While reporting on BAAJA, I talked to Bill McKibben, a climate writer and activist I greatly respect. The bill, he told me, “is plenty good enough for people in the clean energy industry, as they can live with and prosper under a regime where you’re steadily increasing the amount of clean energy, even if you’re increasing, or at least not quickly decreasing, the amount of fossil energy.” But he’s looking for something much more decisive, something that does not pose the risk of building more fossil fuel capacity.
McKibben’s theory is that the building El Niño and the war in Iran might unlock a political consensus to move far beyond fossil fuels in the near future. I don’t know if he’s right, but if he is, then BAAJA looks, to me, more like a risk worth taking. If you believe there’s going to be more pressure for decarbonization by 2029, you want to begin the process of making it easier to build green energy now. If Democrats then have so much power that they can pass more radical laws to help green energy, or impose a social cost on carbon emissions, then all the better. BAAJA can be a floor, not a ceiling. But even in his scenario, you need a new floor, and I don’t think we should wait years to start to build one.
The Senate vote to move forward on the bill was telling. Among Democrats from states that went for Kamala Harris by 10 points or more, the vote was 2-to-1 against it; among Democrats representing more purple or red states, it was 2-to-1 in favor. Something Senator Chuck Schumer said to me last week has been ringing in my ears: “If affordability doesn’t prevail, we’re in trouble,” he told me. “We cannot impose on people what we think is important. We have to listen to what’s important to them and then deliver.” (Schumer voted to advance the bill.)
Some Democrats want to wait for the new Congress to be seated so they can renegotiate this bill to gain more leverage and extract better terms. That makes sense in theory, but most analysts I talk to think it would fail in practice. This bill was a bipartisan project from the start. Whitehouse, one of its architects, is perhaps the most relentless climate voice in the Democratic caucus. And it’s hard to imagine the conditions for deal making improving when Democrats begin investigating Trump and his administration and family in earnest and as Stephen Miller settles into his new role as White House chief of staff. We are entering an era of renewed partisan collision, not a renaissance of bipartisan deal making.
“ The folks that argue that there’s going to be some mythical negotiation in the future, I think that’s just absolute lunacy,” Representative Josh Harder, a California Democrat who is a chairman of the Build America Caucus, told me. To Harder, it’s a mistake to present this bill as a painful compromise: “ It’s so rare in Congress that you have an opportunity to strengthen the economy and accelerate growth, create jobs, reduce climate emissions and lower prices for consumers all at the same time. We’ve got to pass this.”
