Will Kamala Harris Act Boldly on Climate Change?

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

20 August 20

e’re in the Kamala Harris era now, and so far, so good. Of the four people on the major-party Presidential tickets, she appears to be the most energetic and normal. I’ve never met Harris, but I did spend a number of days sitting next to her sister Maya when we both served on the 2016 Democratic platform-drafting committee. Maya Harris was tack-smart and tightly focussed, which appears to run in the family. Listening to Joe Biden speak, I feel a constant mild apprehension about what may emerge; Harris relaxes me.

Given the very real possibility that she’ll be at or near the pinnacle of our politics for somewhere between four and sixteen years, it’s worth asking how she will handle the gravest crisis that looms over our planet. That’s not the same as asking if she should be elected, because, on climate issues, a shrink-wrapped pallet of frozen Ore-Ida French fries would be a vast improvement on the incumbent. But it’s going to take an unflinching, unrelenting effort to transform America’s energy system and lead a similar process globally. Is she committed to that?

Her defenders point to a number of powerful statements that she made over the course of her Presidential primary campaign. She’d eliminate the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal. She’d tell the Department of Justice to investigate oil and gas companies. “When you take away that money because you take them to court and sue them, as I have done, it’s extraordinary how they will change behaviors,” Harris said. “Maybe this is the prosecutor in me. They have to be held accountable.” Harris has been particularly outspoken about environmental injustice: just six days before she got the V.P. nod, she joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to introduce the Climate Equity Act, which, as the Times explained, “would create a dedicated Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability within the White House and require the federal government to rate the effect that every environmental legislation or regulation would have on low-income communities.”

If there’s a rub, it’s that, to date, she hasn’t been that eager to really stand up to power on this issue. During a forum last year, Harris said that she had sued ExxonMobil over its climate denial, but that’s not true. After investigative reporters showed that company executives had spent decades lying about their knowledge of climate change, many state attorneys general announced investigations. Only two, however, actually went to court: New York, under Eric Schneiderman and his successors, and Massachusetts, under the very gutsy Maura Healey. Harris, in California, investigated but never pulled the trigger—a grave disappointment to environmentalists, who knew that the country’s most economically powerful state would have been a useful ally.

Such reluctance is not admirable, but it is perhaps understandable: California is an oil state, if less so than it used to be, and the big oil companies are major players in its politics in a way that isn’t true in New York or Massachusetts. Harris sued oil companies in California for local pollution, but those aren’t existential attacks on the industry, the way the climate litigation against ExxonMobil would have been. So she punted, in the best case because she wanted to live to fight another day. What will she do if she becomes Vice-President? I imagine that her courage will depend on the climate movement’s success in eroding the political power of the oil companies. The weaker the fossil-fuel conglomerates become, the less scary they are. (Oil barons understand this, which is why they’re spending large sums to reëlect Trump). My guess is that Harris is a run-of-the mill politician, who will go where the footing is easiest. That’s less attractive than principled and unbending leadership, because that means movements can’t demobilize after Election Day. The pushing never ceases. (I’m a Bernie guy.)

When politicians are weathervanes, you need to make the wind blow. And the wind is blowing in Washington and in the Atlantic, where, last week, we reached the letter “K” in the hurricane naming list ten days earlier than ever before. Earlier this week, for instance, there was a kerfuffle after the D.N.C. dropped from its platform a pledge to end fossil-fuel subsidies. Within twenty-four hours, a spirited response from disappointed environmentalists produced a new pledge from the Biden campaign that his commitment hadn’t wavered, and that he indeed planned on “rallying the rest of the world” to do likewise. That’s politics in action. Or consider one closely watched Democratic Senate primary: on September 1st, Massachusetts voters will decide between the incumbent, Ed Markey, and the challenger, Joseph Kennedy III. When the race began, Kennedy had a big lead in the polls, based largely on his last name and his Disney Hall of Presidents resemblance to its most famous bearer. But Markey (whom I admire, and have worked with on environmental legislation) fought back. And he did it largely on the strength of his climate credentials. Markey is the Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal, and his House counterpart, Ocasio-Cortez, cut a nifty ad for him. The latest polling shows that the seventy-four-year-old has moved ahead of the thirty-nine-year-old political scion, largely thanks to a fifty-one-per-cent lead among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year olds. Teen Vogue, which has become must-read political journalism, wrote that Markey is “the subject of countless stan accounts. His outfits go viral. Teens cling to his every word.” (Note to Joe Biden.) The Sunrise Movement—the group of under-thirties who organized the sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office that served as a coming-out party for the Green New Deal—produced a YouTube video for Markey last week, which may be my favorite political ad of all time. (Watch till the end for one of the best knife twists in campaign history). If Markey wins, he will go back to the Senate a national progressive hero; more to the point, he will have demonstrated that truly taking on climate change can pay off politically. That lesson won’t be lost on anyone, Harris included.

Passing the Mic

Michelle Wu has been a Boston city councillor since 2013, when (at the age of twenty-eight) she became the first Asian-American woman to hold the job. In 2016, her colleagues elected her city-council chair, and she was the first woman of color to hold that post. She recently introduced plans for a city-scale Green New Deal—and her team is working to make it a template for cities worldwide.

If we don’t do anything about climate change, what’s Boston going to look like in fifty years? Give us a little tour of the city’s landmarks and neighborhoods.

Thanks to local researchers, we have a pretty clear picture of where we’re headed under business as usual. Most of Boston’s downtown area was created through huge landfill projects in the eighteen-hundreds, so we’re really vulnerable to flooding, as storms intensify and the ocean takes back this low-lying, man-made land. By 2070, with more than three feet of sea-level rise, you’ll be paddling the Freedom Trail by kayak. During Nor’easters, Boston Harbor will spill over nearly a mile to the Chinatown Gate. But what should really move us to action is the suffering and displacement we’d face in our neighborhoods. As luxury condo buildings of the Seaport and other areas are abandoned, because they’ll be underwater every day at high tide, safe and dry areas will become unaffordable for many. When every day of summer is hotter than ninety degrees, outdoor workers and residents who can’t afford air-conditioning will face extreme risk. Already wide racial and economic disparities will grow, as communities of color and low-income families bear the brunt of these costs and injustices.

You’ve put racial justice front and center in addressing the city’s environmental future: explain the rationale.

We see across the world that the destructive impacts of climate change always fall squarely on historically marginalized communities, and Boston is no different. COVID-19 has exposed how concentrated and compounding these injustices are. Black and brown communities and low-income families have been devastated by the virus, owing to preëxisting health disparities from more exposure to pollution, less stable housing, unhealthy working conditions, and greater risk of exposure as essential workers. The roots of this public-health crisis are the same as the climate crisis: a political and economic system built on structural racism and injustices that threaten us all, because each person’s health and well-being is so deeply intertwined with that of the entire community. In other words, climate justice is racial and economic justice. Creating truly resilient, sustainable communities means eliminating poverty and dismantling systemic racism.

And what are the barriers to making this happen? Is Boston ready for this or are we just too tired and set in our ways?

Boston is a city that can seem set in its ways, as we’re fiercely loyal not just to our sports teams but also our history and traditions. That can make old-guard Boston skeptical of big changes, and allow political leaders to avoid important fights. But we also have a rich legacy of activism and civic trailblazing. We celebrate Boston being home to the first public school, public park, and public library in the country. And I’ve found that when we push to reimagine what’s possible for the public good—such as fare-free public transportation—these ideas can be embraced by a broad coalition as a point of civic pride. So I’m hopeful and determined for Boston to meet the moment as a leader on climate justice.

Climate School

Kate Aronoff’s trenchant interview with the Cornell University law professor Saule Omarova outlines her bold plans for a National Investment Authority, which would work like a public option for individual investors, letting them fund crucial infrastructure projects instead of just handing money over to BlackRock. It sounds like something F.D.R. might have conceived, in a situation where there are huge quantities of money sloshing around stock markets during a time of enormous social need.

Obvious but important: a new study from Climate Central found that as temperatures rise, so does demand for air-conditioning. It projects that, by 2050, demand for air-conditioning will rise in the United States by fifty-nine per cent—and far more than that around the world. That is why we need highly efficient air-source heat pumps, which also cool air, and why we need enormous amounts of renewable electricity to power it all.

Scoreboard

Big number on the board this week: a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius), which is the highest reliably recorded temperature ever on planet Earth. It happened over the weekend, in California’s Death Valley, which is also the place where the nominal Earth temperature record of a hundred and thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit was set, in 1931. That number, though, has been disputed ever since, and the great weather historian Christopher Burt published a lengthy investigation, in 2016, proving it could not have happened. For now, a hundred and thirty degrees is the mark—but don’t expect it to last.

Jules Pretty, an agronomy researcher at the University of Essex, has released a new study showing that there are now roughly eight million small groups of farmers around the world, teaching each other how, for example, to grow rice without pesticides.

Extraordinarily bad fire news from across the planet. In the Amazon, fires are burning at a rate not seen for a decade. In Siberia, fires may be burning at a rate we’ve never previously seen—and the heating, drying region may be on the verge of moving into a new and extreme “fire regime.” In Colorado and elsewhere in the American West, this year’s fire season has begun in earnest. The forests surrounding Hanging Lake—one of the state’s premier tourist sites—almost burned. The fourteen-year-old climate activist Haven Coleman reports via Twitter: “Even inside my house it's hazy. . . . Feels like I’m being cornered, trapped. Stuck home since there’s COVID everywhere, but NOW my home is becoming unbreathable. Everything sucks. Ugh.” Indeed. By midweek, evacuations were under way in California, where fires were threatening the city of Vacaville and other parts of Napa and Sonoma.

The two-thousands were, officially, the hottest decade on record, up 0.39 degrees Celsius from the previous decade, which is a huge change in ten years’ time. It’s an urgent reminder that the next decade may be our final chance to take serious climate action.

A new study in Nature confirms that the effect of the pandemic on the planet’s temperature was negligible—greenhouse-gas emissions fell, but much of the smog that tends to cool the planet also disappeared. “These results highlight that without underlying long-term system-wide decarbonization of economies, even massive shifts in behaviour, only lead to modest reductions in the rate of warming,” the authors wrote. They also, however, noted some good news: “Pursuing a green stimulus recovery out of the post-COVID-19 economic crisis can set the world on track for keeping the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement within sight.”

Warming Up

The Ed Markey ad that I hailed above plays a version of the Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower” in the background. (There’s also some Nine Inch Nails.) Just for reference purposes, and because it blazes like few other songs, here’s the definitive Hendrix rendition of “Watchtower.”

Joe Biden's Obamacare Opportunity

By Dylan Scott, Vox

20 August 20

The 2010 law gave health coverage to millions but left million of others uninsured. Biden could finish the job.

merica has been better off because Obamacare was the law of the land when Covid-19 struck.

When millions of people lost their jobs this spring, many of them could turn to the law’s insurance marketplaces, where they could purchase coverage with the help of premium tax subsidies created by the law. Others qualified for Medicaid in the states that have chosen to expand the program through the law. The Affordable Care Act created a new safety net, and it was there for people in a crisis.

But not for everybody. The law is flawed, and it has been weakened by Republican obstruction. More than 2 million people remain uninsured because the state they live in has refused Medicaid expansion. Some people who lost their jobs in the coronavirus crisis won’t be eligible for health benefits because of it. The Trump administration refused to reopen Obamacare enrollment in the spring, leaving the uninsured with no options in the middle of the worst infectious disease outbreak in a century.

The ACA had brought the uninsured rate to historic lows by the end of the Obama presidency — but the US still had a much higher share of people without basic medical coverage than any other developed economy. Then Donald Trump entered the White House, tried to repeal the law completely, and, when he failed, weakened it through administrative action. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, with a damaged safety net capable of partially, but not totally, protecting Americans from the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. 

US health care has demonstrably improved since Joe Biden last co-headlined a Democratic National Convention in 2012. But the ACA’s aspirations — to make health care coverage a right — have not been fully realized. There is still work to be done.

If Biden beats Trump in the November election and becomes president in January 2021, he will be charged with finishing the project of universal health care started under President Obama. He will likely assume office in the right moment to make big changes — not unlike when he was sworn in as vice president in 2009.

The question will be whether he has the will and opportunity to do it.

How Joe Biden’s health care plan builds on Obamacare

Obamacare’s successes are self-evident. The US cut its uninsured rate roughly in half, from about 16 percent in 2010 when the law was passed to about 8 percent when Obama and Biden left office, according to Census Bureau data. About 11.4 million people enrolled in coverage through the law’s marketplaces for 2020, the vast majority of them eligible for the tax subsidies created by the law, and 12.5 million people qualified for Medicaid expansion in the nearly 40 states that extended eligibility to childless adults with incomes near or below the federal poverty level. Several million more young people under age 26 have been able to stay on their parents’ health insurance under the law. 

Research has shown that Medicaid expansion literally saved lives. Medical bankruptcies have dropped since the law passed. 

The ACA’s political resilience is best attested by the failures of Trump and congressional Republicans to repeal it in 2017. The rules that banned insurers from discriminating against people with preexisting conditions and required plans to cover certain essential health benefits like prescription drugs, maternity care, and mental health treatment proved to be too popular to undo. So was the requirement that insurers cover preventive services, including birth control, at no cost. Cutting Medicaid was indefensible with millions more Americans relying on its benefits.

But Obamacare has not delivered universal health care in America. Medicaid remains only partially expanded; 12 states are still holding out because of Republican opposition to the law. Many people signing up for ACA marketplace plans still have significant deductibles, which means they could end up paying thousands of dollars out of pocket every year on health care. For many of the Americans who make too much money to qualify for the ACA’s tax credits, premiums are unaffordable. The US uninsured rate ticked up to 8.5 percent in 2017, the last year for which census data is available, meaning 27.5 million people still don’t have coverage.

Biden’s health care agenda is very intentionally designed to patch up those holes. The law’s underlying structure is sound, he argues, and it established the foundation for more reform.

“The quickest, fastest way to do it is build on Obamacare,” Biden said at the first debate of the Democratic Party, back in June 2019. “To build on what we did.”

He would create a new government insurance plan to be sold on the ACA markets. The 2 million or so people currently stuck in the Medicaid expansion gap would be automatically enrolled, for free. Obamacare’s tax credits would be enhanced, pegged to more generous insurance, and eligibility for government assistance would be available to anybody. Nobody would pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on insurance premiums.

Obamacare was supposed to help sever the link between health insurance and work, making it easier for people to change jobs or start their own business because they could buy insurance on the marketplace. There are anecdotes of people taking advantage of that opportunity, but restrictions written into the law on who qualified for coverage and financial assistance slowed down any large-scale shift. Biden’s public option would be available to the 150 million people who get insurance from their job, potentially opening the door for millions of Americans to join a government health program of their own volition, another step toward realizing the law’s vision.

“Extending a public option and premium subsidies to people with employer coverage is possibly the most powerful and underappreciated part of Biden’s plan,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “The largest number of Americans get their health insurance through an employer, and this starts to address their affordability concerns in a way the ACA never has.”

Biden could also reverse the administrative actions taken by Trump — cutting outreach programs, loosening regulations where possible — that have undermined the ACA and likely contributed to the recent uptick in the uninsured rate.

His plan still wouldn’t quite achieve universal coverage, by the Biden campaign’s own admission. Undocumented people living in the US would be left out, for starters, and some people who likely find health insurance to still be unaffordable. But the campaign estimates 97 percent of Americans would have health insurance under those reforms. 

In the primary campaign, that would have been an opening for attack; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) repeated over and over again during the campaign that his single-payer Medicare-for-all plan would cover every single person and almost completely eliminate out-of-pocket costs. Biden’s plan fell short of those maximalist ambitions.

But now we’re heading into the general election, where the alternative is Donald Trump, whose Justice Department is suing to overturn Obamacare entirely. It felt like an important moment for party unity when Sanders, in his remarks on the Democratic National Convention’s opening night, extended some warm words for Biden’s health care plan.

“As you know, we are the only industrialized nation not to guarantee health care for all people,” Sanders said. “While Joe and I disagree on the best path to get universal coverage, he has a plan that will greatly expand health care and cut the cost of prescription drugs.”

Democrats want to run on health care in 2020. Midway through the second hour of the party convention’s second night, actor Jeff Bridges narrated an extended video on Biden’s commitment to health care. The nominee himself spoke via video call with several patients about their medical experiences.

ALS activist Ady Barkan, an outspoken advocate for single-payer health care, punctuated the primetime package, a living portrait of the issue’s importance.

“We must elect Joe Biden,” Barkan said, through a computer because the disease has taken his natural voice. “Each of us must be a hero for the community. For our country. And then with the compassionate and intelligent president, we must act together and put on his desk a bill that guarantees us all the health care we deserve.”

Biden will have to prioritize health care — and he’ll need Democratic majorities in Congress

Biden’s promise, the contrast he drew with Sanders in the final days of the Democratic primary campaign, was he could get a health care reform bill passed through Congress.

“We can do that now. I can get that passed. I can get that done, if I’m president of the United States of America,” he said at the last primary debate in March, facing Sanders one on one. “That will be a fundamental change, and it happens now.”

January 2021, after a year of unprecedented turmoil from compounding medical and economic crises, would provide an opportunity for a President Biden to pursue aggressive reforms. As Vox’s Ella Nilsen reported, the Biden campaign has concluded that a return to normal is no longer sufficient after the Covid-19 pandemic. A sweeping agenda is needed in this moment.

The evolving politics of health care could make the public more receptive to new reforms. This summer, voters in Republican-led states like Missouri and Oklahoma have elected to expand Medicaid coverage through the ACA. The law’s net approval rating (+15 in the latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll) is near its all-time high.

“Many of the biggest coverage expansions both in the US and in similar countries happened in the context of wars and social upheavals, as well as financial crises. One theory is that those circumstances redefine social solidarity, thus expanding views of the role of government,” Cynthia Cox, director of the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker, told me earlier this year. “I think one factor that will determine the permanency of these changes is how long this disruption continues. The longer this goes on, the more likely this social solidarity becomes ingrained.”

This has been a consistent finding in social science for decades. Jacob Hacker, a Yale University political scientist, and his colleagues found this to be true in research they conducted after the Great Recession. Personal experiences with economic insecurity during that crisis led to a shift in policy attitudes of a magnitude that they said “rivals partisanship and ideology.” People who experienced more profound personal shocks ended up supporting a bigger government role in mitigating their economic risks.

As Hacker put it: “The middle and working classes lose their lives, the rich and business at least have to lose their money.”

But even if Biden is thinking bigger now, he’ll need a Democratic Congress to pass most of his health care agenda. Democrats would have to hold on to the House and flip at least three Republican-held Senate seats to take control of that chamber. 

And that’s when the really difficult work would commence.

As president, Biden and congressional Democrats would first have to decide whether to eliminate the Senate filibuster or try to pass a health care bill through the self-limiting process of budget reconciliation. As Vox’s Ezra Klein reported a year ago, after interviews with influential Senate Democrats, that is far from a settled question within the caucus.

Then the party would have to agree on the legislation itself. As the Hill reported recently, the existing disagreements could lead to Democrats starting small on health care reform — even leaving out Biden’s public option at first and sticking strictly to some smaller improvements to the ACA. Key Senate Democrats sounded on board with an expansion of Medicare eligibility and a public option in their interviews with Klein, but there are a lot of details still to be worked. out. And anything short of a significant expansion of public health insurance would surely be a tough sell for progressive Democrats who already believe Biden’s plan doesn’t do enough.

This is where Biden’s self-professed prowess as a congressional dealmaker would come into play. He would have to decide how hard to push. 

But it all starts with Biden beating Trump in November, to give himself the opportunity to build on the Obama-Biden administration’s health care legacy.

“What happens in November?” Hacker said. “The answer to that question is going to influence what’s possible in terms of large-scale health policy changes as much as anything else.”