The Select Committee on the Climate Crisis Mixtape is Good, Actually
Democrats want to do pretty radical things to fight climate change
By Julian Brave NoiseCat
Three years ago in April 2017, I marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. alongside some 200,000 activists for the second People’s Climate March. With Indigenous and environmental justice communities in the lead, we crossed directly in front of the White House, singing and chanting, holding aloft banners and brandishing protest art–my favorite: a 19th- century covered wagon with “CO2lonialism” scrawled on its side. True to D.C.–and, well, the climate–it was muggy as hell. But riding the MegaBus back to New York City, I remember feeling hopeful that the wave of social movements rising out of the Obama era and gaining momentum after Trump’s election would crest and crash on the shores of the Potomac. First as tragedy, then as farce, but maybe after that: as progress.
That week, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon introduced a wide-ranging bill called the 100 by ‘50 Act, a sort of proto-Green New Deal that would move the United States to 100% clean energy by 2050. The bill, co-sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, included many of the bells and whistles one would want in left-wing climate legislation: it eliminated subsidies for oil and gas, leveraged public finance in the form of “climate bonds”, ensured a robust and just transition for fossil fuel workers and even revoked the permits of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines–because why not.
And yet, the legislation landed with a dud. Privately, environmental justice leaders expressed frustration that they were insufficiently consulted in the drafting of the bill. Publicly, the environmental left broke into a heated debate about whether 2050 was too late a date to source all of our power from clean energy. Representative Tulsi Gabbard wrote a competing marker bill, the OFF Act, that essentially control-f-and-replaced “2050” with “2035.” That Fall, Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic penned an essay with a self-explanatory title: “Democrats Are Shockingly Unprepared to Fight Climate Change.” He cited, among other things, the 100 by ‘50 Act as proof of his case.
But then came AOC and Greta and the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal. With the publication of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report on Warming of 1.5ºC–the artist sometimes known as “We Have 12 Years”–climate politics reached a tipping point.
On Tuesday, in perhaps the most resounding sign of the arrival of this new climate politics, the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, a body created by Speaker Nancy Pelosi who, last year, referred to the Green New Deal as the “Green dream or whatever” unveiled a wide-ranging report that will function as the Democrat’s de facto climate plan. It called for, among other things: all new cars sold by 2035 to be emissions free, net-zero emissions electricity by 2040 as well as net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050. These toplines tell the story: Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee has endorsed a more broad, ambitious and progressive policy approach than that outlined in Merkley and Sanders’ 100 by ‘50 Act. In the three years since I marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, the zeitgeist has changed.
I’m still working through the 538-page report, but so far the most encouraging detail has been House Democrats’ emphasis on environmental justice–the notion that policymakers should prioritize the people living on the hazardous edge of poverty, pollution and climate impacts, who are, almost always communities of color and Indigenous nations. The report cites the police killing of George Floyd in the first paragraph and goes on to argue that communities of color should be first in line for “a significant percentage” of new spending on energy and infrastructure. California, for example, requires at least 25% of revenues from its cap-and-trade program go to environmental justice communities, while New York, which is now implementing its own climate regime, requires 35%. California relies on an equity mapping tool called CalEnviroScreen, which overlays and scores various datasets on environmental, public health and climate vulnerability to determine which communities should be prioritized. (As Data for Progress has written elsewhere, the federal government capacity to execute a similar program is currently lagging.)
The most hardline activists might criticize the standards and timelines, which allow for a slightly more drawn out transition than that advocated by Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s climate-focused presidential campaign, for example. They may also take aim at the report’s lack of a price tag–most are of the mind that bigger really is better when it comes to climate bills, nowadays.
Discerning analysts and critics will also likely have many questions about the precise design of the carbon tax teased in the report. Last week, Eva Lyubich, a PhD student at UC Berkeley, published a working paper using data from the American Community Survey to show that Black households face substantially higher energy costs than white households. Amidst a historic pandemic, recession and uprising for Black Lives, advocating for a carbon tax that could exacerbate economic and racial inequality while burdening lower and middle-class consumers is an interesting position for Democrats to take. As written, the report suggests a carbon price can be an important tool for decarbonization–though not a silver bullet–as well as a potential revenue raiser, with funds reinvested in communities and, potentially, rebated to households.
While we should pick at the details, like: the merits of particular performance targets, the scale of investment packages, the efficacy of targeting equitable green investments, the effectiveness of particular regulations, the precise design of a carbon tax–it is important to keep in mind just how far the conversation has come. As someone who stumbled into the climate fight before it was cool, I can’t help but read the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis report–even the parts I disagree with–as a sort of small, wonky victory. Speaker Pelosi just endorsed a position to the left of a Trump-era Bernie Sanders’ climate bill. I’m not sure what they call it on Twitter, but by most normal definitions of the word, that’s progress.