At Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell writes, An Environmental Upside to the Horrible Debt Deal?:
With the debt-ceiling deal done, the details of who feels the most pain from the next ($1.6 trillion) round of cuts will be left up to a 12-person congressional "supercommittee," to be formed in the coming weeks. But you can bet that funding for dramatic action on climate change and toxic mercury pollution is not going to win out over funding for bedpans and missiles.In fact, as others have pointed out, cutting trillions out of the federal budget is likely to mean massive cutbacks in the regulatory arm at the EPA, the gutting of clean-energy funding at the Department of Energy, and goodbye to any hopes of infrastructure spending for little projects like, say, a 21st-Century electricity transmission grid. Erich Pica, head of Friends of the Earth, pretty much summed it up: ?The draconian cuts passed are likely to mean more people out of work, more people drinking poisoned water and breathing polluted air, and a slower transition to a clean energy economy."
All true. But maybe there?s an upside, too. [...]
So maybe this is the ?fuck ?em? moment. Maybe this is the moment when enviros and clean-energy advocates stop being quite so polite and deferential. Maybe more people will climb trees located on mountaintop-removal sites in an effort to stop the blasting. Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets. [...]
[I]f the economy continues to tank, all bets are off. But for years, climate activists have been wondering what it would take to wake people up to how much is at stake in these climate and energy battles. Some thought an epic drought would do it. Or a series of freak hurricanes. Or the sudden calving of a massive ice sheet in Greenland. But the one thing nobody considered was a budget battle.
Here's a little reminder from Wisconsin about why despair gets you nothing by Matt Wisniewski. Their fight = our fight.
At Daily Kos on this date in 2002:
In the latest installment of "Talk Up The Economy," treasury secretary O'Neil promises the economy won't fall back into another recession.But, here's the kicker?the economy won't recover at full speed unless, among other things, Congress makes last year's tax cuts permanent. Is it any wonder no one respects the man?
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