Is This the Year We Doom Civilization?

We may be losing our last, best chance to limit climate change

On Monday House Republicans released the final parts of their proposed tax and budget bill — and it’s the stuff of nightmares. As Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress documents, the bill would impose the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP — the program formerly known as food stamps — in history. Millions of low-income Americans would lose health coverage; millions would go hungry. Many of those suffering would be children.

The purpose of these cuts, sadism aside, would be to partially offset the cost of huge tax cuts for the rich — cuts that would still explode the budget deficit. The cruelty is mind-boggling. In fact, I have both a suggestion and a prediction for major media organizations: I’d like to see them do focus groups with ordinary voters, describing these plans. My prediction, based on what we’ve seen in the past, is that many voters will simply refuse to believe the policy descriptions, insisting that elected officials can’t possibly be that vicious.

But they can be and are.

And yet the brutality of the cuts to the social safety net isn’t what bothers me most about what’s about to happen to public policy. Even worse is the assault on renewable energy. From the Financial Times:

Republicans have outlined far-reaching plans to gut government support for clean energy as part of a series of legislative proposals to fund sweeping tax cuts promised by US President Donald Trump.

Congressional lawmakers on the powerful House ways and means committee, which is responsible for writing tax law, on Monday released draft legislation that would end renewable energy subsidies and scrap tax breaks for electric vehicle purchases.

Meanwhile, fossil fuels would receive billions in subsidies.

Are we just looking at money-driven politics as usual? To some extent. If you look at data on political spending by industry groups, oil and gas is overwhelmingly pro-G.O.P.:

Source: Open Secrets

While alternative energy mostly backs Democrats:

Source: Open Secrets

But this goes beyond the usual role of money in politics, in two ways.

First, it’s obvious that MAGA politicians hate renewable energy in ways that go beyond the fact that they get a lot of money from the fossil fuel sector. Consider what’s happening in Texas, which leads the nation in wind power. You might think that the state’s politicians would embrace a rapidly growing industry that is boosting its economy. But no. According to the Houston Chronicle,

Texas Republicans are getting closer than ever to killing the state’s renewable energy boom, according to the clean energy industry — not only by halting new development in its tracks, but also by possibly sending scores of existing projects to an early grave.

Why does MAGA hate renewables? They consider them woke because they help fight climate change, which they insist is a hoax. And they’re cleaner than burning fossil fuels, which means that they aren’t manly.

It’s all kind of funny — or would be if it weren’t so tragic.

At this point there’s no legitimate way to deny that man-made climate change is an existential threat. According to researchers at NASA — whose work is, of course, on the chopping block — 2024 was the warmest year on record. But the politics of climate action have always been extremely difficult. The threat isn’t always obvious, since there are still cold days; it’s global, not local; and it’s long-term, with the big payoffs to doing something decades in the future.

As a result, the Economics 101 answer to pollution — put a price on emissions — has seemed politically out of reach. As far as I know, every government that has tried to impose some form of carbon tax has paid a large political price. Around 15 years ago it was hard to avoid feeling despair about our chances of steering away from catastrophe.

Then came a miracle: Dramatic technological progress in renewable energy, making it drastically cheaper, especially but not only as a way of generating electricity. The International Renewable Energy Agency has a striking chart showing how the cost of electricity generation from various renewable sources has plunged compared with the cost of generation from fossil fuels:

Source: IRENA

This technological miracle suddenly made an alternative climate strategy possible, one that was all carrots, no sticks. Instead of using carbon prices or regulations to force people to stop burning fossil fuels, policymakers could subsidize and promote renewable energy, nudging us toward an electrified economy with wind and solar — plus, probably, nuclear, which has its place — providing the electricity. Instead of telling people to eat their spinach, we could be advertising job-creating investments.

Given how cheap renewables have become, the subsidies probably wouldn’t have to be that large. Wind and solar have been taking off on their own:

Source: Energy Information Agency

What we mostly needed, arguably, was a push to overcome the network externalities chicken-and-egg issues — e.g., people reluctant to buy electric vehicles unless there are plenty of charging stations, businesses unwilling to build enough charging stations unless large numbers of people buy electric cars.

What I’m describing, of course, is something like the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was actually mainly about climate and not at all about inflation.

And the renewable technology miracle, with the policy possibilities it offered, came just in time. True, even with serious climate change policy finally possible in the United States, and even with other major economies adopting I.R.A.-type policies, it’s too late to avoid a damaging rise in global temperatures. Climate-related disasters are already on the rise, and would keep rising even if we stopped emissions tomorrow. But as of a few months ago there was hope of avoiding the worst.

Well, abandon all hope, ye who enter an era of MAGA rule.

OK, all may not be lost. There are already enough jobs tied to IRA-linked subsidies, enough businesses that made big bets on the new climate policy, that actual policy may not be as bad as what emerged from the Ways and Means Committee.

But things really have taken a grim turn. And a lot of it isn’t even about money. It’s just about spite.

MUSICAL CODA