rjzimmerman:

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

When President Joe Biden took office a year ago, promising to “listen to the science” and “tackle the climate crisis,” the stars seemed aligned, with a political party in favor of climate action newly in charge of both houses of Congress. But Democrats’ narrow majority has made intra-party negotiations delicate, with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia the fickle, final, coal-friendly vote. Once again, a focus on upfront costs is stymying a once-in-a-decade chance to pass comprehensive climate legislation.

Manchin’s complaints have centered on the sticker price. In September 2021, when Congress began considering Build Back Better, Biden’s package of social and climate policy programs, Manchin wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion.” He asked his fellow Democrats to pick and choose which policies were really needed and to stop and consider how a big spending bill would exacerbate the problems of inflation and growing government debt. Another reason for a “strategic pause,” he went on, was to “allow for a complete reporting and analysis” of what the bill would mean “for this generation and the next.” The op-ed made no mention of climate change nor any consideration of how these future generations might fare on an unstable hothouse Earth.

Manchin is hardly alone in framing things this way. Economics has become the de facto language politicians use to debate public policy and how they evaluate solutions to alleviate planetary problems. Its persuasive power and rhetoric have been harnessed by the fossil fuel industry and its allies, who have argued for decades that climate action is a killer of economic growth, even as it has become increasingly evident that inaction is a wicked killer itself. A narrow focus on short-term costs and benefits has led to a failure of imagination, experts say: Amid an abstract debate of how to make any action on climate change economically efficient, the bigger picture of what really matters — who suffers, who benefits, whether the planet burns to a crisp — often gets lost.