Part of the solution
by Tom Sullivan
Via Business Insider.
They had always done things that way. And they were wrong.
In a footnote to the NC-9 election fraud hearings last week in Raleigh, election workers in Bladen County, North Carolina admitted they had run a tape of preliminary vote totals after the close of early voting on the Saturday before Election Day last November. Those totals should not have been tabulated until the close of voting on Election Day, and the early vote count may have leaked to one or more of the campaigns. Coy Mitchell Edwards testified they had always done it that way in Bladen County. He did not know what he was doing was improper before state Elections Board staff told him.
There is always a risk over time that people in charge continue doing things they way they’ve always done them out of habit. It is the way they learned to do things and, by God, that’s the way we do things here. Even if it is wrong. Even if it may once have been right but is no longer.
Which brings us to the viral video released over the weekend by the Sunrise Movement. A group of children visited California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office to urge her to support the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The proposal seeks no less than remaking the American economy around renewables in a decade.
Feinstein did not come off either in the shortened or full video. While the kids argued their futures were at stake, Feinstein, the seasoned hand, lectured them on why she would not support the Green New Deal.
For one, there is no way to pay for it, Feinstein began. She has her own resolution for conversion to renewables by 2050 with no way to pay for it. (Neither is policy, but a set of goals.)
“That resolution will not pass the [Republican-controlled] Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here,” Feinstein continued. “The key to good legislation is to tailor something that you write so that it can pass, and you can get a step ahead.”
“You know what’s interesting about this group?” she added. “I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here and you say, ‘It has to be my way or the highway.’ I don’t respond to that. I’ve gotten elected, I just ran, I was elected by almost a million-vote plurality. And I know what I’m doing. So, you know, maybe people should listen a little bit.”
They knew what they were doing in Bladen County too, and that’s the problem. Feinstein’s approach represents “warmed-over versions of Obama-era environmental policy,” explains Bill McKibben in The New Yorker. “It’s not that these things are wrong. It’s that they are insufficient, impossibly so.” Our opponent here is not the Chamber of Commerce, but physics, McKibben writes:
The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been “doing this for thirty years,” she described the precise time period during which we could have acted. James Hansen brought the climate question to widespread attention with his congressional testimony in 1988. If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory. But that didn’t get done, in large part because oil and gas companies that have successfully gamed our political system didn’t want it to get done. And the legislators didn’t do anywhere near enough to fight them. So now we’re on the precipice. Indeed, we’re over it. The fires that raged in California last fall were the fires of a hell on earth.
Old-style politics, McKibben argues (as did the children) — the way we’ve always done things — is not the solution. It is the problem.
“To put it bluntly,” writes David Roberts at Vox, “this is not normal. We are not in an era of normal politics. There is no precedent for the climate crisis, its dangers or its opportunities. Above all, it calls for courage and fresh thinking.” Roberts argues that even the best-case scenarios for the impacts of climate change are very, very bad. But the state of American politics is so bad that trying to reach bipartisan consensus is a fool’s errand:
There is nothing in 21st century American politics to suggest that Republicans will join with Democrats in a dramatic transformation of the economy along more sustainable lines. At this point, it is those who propose bipartisanship as an alternative who bear the burden of proof.
Political and economic transformation of the scale proposed in the Green New Deal may be a long shot, Roberts argues, but “it’s either long shots or climate disaster at this point.” What can tip the balance, Roberts argues, is people power of the sort Feinstein so easily dismissed (emphasis mine):
These young people, the ones who will live with the snowballing damage, want the US to marshal its full resources to tackle the problem, to transform its economy without leaving anyone behind. It takes a lot of gall for the very people responsible for the current desperate situation to tell them they’re asking for too much, that they should settle down and let the adults handle it.
And it’s incredibly short-sighted. A waves of grassroots enthusiasm like this isn’t fungible. It can’t be returned to the kitchen in exchange for a new one with the perfect mix of policy and rhetorical ingredients. It is lightning in a bottle, easily squandered.
There isn’t much time left to wait for another one. Smart leaders who share the broad goal of equitable decarbonization will amplify and deploy grassroots energy while it’s available. The policy details can be worked out later.
The New York Times Editorial Board agrees with the general goals of the Green New Deal, but steps gingerly around its grander aspirations and tut-tuts the missteps in its rollout. Yes, there are multiple ominous reports on the trajectory of CO2 emissions, on the rate of ocean warming, and on the melting of Antarctica’s huge ice reserves that might inundate much of Florida. But cool your jets, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, transforming the economy too might cost trillions. Perhaps some more modest goals?
That is the problem. Modesty, tentativeness, half-measures are not what the times call for. Roberts adds:
The house is on fire. But an odd number of Democrats and pundits just seem to be whistling past it, acting out familiar roles and repeating familiar narratives, as though we’re still in an era of normal politics, as though there are still two normal parties and some coherent “center” they are both attempting to capture.
They boast of savvy in spades, but lack urgency, drive, and vision. Younger Americans who expect to inherit their messes are less bound by how things have always been done.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” it says in Proverbs. Under present circumstances, that may be literally true.
