45: The old guard

Technocrats are no longer setting the agenda and activists are taking over

Jul 25, 2020

Fauna ibérica; mamíferos Madrid, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, 1914.

So I want to talk about Joe Biden’s climate plan, whoa whoa hang on come back. Mainly I want to talk about the process by which his climate plan came about, which suggests that technocrats are no longer setting all of our policy agendas, and activists are increasingly taking over. And that is something I think we should be happy about, especially on climate change.

I will say first that of course I am going to vote for Joe Biden, whose middle name is Robinette, and I really do hope he wins but I’m not some Joe Biden fan or anything. He sucks in a lot of ways and I was not excited when it became clear he would be the nominee but that’s elections you know.

Still, like a lot of people when I first saw his new climate plan, which surfaced last week out of the regular torrent of sickness and violence that is the daily news cycle, I was surprisingly happy about it. I can’t even remember who all the other candidates were at this point, but during the primary, Biden had one of the worst climate platforms out of the frontrunners (Sunrise Movement gave him an F). His new plan has faster timelines, more government spending, more ambitious goals in specific sectors, and notably, a big focus on racial and environmental justice.

Biden’s team lifted components from several places, including Jay Inslee’s platform, and as Julian Brave NoiseCat of Data for Progress points out, the leading presidential candidate has basically adopted the gist of the Green New Deal (albeit with some of its leftiest ideas picked out). “Biden’s plans broadly align with an approach advocated by the left-wing of the Democratic party,” NoiseCat wrote.

In short, it is a huge victory for the Sanders/Warren wing of the party, Jay Inslee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, but mostly the legion of young activists who reshaped the climate debate and forced this issue to the top of politicians’ agendas before and during the primary. And don’t say oh all that will never pass the Senate, it doesn’t diminish the fact that this is the new benchmark, set by a moderate candidate.

But to really appreciate what this shift means, I think you have to look at how the plan came about, especially in contrast to the last big push for federal climate action— USCAP and the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill.

This now-historic failed attempt at national climate legislation could not have been more different in its origins from the Green New Deal, or Biden’s new climate agenda. That’s because the cap and trade strategy was more or less engineered in various board rooms over the years by technocrats—a combination of large NGOs, foundations, lawmakers, and industry representatives. A partnership called USCAP in particular set out to pursue the most industry-friendly, market-driven compromise they could, which ultimately led to the cap and trade bill that died in the Senate in 2010.

Wealthy donors and foundations played a big role in shaping this strategy, after they pooled resources in the late 2000s on an agenda-setting report called “Design to Win” and a resulting NGO called the ClimateWorks Foundation. While neither project focused solely on cap and trade, and CW has supported a lot of other work over the years, the initiatives championed the idea of a national carbon market, with Design to Win predicting that it would “prompt a sea change that washes over the entire global economy.” Foundations, donors and NGOs threw significant weight behind a cap and trade policy, and more broadly, set the table for the engineering- and economics-heavy framing of climate change that dominated for decades.

While there are many theories as to why Waxman-Markey fizzled out exactly, I tend to agree with the analysis that rushing to the center as a starting point meant voluntarily capitulating to an unpopular compromise bill that nobody really liked that much. It banked too much on the importance of lukewarm industry and GOP support and not enough on public will (other incarnations of this same approach have limped along sadly ever since). Related, it was an elite-driven campaign that had little connection to the grassroots or actual people. As organizer and academic Marshall Ganz put it, the big green groups behind it had become “bodiless heads,” to their own detriment.

I’ve harped on this story a lot in various venues, mainly because I think it is a powerful example of what the climate movement did wrong for many years. And it’s an example of how the wealthy and powerful, even if they have good intentions, can impose their own agendas on social movements and hold back progress.

The process that led to Biden’s new plan was strikingly different. It involved a task force that brought together representatives selected by the Biden and Sanders campaigns, including Ocasio-Cortez, Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash, and Catherine Flowers, the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. Quite a different roster from USCAP, which included the EDF and NRDC, along with BP, Duke Energy, PG&E, and ConocoPhillips. Long before the task force, the Green New Deal itself was a largely iterative process, with grassroots groups and networks pushing to strengthen its justice lens since it was introduced.

Of course, I have no idea how the Biden campaign or his new climate agenda will end. But what the campaign seems to be banking on (and NoiseCat notes the polling backs this up) is that climate change could be a winning issue with the left and the center. And maybe the only reason it wasn’t before is that it was always framed as this sterile math problem. In reality it’s a labor issue, a health issue, a justice issue, an agriculture issue, and a matter of overall human well-being and dignity that impacts every single one of us.

Even if not much happens with this exact plan, which is you know likely, the process by which the plan came into existence says something kind of remarkable about how much activist pressure has shifted the way we approach climate change, now as a human problem. I suspect that change will bear fruit well beyond a presidential candidate’s campaign.

You never really know what the outcomes of social movements will be, but this strikes me as one of those surprising outcomes. All those people who marched, who knocked on doors for Bernie Sanders, who got arrested sitting in Congressional offices, they changed the rules of the game and that’s pretty cool.

Cadwell Turnbull on American Dystopia

I would normally put this in the Links section, but I just loved this essay by Cadwell Turnbull so much that I wanted to more prominently note it. I very much enjoyed Turnbull’s The Lesson, which is an weighty alien invasion story set in the US Virgin Islands. He explores similar themes as in that novel in this essay for Wired, “Dystopia Isn’t Sci-Fi—for Me, It’s the American Reality,” including the ways that dark fictional tropes are not imaginary for marginalized communities.

He also talks about how, to overcome the dystopias in our midst, we need to believe that utopia can exist, and that a better world is possible. Not utopia in the sense of a perfect world. Rather he points to that anarchist society in Ursula LeGuin’s excellent book The Dispossessed, that is imperfect, but rooted in an idealistic pursuit of cooperation and solidarity—a fundamental assumption that justice is real and possible. Here’s my favorite part, but go and read the whole thing:

But in America, especially in discussions about social justice, “just” and “perfect” are treated as synonymous objectives. And because perfect is never attainable, justice, too, becomes out of reach. Under this framing, injustice becomes normal, oppression is realistic, and any move towards justice and equity must come from struggle. A disturbing unspoken belief is born from this framing, that marginalized people will never receive full humanity because a just society is not possible. By failing to recognize the dystopia, and dismissing the possibility of a utopia, America has resigned itself to its current, dark narrative.

Reading

I love a short story anthology and have had good experiences with this Akashic Noir series, in which local authors write crime stories about a particular city for each book. As every crime or detective fiction fan will tell you, a good crime story is just as much about a place, and the social strata of a place, as it is about crime so these books have this nice formula where you get a little guided tour of a city via various characters breaking its laws.

I’m currently reading Portland Noir, and the cool thing about it is that it published the year after I moved from Portland to Denver, so it’s a portrait of a city I love exactly as I left it. I started reading it before stormtroopers descended on the city, but that has added a layer of poignancy I guess. The very first story takes place one block from the last place I lived, but that is where the similarities end, I did not kill anyone there by hitting their head on a radiator. (Related: Activist Raises Awareness That She Used to Live in Portland)

Watching

I watched a bunch of movies last week, including two that everyone else also watched, The Old Guard and Palm Springs. More than four months in, I am honestly so sick of saying that so and so feels especially relevant now but yeah of course they did. One is about these immortal freedom fighter types led by Charlize Theron and they just die over and over again and it feels like nothing is ever getting better but maybe they are getting a little better it’s hard to say really and then this pharma startup guy tries to turn them into medicines and that does not go well for him.

Look at this axe thingy Charlize Theron has.

The other movie is a Groundhog Day story where characters are stuck reliving the day of a wedding in Palm Springs and every day is exactly the same and nothing they do matters but maybe it does matter again it’s hard to say. Totally unbelievable that *spoiler* the couple get together in the end they should have both been like, I need to do some work on myself for a while, but that’s movies you know.

Oh and I watched Spider-Man: Far From Home, which was a delight but when are we getting a new Spider-Verse movie we need it. In summary, all of the movies I watched this week were pretty good.

There you go a full on climate change joint, haven’t done one of those since I don’t know maybe even The Before Times. How’s everybody holding up not good right, yeah I know. Earlier I said to Jamie, you know I’ve just been depressed this week I don’t know why. And she gave me this look and said, well I can think of at least a couple reasons.

Now that we’ve been grinding through this for oh 20 weeks or so, it can be easy to forget that we’re all going through some pretty awful shit and it’s OK to not feel so great about it!

And I think we probably have some rough months ahead I’m sorry to say. But you know what, I’m here with you. Talk to you next week.

Tate

Crisis Palace by Tate Williams

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