283 Comments

The Green New Deal vision of free water and electricity never made sense to me...

If you want people to conserve water and electricity, you make them pay based on their rate of consumption. If you want them to waste water and waste electricity, you give it to them for free.

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>>>The punchline is that that presidential visit got vetoed because other factions in the White House warned that environmental groups wouldn’t like the president touting a facility that used natural gas as green.<<<

To echo Matt, I "like this president," too, but, if I have one gripe, it's that he doesn't have the killer instincts of some of his predecessors. He's too cautious. He should have been able to see the wisdom of visiting a steel mill (the dude's originally from NE Pennsylvania!). In word, he should be able to *triangulate* a bit more. What's the left going to do, support AOC in a 2024 primary challenge?

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My wife and I can fairly be called Sanders Democrats, but we've talked repeatedly during the past 2 years about whether we're becoming more conservative, as progressive tactics have seemed repeatedly unwise. I like to say it's just that the left has gotten dumber, but not sure. I think MY is too generous to the climate left here. They're invested in a Howard Zinn picture of the progressive masses thwarted by Snidely Whiplash elites and often don't know or care what working-class people appear to think, and their view that sitting in at Nancy Pelosi's office, or whatever, produces change on the climate issue is unfalsifiable to them. (My local branch of 360.org last year decided the way to become relevant and win support for action on the climate was to jump on the Defund the Police bandwagon. How is that for smart?) Now the Green New Deal's strategic logic isn't hard to understand. Its framers are clear about it. They know w-c Americans aren't fired up about climate and are leery of a politics of limits. So the GND promises a huge suite of social benefits that will win the allegiance of those Americans. I don’t think that's about to work, but that's the idea.

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>>Now obviously this all goes quite a bit further than anything Joe Biden ever proposed.<<

Well, don't blame Gina when she votes for Yang's Forward Party. You've been hereby warned.

This column, which is excellent, by the way, had me in stitches. Matt's really an extremely underrated (and ultra-dry) humorist.

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Aug 2, 2022·edited Aug 2, 2022

I really do not get the sense from the "Climate Left" that they believe there is a desire among the mass public for sweeping climate legislation. While they will often cite issue polls showing their legislation's supposed popularity, that seems more of a supporting justification for why climate legislation should be first on the agenda than the central reasoning. The central reasoning is that the government should have a "moral" commitment to addressing climate change, and in particularly has a moral commitment to younger and future Americans to ensure they will have a hospitable planet in the future (notice how central children are to their campaign). I happen to agree with this reasoning, but the progressives often treat this line of reasoning as self-evident and not based on a series of assumptions baked into their specific worldview, so they neglect the need to convince the mass public to share their worldview. Also, as someone who learned about the greenhouse effect at a young age, I have developed an intuitive understanding on the connections between carbon emissions and climate change, but it is actually quite complex and not very intuitive, and I think educated elites who have been steeped in this world for a long time just have lost a sense of how much all of this just does not register with the average person.

A general problem that plagues the left is that they all believe that the government has a "moral" responsibility to address various ills that plague society (climate change, poverty, racism, lack of healthcare coverage, gun violence, income inequality, etc.), so when it comes time to try and prioritize campaign and legislative issues, they fight over whose issue deserves the highest "moral" priority, which essentially becomes a religious debate divorced from political realities. This view of the government's "moral" obligations is treated as self-evident in progressive circles, as if you are an inherently shitty person if you don't subscribe to it, but I would like to see some writing outlining where precisely this view of "morality" comes from, especially in a left that is increasingly secular.

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>>This struck me as such an unbelievably weird bank-shot theory of change that I mostly believed the guy was just BSing to get me to stop complaining. But the fact is, that’s almost exactly what happened, so it’s possible this guy is the Kwisatz Haderach and everything went according to plan.<<

:-D

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>>In this case, I think Democrats may actually benefit politically from passing the bill because it would give the party license to stop talking about climate change for a year or three. <<

This this this. I hadn't thought about this before, but this would be so welcome. Climate is both the most important political challenge we face and the one most needing depoliticizing. It needs investment and subsidies -- which the people will never rise against -- as well as NRC reform, easier transmission line permitting, lots of actions on the state and local level, and the like. But if we could keep it out of the national political arena? Awesome! Let the Secret Congress do its occasional thing and otherwise let's move on to the next great existential debate.

On the other hand . . . I read this: "Politically, now that they’ve done a Big Important Substantive Thing on climate" and I scream in anguish. It hasn't come close to passing yet! It's not law! I imagine my Jewish mother turning her head, spitting and going "Tfoo tfoo tfoo." Matt, you are just begging for the kinehora; please stop.

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I’m glad that Matt finally came out of the closet and said Dems should talk less about climate. His timing is curious. The IRA has yet to pass and there are still more points of friction (SALT, Sinema’s affinity for big pharma) than spare Democratic votes. Matt was looking for an excuse to embrace a stance that dare not speak its name in liberal bubbles. He is a mix of populist pragmatism and elite caution.

Accordingly Matt has yet to go full populist. Us folk in suburban Georgia don’t give a flying fuck about transit. It will never get me from Peachtree City to McDonough. The BIP may have passed, but state route 20 still has an at grade crossing of the Norfolk Southern mainline and there are no plans to fix this. There are still too few ways to cross I-75 and this crap costs me an hour or more every week. My wife loses 5 or 10 minutes a day because there is no overpass at the junction of State Routes 54 and 74. I hope the coastal elites who run the Democratic party will delude themselves into thinking we’ll all drive EVs in ten years and actually build first class roads. Transit is a niche issue for urbanites and should get no more than 15% of the infrastructure pie.

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“That said, the investment and justice parts of the three-legged stool basically died on the vine. What we ended up with in the IRA is closer to a pure investment-driven approach”

Is the first sentence supposed to say “standards and justice”?

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This is a good bill and I am a big fan of the Manchin congress’s work in the past year.

One interesting angle to all of these bills is that the ‘process’ Politico-style stories never mention the White House or POTUS being involved in negotiations. Is Biden just really good at keeping his name out of the press? Is he trying to give Congress the flexibility to compromise without getting in the way? Is he just busy? Feels like a big departure from Obama & Trump.

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Speaking of bill names that don’t translate well across the Atlantic, I can’t imagine there will be many pro-IRA politicians running around the UK.

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I'm conservative/libertarian but also an economist. Thus I love the idea of a net zero carbon tax.

Better to tax carbon that labor.

Also I wish we saw more of a focus on regenerative farming to sequester all that carbon while building soil health, and healthy foods

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“Do Democrats want to emphasize the (true) idea that the IRA should moderately reduce inflationary pressures in the economy”

Who says so? Because the eggheads at Wharton say otherwise:

“The impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/7/29/inflation-reduction-act-preliminary-estimates

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I think something that is very deeply ingrained in the Democratic political psyche is that tangible marketing of the things the government is doing for you is very critical to political success in the future.

This is evident across the entire issue space... a hugely popular theory about the problems with the Obama stimulus is the Social Security tax cut was a bad idea because it was not broadly marketed. Student loan stuff is very popular under the perception that "doing something" for young people (something with a visible and financial impact) is key to retaining their support. The desire for something very visible was also key with how prominent the various relief checks were in the discussion of pandemic aid.

It isn't exactly "checks" but the Green New Deal is a similar theory that you can essentially buy off a huge array of interest groups and voters with various targeted programs (re-training/aid funds for affected fossil fuel workers, various programs targeted at underprivileged folks, and a huge expansion of the social safety net/possible jobs guarantee for everyone).

Ultimately though I think the last two years of polling/politics doesn't really support this theory of the case... people did not really care that much about the relief checks. And frankly the general populace was more skeptical of the Child Tax Credits, etc. than wonks were. The checks/letters were super visible with Trump or Biden's name on them but did not move the needle (as a side note I remember people saying putting Trump's name on the first relief check was somewhere between Machiavellian genius and dirty politics, but it really didn't do anything).

I think it really debunks the theory that directly targeted programs at particular constituencies will create any political impact with those constituencies...

Basically I think the thing is any policy action you do will create a political backlash. You should try to do the best you can while you are in power, but it is unrealistic to think that a great/popular policy will create NEW popularity that you can use for a snowballing "GREEN NEW DEAL" type agenda.

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>> Do Democrats want to emphasize the (true) idea that the IRA should moderately reduce inflationary pressures in the economy, or do they want to emphasize the (also true) idea that it’s the most important climate legislation in history? <<

Surely the correct answer is (c), emphasize the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

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Matt during the Obama administration: "The Obama administration is making a huge mistake by preemptively compromising because it makes their compromise look like the left wing position."

Matt in 2021: "Biden should preemptively compromise because that's moderate and polls well."

*Biden does not preemptively compromise. Instead he starts with strong left positions, eventually takes the best compromise he can get, and passes several pieces of massively important legislation that Matt and most people like.*

Matt in 2022: "Biden got lucky. He should have gotten here by preemptively compromising and waiting for conservatives to be reasonable."

It's basically the Charles Barkley argument about the Golden State Warriors shooting 3s.

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