Democrats are acting like the single biggest climate-related spending bill ever to be signed into law never happened.
“We’re celebrating the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act!” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declared on Tuesday night, summoning all the enthusiasm he hopes Democratic voters might eventually mimic. That goal is unlikely to be advanced by the way his party talks about what the bulk of the Inflation Reduction Act was designed to mitigate: not inflation, but climate change. But given how the party’s most influential voices talk about global warming, you could be forgiven for thinking this legislation doesn’t exist.
When the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law, the truth about it could finally be told. The law “may have little impact on inflation,” the Associated Press sheepishly confessed when it was at last safe to do so. Indeed, “It’s increasingly clear that immediately curbing prices wasn’t the point,” the AP deigned to admit last week. In fact, as Northeastern University professor Laura Kuhl crowed, that bill wasn’t an anti-inflation measure at all. Rather, it was the “biggest piece of climate legislation that’s ever been considered in U.S. policy.”
The gall on display in these analyses is tough to overstate. They amount to a celebration over the thoroughness of the deception deployed against voters. But the Democrats’ victory was always destined to be a pyrrhic one. Democratic voters and leftwing activists who support using every means available to arrest and reverse global climatological shifts reject incrementalism in that pursuit, and incremental change is all the American system of government is designed to produce. What they want is to change the weather. No piece of legislation could achieve that. And so, in the year that has passed since, they have (predictably) reverted to a familiar form in which they act like the single biggest climate-related spending bill ever to be signed into law never happened.
“If there is not bold, immediate action to address the climate crisis, the quality of life that we are leaving our kids is very much in question,” Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in July. Climate change is “ravaging the planet,” he added. “Congress must develop an unprecedented sense of urgency about this global crisis.” Sanders’s advocacy is in line with what “scientists” are telling NPR. Humanity is facing an existential crisis unless lawmakers take “more aggressive action” to appropriate ever larger sums of taxpayer dollars to fund the industry in which they operate. “What the scientific community is telling us now is that the Earth is screaming at us,” Washington governor Jay Inslee recently divined. Soothing Mother Nature will require “more support” from Washington.
Politico’s reporting on the first anniversary of Joe Biden’s bait-and-switch indicates that congressional “climate hawks” are keen on taking the advice offered by Sanders and his cadre of scientific minds. They hope to see even more climate-related spending, including “a green jobs training program, incentives for power companies to switch to clean energy and a tax credit for electrical transmission projects.” For his part, Schumer agreed that Congress must “go much further” in its fight against heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere. Senator Ed Markey seeks the establishment of a “Civilian Climate Corps,” which would militarize that fight. Senator Brian Schatz wants to see Congress “boost funding” for geothermal energy. Senator Debbie Stabenow hopes to impose a carbon-credit scheme on the nation. And the clock is ticking. Not just on the “dystopian” future Sanders warns of, but the more acute threat of a Republican resurgence sufficient to retake control of both chambers of Congress.
And, of course, there is the activist class, which has no use for luxuries like the separation of powers or the legislative process. They demand Joe Biden unilaterally declare a “climate emergency” — a demand the president ill-advisedly paid lip service to when he told the Weather Channel last week that he had already declared just such an emergency “practically speaking.” The “unfortunate reality is that doing some good things is simply not enough, because we are in a physical climate emergency,” said the director of the Climate Law Institute of the Center for Biological Diversity, Kassie Siegel. “It is a question of survival and every day counts.”
“I wish I hadn’t called it that,” Biden confessed last week at a Utah fundraiser when the subject of the Inflation Reduction Act came up, “because it has less to do with reducing inflation than it has to do with providing alternatives that generate economic growth.” Now he tells us. In fact, there were two valid, albeit sordid, rationales for lying to the voters as brazenly as Democrats did one year ago. The foremost was the need to convince the public that Congress actually cared about curbing inflation. The second was to avoid raising the climate-obsessed Left’s expectations. As Khul absurdly claimed last year, the Inflation Reduction Act was “so huge because this is kind of the last chance to adopt significant climate policy.” It is always and forever the last chance to act. And when the nation acts, it is always and forever unequal to the scale of the challenge.