I mostly lurk here, but in the aftermath of the election I’m seeing a whole ton of people essentially making the argument that any attempts at bipartisanship are impossible and will only result in the Republicans screwing us over. The consensus on here seems to be that our options for getting anything done are to either win those two Georgia seats or to spend the next two years grinding our teeth to nubs and sticking pins into our travel-sized Mitch McConnell effigies. But here I am with news: there is broad support on the Republican side of congress for more than one sensible piece of climate legislation.
In the Senate, Mike Braun (R, Indiana), Debbie Stabenow (D, Michigan), Lindsey Graham (you know who), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D, Rhode Island) have co-sponsored a bill that will pay farmers for reducing their emissions. Bruce Westerman, a Republican rep from wildly MAGA-happy Arkansas, is sponsoring a bill to try to plant one trillion trees. Young Republicans like Benji Backer are plainly very over climate denial, and they’re pushing their elders to do something about it. We have an excellent shot here to hammer out a bunch of solid, clean climate bills which we can then tout as an accomplishment of the Biden administration to skeptical young people.
”But it’s not enough!” I can hear you cry! “We need a Green New Deal! And if we pass these bills someone on NPR might say something nice about Lindsey Graham!”
You know what? I don’t care. I don’t care if it might earn Lindsay Graham some richly undeserved praise! I don’t! And most young people won’t care, either. How do I know? I’m a millennial, and though I’d LOVE a Green New Deal, I’ll take a trillion trees. I’ll take farmers reducing their emissions. I would write an ode of praise to Lindsey Graham and sing it to him on his birthday every year for the rest of his weird little life if he could help get some of this stuff done. There is no time to waste here. There’s no time to stuff these bills with other things that progressives want but that Republicans will never go for. Incrementalism won’t be good enough to save the planet, but passing something is better than sitting around with our thumbs up our butts complaining about how we can’t pass the bills that we really want while half of the planet ignites and the other half sinks under the waves.
Maybe someone in their sixties or seventies is comfortable with waiting to make progress on the climate until we can pass the most glorious, perfect climate bill the world has ever contemplated, but my main focus is fighting for every single scrap that will make the dystopian hellscape my theoretical future children and grandchildren will inherit even slightly less full of nomadic death cults riding solar-powered four-wheelers through the dust storms of the Great Californian Desert. I’ve already resigned myself to the thought that I’ll probably live to see people being punted through Midtown Manhattan by singing gondoliers, but I don’t want to be in my eighties and explaining to those future theoretical great-grandchildren what a “tree” was. So please, I beg of you, if we can’t take the senate let’s get on board with whatever sensible, clean climate legislation our nutty uncles on the other side of the aisle will let us pass. Call your senators. Hell, email Lindsey! Stroke that weird little ego like it’s never been stroked before. You may have to take a really long shower afterward, but as sacrifices to make in the name of literally saving the world, I’m pretty sure that we all could do a hell of a lot worse.