Fierce Planet

The deeply imperfect “Inflation Reduction Act” is so important to pass. I won’t truly believe in the passage until I see it, of course, because our dysfunctional Congress does tend to kill every potential step forward.

But this bill contains many policies that can help us make real progress against the most important emergency we face: climate change and the resulting disruption to current ecological systems on earth, systems that humans and other living things rely on for survival.

From Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams:

Humanity can’t equivocate any longer. This is a climate emergency

…The climate emergency has been declared over and over by Nature and by human suffering and upheaval in response to its catastrophes. The 2,000 individuals who recently died of heat in Portugal and Spain are not here to bear witness, but many of the residents of Jacobabad in Pakistan, where Amnesty International declared the temperatures “unlivable for humans”, are. The heat-warped rails of the British train system, the buckled roads, cry out that this is unprecedented. The estimated billion sea creatures who died on the Pacific north-west’s coast from last summer’s heatwave…all bear witness that this is a climate emergency. So do we. Yet the anxiety we feel, the grief that is ours, pales in comparison to the ferocity of our resolve.

We can choose to live differently and build wiser and more just ways to produce, consume and travel. Our hope lies in our collective actions….

What Democrats’ big new bill would actually do – Vox has a review of the bill’s provisions.

Bill McKibben outlines what our next steps must be if the bill does pass: Making Momentum Matter! – Post-Manchin, the climate fight morphs in many ways.

But I wanted to point out, once again, that throughout the entire lengthy saga of the bill first known as “Build Back Better” it has always been the “moderates” of the Democratic Party who have held up progress, who have been the sticking point.

The Progressive Caucus and Pramila Jayapal, head of the caucus, have consistently been pragmatic and willing to compromise, to do all it takes to accomplish something, anything that helps us move towards our goal. Personally I want whatever fragments of harm reduction our broken system can produce.

The media in general like to scold leftists any time things don’t go well for the Dems, but in truth we are not the stumbling block here. And the media doesn’t understand much about the topography of the left anyway, so they probably shouldn’t be commenting on us at all.

Biden’s Presidency Is Sinking Because of Conservative Democrats—Not the Left

Call your Senators, write some letters, find a local protest, whatever you can do to see this bill over the finish line. We are in a moment where every day counts, every step matters, and every tenth of a degree that we can lower the earth’s temperature makes it more likely that we will survive this time.