked hard, and effectively, to pass Build Back Better, even as Joe Manchin cut it down into the Inflation Reduction Act—again they swallowed hard and backed a seriously imperfect bill. It was a rare display of political maturity and effectiveness among any progressives, let alone young ones.

Now a new generation of Sunrise volunteers is saying they can’t, yet, endorse Biden—but they’re also promising to fight hard against Donald Trump. Look, I’m fighting hard for Biden. I understand deep in my soul the existential risk Trump poses. But I also get why young people are having a hard time joining fully in—it’s because of Gaza, above all. And we do not want a world where young people would not be hideously upset by Israel’s endless bombing campaign, a campaign of immiseration clearly designed, as Biden said this week, to protect Netanyahu’s political future. Though the media has seized on every example of left obtuseness they can find (usually from middle-aged college professors), the young people I’ve watched have been clear in their condemnation both of Hamas’ repulsive violence, and of anti-Semitism. And in part because of their hard work, Biden has shown more willingness to stand up to the repugnant Netanyahu and try to end the fighting even as he works to head off a regional war. The invaluable Kate Aronoff has a fine account of the Sunrise news in the New Republic yesterday, and she even bothered to call up the head of the thing and ask what it meant.

“Do we want to be fighting for a Green New Deal under a Trump presidency or a Biden presidency? To me, the answer is pretty clear,” Stevie O’Hanlon told me earlier today. “Donald Trump winning a second term is an existential threat to our climate and our democracy and will set back the fight for a Green New Deal.”

So yes, Gaza is complicated and nuanced. But a society needs people for whom complication and nuance are not central, and these are usually young people. They offer useful clarity. And if Biden eventually loses, it will be less because young people don’t support him than because old people don’t: there are far more of us, and we are not reliably voting in defense of the values we grew up with (like, respect, decency, kindness, and not getting convicted of felonies). That’s why we at Third Act are backing Biden with all that we’ve got—we don’t like what’s happening in Gaza, but a job of older people is to bring to bear the somewhat wearying but valuable experience that simply living longer allows you to accumulate. We admire Biden for the good things he’s done, and we know that Trump can and will make the bad parts worse, beginning with his promise to radically accelerate the climate crisis. But I’m glad, for one, that the young are making the witness that they are.

Yesterday did offer a real betrayal, though, and it came from Democratic elders—most particularly New York governor Kathy Hochul. She—out of the clear blue—announced she would block New York City’s congestion pricing plan, due to go into effect January 30.

This is stupid policy—it’s the most aggressively anti-environmental stand I can recall a major Democratic governor taking, beating even Gavin Newsom’s recent demolition of rooftop and community solar in California. Congestion pricing meant that people who wanted to drive into the clogged streets of lower Manhattan would pay a $15 toll; the revenue would go to support the beleaguered transit system that actually allows New York to operate. This kind of system has been a huge success in the European cities that have tried it, like London and Milan; Manhattan (as advocates back to Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer have noted) would be an incredibly sweet place with many fewer cars. This is, as Robinson Meyer noted yesterday “tier one climate policy,” which with a success in Manhattan could quickly spread to other cities. And so there’s been a tremendous effort over decades to build out support for congestion pricing. An earlier version came close to passing years ago—lore has it that the opposition of parking garage owners carried the day in Albany. This time, though, everything was lined up: Governor Hochul had given a rousing defense of the plan in a speech just two weeks ago. I’m going to quote from it at some length, because I think it’s possible that no politician in American history has ever flip-flopped quite so thoroughly or so fast:

Walk around many major cities and it won’t take long to encounter frustrated drivers caught in traffic jams, cars spewing exhaust on overpacked streets. We determined that the average New York City driver spends 102 hours a year stuck in traffic. Those hours add up to more than four days of your life – every year.

That’s four days sitting behind the wheel of a car instead of sitting by your kid’s bedside, reading them a book, sitting around the dinner table or reconnecting with a friend.

There has to be a better way. So, starting next month, New York City will become the first city in the U.S. to implement congestion pricing. We’ll charge people $15 every time they drive into New York’s Central Business District.

London, Milan, Stockholm, and Singapore have all implemented similar plans with great success. In New York City, the idea stalled for 60 years until we got it done earlier this year.

It took a long time because people feared backlash from drivers set in their ways. But, much like with housing, if we’re serious about making cities more livable, we must get over that.

We estimate congestion pricing will reduce the volume of vehicles in Manhattan’s central business district by 17 percent. Fewer cars mean less gridlock, traffic and pollution. Fewer cars means safer streets, cleaner air and more room to maneuver for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Congestion pricing will generate $1 billion every year, which will then fund large-scale projects that make public transit faster and more accessible. That’s key because we’ll never change people’s habits if we don’t offer safe, reliable alternatives to driving that work for everyone.

In her remarks blocking the plan yesterday, Hochul said something something pandemic—when work on the plan began in 2019, “workers were in the office five days a week, crime was at record lows and tourism was at record highs. Circumstances have changed and we must respond to the facts on the ground.”

But clearly none of those circumstances changed in the past two weeks. Who knows what caused this unreal shift. Speculation ranges from (the now fashionable) brain worm to lots of Hochul fundraising by local autodealers to the notion that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries was worried that congestion pricing would hurt the prospects for regaining his majority in the fall elections. (A bad showing by New York Democrats in the suburbs cost him the speakership last time around; the same people are still in charge of the Empire State campaign this time around). If it’s really electoral fear that drove Hochul’s stab in the back, then this is political malpractice: you don’t wait until the last possible moment to jerk around the advocates who have spent years working with you to craft an agreement.

People on the outside underestimate, I think, the degree to which significant change comes from a long and controlled dance between activists and politicians—and one of the rules of that, on both sides, is that you don’t pull out the rug at the last minute. People like Charles Komanoff have spent most of their lives working up to this deal, jumping through every hoop to demonstrate the needed support, and now it’s been trashed. And trashed with the support of other parts of the progressive coalition. It was so sad to see the United Federation of Teachers gloating at the downfall of congestion pricing—the larger left has engaged in a generational effort to raise teacher pay, understanding it to be both right and a core concern of a partner; the UFT ignored the core concern of environmentalists in order to help teachers who wanted to keep driving. Public school teachers should be supporters of public transit; this, not Sunrise, is real-world malarkey.

If any possible good could come from Hochul’s cold-blooded betrayal, it’s that she, and Albany Democrats in general, might feel the need to give environmentalists some kind of win. The NY Heat act, and the climate superfund bill, are both up for action in this final week of the legislative session. It would be scant comfort to see them passed in the wake of this shocking schism, but it would be something.

In other energy and climate news:

+Perhaps suboptimal that Alaska’s rivers are turning rusty orange as thawing permafrost thaws, releasing lots of minerals into the water. Liz Kimbrough has the story for Mongabay

Dozens of once-pristine rivers and streams in Alaska’s Brooks Range are turning an alarming shade of orange. The discoloration, according to a new study published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, is likely caused by the thawing of permafrost, which is exposing previously frozen minerals that are now leaching into the waterways.

The research team, led by ecologist Jon O’Donnell from the U.S. National Park Service, documented 75 locations across a vast area of northern Alaska where the crystal-clear waters now appear heavily stained. Using satellite imagery and field observations, the scientists determined that the onset of this discoloration coincided with a period of warming and increased snowfall in the region over the past decade

+Thanks to the Biden-Harris administration for a new tool that will save lives

The Heat and Health Index (HHI) is the first nationwide tool to provide heat-health outcome information at the ZIP code level. The HHI will help state and local officials identify communities, at the zip code level, most likely to experience negative health outcomes from heat, ensure that outreach and medical aid reach the people who need it most, and help decision-makers prioritize community resilience investments.

As all seasons, especially summer, continue to get hotter due to the climate crisis, stronger public health protections are needed. Heat is already the deadliest weather-related hazard – CDC estimates that at least 1,220 people in the U.S. are killed by heat events each year.

+An excellent account from Texas Tech’s excellent Andrew Dessler on how the fossil fuel industry is trying to rig the marketplace to compensate for the fact that oil and gas are now economic losers.

In the United States alone, the amount of solar and wind energy capacity waiting to be built and connected to the grid is 18 times the amount of natural gas power capacity in the queue.

So you might reasonably conclude that the market is pivoting, and the end for fossil fuels is near.

But it’s not. Instead, fossil fuel interests — including think tanks, trade associations and dark money groups — are often preventing the market from shifting to the lowest cost energy.

Similar to other industries from tobacco to banking to pharmaceuticals, oil and gas interests use tactics like lobbying and manufacturing “grass-roots” support to maximize profits. They also spread misinformation: It’s well documented that fossil fuel interests tried to convince the public that their products didn’t cause climate change, in the same way that Big Tobacco tried to convince the public that its products didn’t harm people’s health.

+So here’s a scary scenario: extreme heatwaves, coupled with the collapse of a power grid that brings down the air-conditioning. Jeff Goodell, our bard of heat, has a good account of what we need to plan for

Last year, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University and the University of Michigan published a study looking at the consequences of a major blackout during an extreme heat wave in three cities: Phoenix, Detroit and Atlanta. In the study, the cause of the blackout was unspecified.

“It doesn’t really matter if the blackout is the result of a cyberattack or a hurricane,” Brian Stone, the director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech and the lead author on the study, told me. “For the purposes of our research, the effect is the same.” Whatever the cause, the study noted that the number of major blackouts in the United States more than doubled between 2015-16 and 2020-21.

Dr. Stone and his colleagues focused on those three American cities because they have different demographics, climates and dependence on air-conditioning. In Detroit, 53 percent of buildings have central air-conditioning; in Atlanta, 94 percent; in Phoenix, 99 percent. The researchers modeled the health consequences for residents in a two-day, citywide blackout during a heat wave, with electricity gradually restored over the next three days.

The results were shocking: in Phoenix, about 800,000 people — roughly half the population — would need emergency medical treatment for heat stroke and other illnesses. The flood of people seeking care would overwhelm the city’s hospitals. More than 13,000 people would die.

So maybe you don’t want to move to Phoenix. And maybe check out your plans for Juneau too. Writing in Lever, Lois Parshley points out it’s interesting but somewhat nervy to live next to a slowly collapsing glacier.

Researchers have found that roughly half of the capital’s downtown is in the potential path of landslides or avalanches. But when a heated debate sprang up in 2021 over whether to update outdated hazard maps to reflect the danger, officials began to agonize over the kind of questions more and more communities will have to tackle. As governments grapple with just how much climate risk they’re willing to allow, how do you balance looming safety concerns with potentially ruining people’s property values, stripping their ability to buy insurance, or forcing them out of the places they call home?

“As climate change continues,” said assemblymember Alicia Hughes-Skandijs at a recent public meeting on the matter, “I just want us to be clear-eyed as we go into this. There’s not a lot of really safe places to live in Juneau.”

+Sammy Roth is a gutsy climate writer. This week he points out we may need to sacrifice some Joshua trees to solar arrays, in order to have a shot of an ecosystem that can support Joshua trees at all.

There’s no greater threat to Joshua trees — or humans — than carbon pollution building up in the atmosphere, spurring constant temperature records, drier droughts and more destructive fires that have conspired to decimate Joshua tree forests across the Southwest. The York fire alone may have burned more than 1 million Joshua trees last summer in and around Mojave National Preserve. Long term, scientists estimate that Joshua trees could lose upwards of 90% of their current range.

What about rooftop solar systems, you may ask?

They’re a great climate solution, and we should build as many of them as possible. Gov. Gavin Newsom failed miserably when he allowed his appointees to gut rooftop solar incentives, and again last month when he let them approve weak-sauce subsidies for small-scale “community solar” installations that don’t take up nearly as much land as big solar farms in the desert.

But we also shouldn’t cover our eyes and ears and ignore the research telling us we need big solar farms too.

Also in the LA Times, David Helvarg, who pays closer attention to the saltwater 70% of the planet than almost any activist, chronicles the trouble afoot

Climate impacts are overwhelming all other marine environmental insults, including industrial overfishing and oil, chemical and plastic pollution. Compounding the danger, unsound floodplain development is destroying coastal habitat in such places as Jakarta, Indonesia; Lagos, Nigeria; Houston; and Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed legislation banning any reference to climate change by state agencies.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is warning of above-normal hurricane activity this year, predicting 17-25 named storms (versus an average of 14), with four to seven major hurricanes. The culprit is near-record high temperatures in the Atlantic, combined with a La Niña cooling phase in the Pacific. (Fun fact, water temperatures in recent La Niña years have been hotter than El Niño years in previous decades, according to NOAA.) And, of course, hurricane damage will only be increased by rising sea levels linked to warming sea water (H2O expands when heated — boil a kettle of tea if you don’t believe me), plus melting sea ice and glaciers.

Scientific reviews have found that the duration of marine heat waves has increased more than 50% since 1925. By 2014, 50% of the ocean was affected, and last year, more than 90% of the ocean hit internal heat wave temperatures, including one day when the temperature of the waters off the Florida Keys measured 101 degrees. The average global ocean surface temperature hit a record of nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit one day last year, the highest ever recorded, and a stark contrast to the 61 degrees average throughout the 20th century.

+Connecticut enviros are pushing for a special legislative session to address the crisis this summer. I’m noting it because it’s important, and also because I love the picture of Third Act’s Rev. Davida Crabtree giving the governor what-for. Don’t mess with us, folks!

The House voted on May 1 for a bill that would have declared a climate crisis in Connecticut and outlined steps to sharply reduce greenhouse gases by 2050, but the annual session ended on May 8 without a vote by the Senate.

Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, said Tuesday he wants climate off the table in the brief special session, but he is open to addressing it in a lame-duck session after the election this fall.

Advocates of the bill say Democrats are punting on an issue that defines differences between the parties in an election year, antagonizing elements of the Democratic base and undermining one of President Joe Biden’s favorite talking points.

“If they don’t pass it, they are going to get beat up. I’ve told them that,” said Lori Brown, executive director of the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters.

“I do think it’s going to redound against us with young voters,” said Rep. Christine Palm, D-Chester, the bill’s lead sponsor.

+Why do we call it the climate crisis, or global warming, or the greenhouse effect? A team of professors and students at Middlebury tracked the nomenclature changes in an in-depth project. Late 2018—the start of the Greta years—seems to have been when a lot of journalists began to accurately describe it as a crisis

+Thanks as always to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who has emerged as a prime truth-teller in the climate fight. Yesterday, at the Natural History Museum, he called out the ad and p.r. industries for their ugly efforts at greenwashing

“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action — with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns,” Guterres told an event at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History.

“They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies — Mad Men fuelling the madness,” Guterres said, speaking in the museum’s Hall of Ocean Life, which is dominated by a 94-foot-long blue whale model suspended from the ceiling. “I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones.”

The announcement builds on a warning that Guterres issued in September, 2022, when he told the U.N. General Assembly that the advertising and public relations industry was harming its own reputation by working for oil and gas.

“Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet — they’re toxic for your brand,” Guterres said. “Your sector is full of creative minds who are already mobilising around this cause. They are gravitating towards companies that are fighting for our planet — not trashing it…I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.”