WORLDFIRE - Chapter 9, Part III

Climate of Denial

In Chapter 9, “Climate of Denial,” we will be exploring various expressions of climate denial: 1) Fossil Fuel Industry Denial, 2) Republican Party Denial, 3) Democratic Party Denial, 4) Barack Obama’s Denial (included because he was president during my 2010 ride), 5) Donald Trump’s Denial, 6) Joe Biden’s Denial, and 7) Distraction as Denial. I have made every effort to be nonpartisan in my analysis. I hope you’ll stick with me through all seven parts - irrespective of your political views - as we objectively explore how best to dismantle these forms of destructive denial. Thank you.

Democratic Party Denial

It is not just corporate Republicans, though, who are obstructing climate progress. Corporate Democrats are also complicit in putting civilization at risk. In 2014, Joel Dyer, a columnist for my hometown newspaper, The Boulder Weekly, introduced a novel definition of “climate denier” that I found undeniably compelling. In his piece, Dyer posed the provocative question: “So what happens to the political debate around climate change if we begin to properly label those who claim to champion the cause of global warming while simultaneously pushing policies that increase fossil fuel use?” Dyer’s answer: “I think the first thing that would happen is we would quickly realize that a lot of Democrats are actually climate deniers just as surely as their Republican counterparts. And once we recognize and acknowledge that, change could begin to occur via the ballot box. The days of using the word environmentalist to describe politicians who protect wilderness with one hand while pushing for increased drilling and fracking with the other are over, or must be if we are to survive.” His conclusion: “It’s not that complicated folks. It’s actions, not words, that define real climate denial. It’s not which political party you’re in that makes you an environmentalist or a climate denier.”

I embrace Dyer’s broad definition of climate deniers. The climate crisis is not just one more issue on a long list of issues for politicians to grapple with. It is the biggest test humanity has ever faced, a test upon which our survival as a species may very well hinge. Because of this, it demands the highest level of political attention and integrity.

The last time I looked, there were zero climate scientists serving in Congress. Just as the president and members of Congress regularly consult military experts on matters of national defense and economic experts on matters of finance, so does Congress need to heed the advice of scientific experts on the matter of climate breakdown. But they don’t. Instead, most Democratic policymakers seem content to blindly march humanity over the climate cliff. Sure, some pay lip service to the cascading crisis, but too few have proposed legislation with a snowball’s chance in hell of actually solving it. This is not a blanket condemnation of the work Democratic members of Congress do every day on other issues of great import to the American people. I believe most members of Congress (including many Republicans) are genuinely committed to public service. But there has been a damning lack of principled leadership on solving the climate crisis. The architect of the Green New Deal, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), even has a name for such politicians: “climate delayers” (people who act like we have all the time in the world to respond to the climate emergency). Their fossilized worldview is steeped in climate resignation, a defeatist mindset that promotes timid policies that damn our children to a future filled with climate chaos, misery, and death.

I witnessed such an unforgettable display of climate delay in action when in 2019 a video went viral of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) talking down to a group of children and teenagers asking her to vote in favor of a Green New Deal. Saturday Night Live even went so far as to produce a comic sketch of the encounter. During the exchange, Senator Feinstein patronizingly told the youth gathered in her office that she had her “own Green New Deal piece of legislation.” When the kids passionately pressed on, Sen. Feinstein dismissed them, saying, “That resolution will not pass the Senate and you can take that back to whoever sent you here.” Fair enough on the first part. As to the second, can you imagine her speaking so disrespectfully to a fossil fuel lobbyist in a suit? I can’t. The most galling part was when she condescendingly lectured the young activists, saying: “I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing.” That is precisely the problem. Sen. Feinstein and other institutional Democrats did know about the climate threat for 30 years, yet did nothing in all that time to seriously address it. At the end of the meeting, she passed out draft copies of her milquetoast pretense of a Green New Deal that echoed the feeble goals of the Paris climate accord and the equally impotent 2050 timeline for zeroing out U.S. carbon emissions. Instead of courageously embracing the Green New Deal’s bold ambition of zeroing out U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in ten years, Feinstein cynically told those earnest kids: “It’s not going to get turned around in ten years.” How could she possibly know when we haven’t even tried?

One awkward encounter obviously does not define a remarkable life. I share this encounter simply because the late senator’s demeanor so uniquely laid bare a deep-seated problem with the Democratic Party establishment: its weak and defeatist climate delayer mindset. Feinstein was hardly alone in her go-slow approach. Many Democrats long aligned with the fossil fuel industry are also climate delayers. Democrats like President Obama’s former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who made this comical claim to NPR in 2019 to justify his skepticism of the vital policy initiative: “We will jeopardize what has been, I think, the very significant movement of the large energy companies towards developing their new business models to function in a low-carbon world.” Big Oil has done nothing of the sort and everyone knows it. The carbon barons won’t stop until they are stopped. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the two largest U.S. oil companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron, spent only about 0.16% and 2%, respectively, on low-carbon investments in 2021. Moniz later took another shot at undermining the Green New Deal by teaming up with President George W. Bush’s former Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Andy Karsner, to insultingly call for a “Green Real Deal” that features destructive methane gas, nonexistent advanced nuclear technologies, and unaffordable and unproven-at-scale carbon capture and storage schemes. This is yet another form of climate delay.

But the Democratic poster child for climate denial would have to be U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who with the help of another corporate-friendly Democrat, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, in 2021 and 2022 torpedoed President Biden’s Build Back Better climate bill. At the time, the #1 recipient–from either party–of oil and gas campaign contributions on Capitol Hill, Senator Manchin all too happily did the bidding of his corporate paymasters by blocking passage of the bill. In doing so, he cemented his legacy as someone who puts his own interests (Manchin’s family has made millions off of coal) and the interests of the coal industry ahead of the survivability of current and future generations. Joe Manchin’s behavior is the embodiment of Democratic Party climate denial.

Thankfully, Democrats did get some important climate initiatives enshrined into law with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021, the latter two bills passing with significant Republican support. All three laws, analyzed later in this chapter, incrementally moved the climate ball down the field, but these are the kinds of initiatives that should have been implemented decades ago. The Democratic Party is desperately in need of more Democrats like the 13 members of Congress who in 2021 publicly called on President Biden to exercise his authority “to immediately stop fossil fuel expansion and declare a climate emergency.” If more Democrats started displaying climate courage–a winning mindset that embraces heroic government policies that give our children a fighting chance of inheriting a habitable planet–we might even convince more congressional Republicans with consciences to also start thinking about their kids’ and grandkids’ lives and futures.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.