Sure, This Bipartisan Bill Sucks. But It's Bipartisan!
The latest monument to human arrogance can be found in the early outlines of the Bipartisan Compromise Infrastructure Bill, a kind of holy document for people who gain spiritual ecstasy from walking down the hall in the Capitol. The Senate council of elders involved in the drafting of this thing have reportedly earmarked just $579 billion in new spending, including $47 billion for "climate resiliency," $10 billion for electric buses, and $73 billion for "power infrastructure." In the most generous reading, some of that last bucket will go towards changing the way we power our society so that we are not pumping so much CO2—and, for that matter, methane—into the atmosphere. These are gasses that, when they get up there, trap more and more heat and gradually alter the ecosystems in which we live on a fundamental level.
For a sense of scale, we're spending $400 billion to acquire F-35s, a fighter jet that does not work. We'll spend an eighth of that on mitigation, to try to ameliorate the effects of our own civilizational self-destruction. And therein lies the hubris. We cannot mitigate what's coming if we don't stop pumping heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere. There is no sea wall high enough, because the disasters will be more varied, interconnected, and arrive sooner than we seem to be capable of accepting. Sea levels will rise and put oceanfront property at risk. The storm surge from ever-strengthening hurricanes already is. Wars will be fought over scarce resources—and water in particular. The American Southwest is already mired in a 20-year drought that we will at some point have to accept constitutes aridification. Where it once rained, it's now a desert. That's what happened to parts of western Honduras, and the inability of farmers there to find a subsistence living may have fueled migration to cities and then up north to the American border. When people can't live where they've always lived, they get on the move.
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And just look at how we dealt with The Caravans. (By freaking the fuck out.) Multiply that by many times, and you've got a look at the future. All over the world. Large swathes of the country of Bangladesh, population 163 million, are below sea level and at risk of becoming unlivable. Where are these people going to go? And how are the people who already live in those places going to react when the newcomers arrive? These are not questions for future generations. They are the questions of our time. So is the fact that for most of the year, our nation's most populous state is simply on fire. This coming fire season—increasingly a misnomer, considering California is on fire most of the time—promises to be among the worst, if not the worst, in history. Every year is the hottest on record now, and the heat kills. When that system delivering extreme heat leaves an area, what often will arrive next is catastrophic rainfall—huge amounts of precipitation that arrives all at once, drowning the area in flash floods. Warming oceans are damaging the ecosystems that generate food for billions of people and even scrambling wind patterns, changing weather on land. All of this is already happening.
And yet, if these first reports are anything to go on, the big bipartisan infrastructure proposal pretends none of this exists in order to justify crafting a shitty bill in the interests of Bipartisanship. The proposal also floats "bringing in pieces of a large Energy Committee bill that Manchin is working on to deal with abandoned mines, weatherization and power and climate related provisions," Politico tells us, but the afterthought vibes here do not suggest a climate response worthy of the name. We cannot mitigate our way out of this, and we certainly can't do it for $47 billion. It took a while, but the conservative wing of the Democratic Senate majority has conspired to throw away that majority and perhaps the last chance we have to avoid the worst-case scenarios on climate. Once the Republicans retake one house of the federal legislature, ain't nothing getting done. And that's not even broaching their all-out war on free and fair elections in this country, another issue that "moderate" Democrats have so far decided to do nothing about in the interests of Bipartisan Comity or whatever. The Vikings have come to sack our village. We cannot fight back without 10 Viking votes for our Fight Back Bill.
It is literally disgusting—physically nauseating—to watch this play out. If the Biden White House signs onto this level of investment, part of a proposal which also reportedly includes privatizing big chunks of the public infrastructure, then the Biden White House deserves everything that's coming next. That includes possibly losing its allied majorities in the federal legislature losing the White House next time around. With the sprawling Republican efforts to entrench their own power against the popular will, Democrats may not be making policy in any consistent way for a generation. What began as a campaign of such promise, with the president backing a two-pronged push made up of physical infrastructure and so-called "care infrastructure" investing in the people and services that make this train go, has given way to some podunk compromise that will be the end of all infrastructure work Congress does this session. It's almost impossible to believe these conservative Democrats will get on board for a subsequent bill that plugs the gaps. Democrats could have acknowledged that Republicans in Congress will never work with them to draft an infrastructure bill that meets the needs of the moment, and instead turned to budget reconciliation to pass a bill that does—and only needs 50+1 votes. Instead, they've chosen to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
And they've probably convinced themselves that this is the Good and Virtuous route, simply because it is Bipartisan. As if the history books will lead with "Senators Manchin and Sinema Preserved the Filibuster and Sought Bipartisan Compromise" rather than "they allowed the continued erosion of American democracy and the continued decline of the viability of human civilization as we know it on this planet." Nobody cares about your high-minded nonsensical op-eds or your stanning for Institutional Norms that are all made-up anyway. Bipartisanship is not, in and of itself, a goal or a virtue. We reached a bipartisan deal to invade Iraq. This is a results business, and $10 billion for electric buses is not going to do it. Jesus Christ, get it together. The politically suicidal Democratic Party might deserve what's coming if they fail this badly, but the rest of us do not.
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