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So how do we move on Climate, how do we set priorities, and who will be leading? [1]

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Date: 2023-06-18  

California Governor Gavin Newsom has a problem. An Ezra Klein opinion piece asks

By the time I talked to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he was clearly frustrated. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “These guys write reports and they protest. But we need to build. You can’t be serious about climate and the environment without reforming permitting and procurement in this state.” It hurts to get hammered by your friends. And that’s what’s happening to Newsom. More than 100 environmental groups — including the Sierra Club of California and The Environmental Defense Center — are joining together to fight a package Newsom designed to make it easier to build infrastructure in California. For Newsom, it’s a wounding break. “I licked envelopes for these nonprofits as a kid. My father was on the board of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund for more than a decade,” he told me. “This was my life. But this rigidity and ideological purity is really going to hurt progress. I did the climate bills last year, and these same groups were celebrating that. But that means nothing unless we can deliver. That was the what; this is the how.” The environmental movement is dealing with a bit of dog-that-caught-the-car confusion these days. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into infrastructure for clean energy, and decarbonization targets that were once out of the question are being etched into law. That’s particularly true in California, which has committed to being carbon neutral, and to running its electricity grid on 100 percent clean energy, by 2045.

What really makes it tough for Newsom is an ironic paradox of our politics. The Biden administration is giving priority to funding projects in states that have focused on regulatory ‘reform’ to make the big projects Newsom is talking about easier to get rolling. What this means in practice is that anti-regulatory, anti-government red states are finding it easier to get those dollars. So funding intended to serve the public good, address climate, and modernize infrastructure are going to people who have been militantly on the wrong side of this. Talk about rewarding bad behavior.

I offered up this comment to Klein’s commentary:

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/18/2176111/-So-how-do-we-move-on-Climate-how-do-we-set-priorities-and-who-will-be-leading

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