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09 April 22
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PBS' two-part documentary shows our country's most relatable Founding Father – statesman, inventor ... rascal
Benjamin Franklin's oft-paraphrased quote, which pops up in the second season of Neflix's drama "Virgin River," is employed by a small-town mayor who begrudgingly takes in someone she dislikes. It's a favorite quote of reluctant hosts, for obvious reasons but also a testament to the enduring wit of Franklin more than 250 years later.
The Founding Father is the subject of Ken Burns' latest docuseries on PBS, airing across two nights. The first part lays the groundwork for Franklin's apparent brilliance and innovation when it comes to publishing and science. His "Poor Richard's Almanack" was a sensation because he added humor (e.g. comparing visitors to fish), helpful advice and other fun bonus content to the usual dry weather reports seen in almanacs of the day. It's especially impressive considering he was mainly self-taught, having had his formal education cut short at age 10.
"Apprenticing himself to a printer and becoming a printer means you're setting words upside-down in type, which means that you get a kind of hyper-literacy which he displays all the time," Burns said during the Television Crisis Association press conference for the series in January, along with many talking heads from the project.
Franklin the intellectual pioneer
Biographer Walter Isaacson also gives Franklin credit for pioneering a type of irreverence that wasn't seen in the stuffy statesmen or religious leaders of the day. This explains why his writing struck a chord with the common man.
"I think he invents a classic form of American writing," said Isaacson at the press conference. "He does not speak in the Original Sin [manner of theologian] Jonathan Edwards. Instead, it is a casual, 'cracker barrel'-type humor in which he's talking in an informal way – whether it is 'Poor Richard's Almanack' or any of the parodies and hoaxes that he writes for his newspaper or the autobiography.
"So that form of humor leads you to Mark Twain and Will Rogers and so many others, and it pokes fun at the pretensions of the elite. And he's the first to develop that. He gets it a little bit from Addison and Steele, the British editors of The Spectator, but in some ways he's the first to develop that 'aw shucks,' cracker barrel, informal way of writing."
He wasn't just handy with words though. Most school children first encounter Ben Franklin as the man who flew a kite and "discovered" electricity – or more accurately, created the lightning hypothesis and proved it. His curiosity and creativity knew no bounds, and he's rightfully revered as one of America's true Renaissance men, who was as familiar with wielding words as he was with the application of Newtonian physics.
"I think the importance of Ben Franklin is that he was able to connect art and science, able to connect the humanities and the technology," added Isaacson. "He cared about everything you could possibly learn about anything, from art to anatomy to math to music to diplomacy.
"And his science helped inform the things that he did. By being an expert in Newton, he understood checks and balances, and balances of power. His electricity experiments are the most important scientific achievements of that period, right after Newton. And, so, I do think by being like a Renaissance man, like a Leonardo da Vinci, he's able to see the patterns in nature. And he thought of himself as a scientist and an inventor. I think that is ingrained not only in him, but into what the foundation of America was about."
Among his inventions, which he refused to patent, are the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove and even the eerie-sounding armonica – a musical instrument that used an array of glass bowls.
Franklin the flawed statesman
Burns' docuseries is no hagiography, however. Despite Franklin's brilliance, he was a flawed man who was often the first to admit it. At age 20, he created a list of 13 virtues – among them temperance, justice, chastity and humility – by which he tried to develop his character. But even by his own standards he often failed, such as when he had a child out of wedlock. To this day, Franklin is known to have been quite the womanizer.
"He's a total rascal, too," Rutgers University history professor Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar told the press. "He's someone who the common man can connect to, right? He liked to party. He liked women. These are the things Ken made certain to balance in this film, that while we see him and his immense knowledge, we also see him as a person."
While certain failings may seem forgivable in a man who contributed so much to our country, his track record with slavery cannot be ignored in a person who is integral to how American defined itself and its ideals. Not only did Franklin own several enslaved people, but he also enabled slavery through his publications and the use of his general store. Only much later in life, when the country was being founded, did he become an abolitionist.
Having covered so many American figures, events and institutions throughout his body of work, Burns has had to contend with addressing the nation's racism repeatedly – whether in "The Civil War," "Jazz" or "Jackie Robinson." Racism is as American as apple pie, or in this case, a Founding Father.
"Race . . . is the central question of the United States," said Burns. "It comes from the Three-fifths [Compromise]. It comes from the fact of the Declaration written by a guy who said, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' and he owned hundreds of human beings in his lifetime and didn't see the hypocrisy and the contradiction. This is us."
Despite some defenders of 1787's Three-fifths Compromise – which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of distributing income tax funds back to states and determining congressional representation – Isaacson calls it "odious . . . Whether it was done to help the South get representation or hurt the South, it was dehumanizing."
Armstrong Dunbar added, "That's the age-old issue, question, vestige, whether or not we're talking about three-fifths of a human being being represented or the call about Black life mattering. We can draw those connections. And I'd argue that while that was for the sake of compromise, that there were long-lasting, long-reaching effects that were attached to that specific decision . . . We all know what the collateral damage was here."
"It's horrifying. It is beyond original sin. It is unforgivable," said actor Mandy Patinkin, who voices Franklin in the series. "And to think that if Franklin hadn't realized the necessity of compromise, we would not have had a Constitution. So, he tried to weigh all of that and then chose to devote the rest of his life to righting his own wrong, which was first to be a slave owner and then to devote the rest of his life to be an abolitionist."
Capturing that context of why Franklin may have had to act against his own beliefs is part of Burns' challenge as a documentarian. Even the idea of American independence isn't necessarily the pure and noble desire for autonomy that it's usually depicted to be.
"I think it's particularly true in this film, understanding all of the competing motives of independence," he said. "It's all right to throw out the dream of a democracy, but there's lots of land speculation in the Ohio Valley that's animating a lot to become patriots and not to stay loyalists. If you think there's money going to be made, then maybe that's a decision that people make and Americans certainly make.
"So, it is a very, very complicated and ever-shifting thing. We tend to see the past as fixed, but it is not, it is malleable," he continued. "And our job as historians is to actually embrace that malleability, not just as new information, new artifacts arrive, but as new ways of thinking, new modes of inquiry compel us to different ways of expression."
Refugees from Ukraine wait in the ticket hall of the railway station in Przemysl, eastern Poland, which has become a hub for refugees from Ukraine fleeing their country due to Russia's aggression. But today, many Ukrainians are opting to go back home. (photo: Wojtek Radwanski/Getty Images)
Many Ukrainian refugees have decided to go back to Ukraine, despite the fact that the war is ongoing.
Kristina, a 22-year-old Ukrainian from the Kyiv area whose last name is concealed to protect her relatives back home, fled Ukraine for Warsaw, Poland, in early March. She returned to Lviv, Ukraine, last week for six days to deliver some items, including toys and shoes for her younger siblings who are still living in Ukraine with her stepmom.
Kristina said many Ukrainians are trying to go back home, especially after news broke that Russian forces retreated from Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. But it’s unclear what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next move is going to be, she said.
“People are thinking, ‘OK, maybe it’s the end of the war.’ They think it’s the end and they’re going back. But honestly, what if he’s regrouping?” Kristina told VICE News. “Ukrainians shouldn’t return home yet because this could just be the calm before the storm.”
Local officials in Poland confirmed that some Ukrainians are heading back.
“For some time, we’ve observed a growing number of people wanting to return to Ukraine,” said Kamil Krukiewicz, a spokesperson with the mayor’s office in the border city of Przemyśl, Poland.
Przemyśl has been helping refugees fleeing Ukraine, even transforming a supermarket into a shelter for them. Many people pass through the city when delivering aid to Ukraine as well.
Kristina said she misses Ukraine, but it’s not worth staying in the country permanently right now.
“I wanted to be there, in Ukraine, so badly because it's my country. But when I arrived it wasn't like it was before,” she said. “When you’re home, you hear bombs, and you don’t know where they’ll drop.”
In Ukraine, life isn’t returning to normal yet either. Kristina pointed to the curfew, and said a lot of stores aren’t open. Air raid sirens ring day and night.
“It’s really bad there,” she said.
More than 4 million people—mostly women and children—have fled Ukraine since Russia first invaded six weeks ago, 2.5 million going to Poland, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. But today, many are starting to go back.
Many Ukrainians have opted to stay in Poland—as opposed to moving to another country—because it’s close to Ukraine and they hope to return as soon as the war ends. One Ukrainian woman currently in Warsaw, who asked not to be named out of concern for her male relatives back home, said she will return to Ukraine as soon as it’s safe to do so. Her husband has repeatedly told her not to return yet.
“He said, ‘What will you do here? You want to live in the cellar with me?’” she said. “But it’s my home. My entire life.”
Workers at the Staten Island facility celebrate their union victory. (photo: Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock)
Tech giant wants to redo election, arguing in legal filing that National Labor Relations Board acted in way that tainted results
The e-commerce giant wants to redo the election.
Amazon listed 25 objections in the filing on Friday, accusing the Amazon Labor Union of intimidating workers to vote for the union, a claim an attorney representing the group called “patently absurd”.
“The employees have spoken,” Eric Milner, the attorney, said in a statement after Amazon’s initial planned objections were made public in another legal filing.
“Amazon is choosing to ignore that, and instead engage in stalling tactics to avoid the inevitable – coming to the bargaining table and negotiating for a contract” on behalf of the workers, he said.
Warehouse workers in Staten Island cast 2,654 votes – or about 55% – in favor of a union, enough support to pull off a victory last week.
In one objection, Amazon said organizers “intentionally created hostile confrontations in front of eligible voters” by interrupting the mandatory meetings it held to persuade its employees to reject the union drive.
In a filing last week, the company disclosed it spent about $4.2m last year on labor consultants.
In another objection, Amazon targeted organizers’ distribution of cannabis to workers, saying the labor board “cannot condone such a practice as a legitimate method of obtaining support for a labor organization”.
New York legalized the recreational use of marijuana last year for those over 21. Milner, the attorney representing the union, said Amazon is grasping at straws.
Distributing cannabis “is no different than distributing free T-shirts and it certainly did not act to interfere with the election”, he said.
The company also accused organizers of improperly polling workers.
The retailer had signaled it planned to challenge the election results because of a lawsuit the NLRB filed in March in which the board sought to force Amazon to reinstate a fired employee who was involved in the union drive.
The company pointed to the lawsuit in one of its objections filed on Friday, saying the regional NLRB office that brought the suit “failed to protect the integrity and neutrality of its procedures” and had created an impression of support for the union by seeking reinstatement for the former employee, Gerald Bryson.
“Based on the evidence we’ve seen so far, as set out in our objections, we believe that the actions of the NLRB and the ALU improperly suppressed and influenced the vote, and we think the election should be conducted again so that a fair and broadly representative vote can be had,“ Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement.
Bryson was fired in the early days of the pandemic after leading a protest calling for the company to do more to protect workers against Covid-19. While off the job during the protest, Bryson got into a dispute with another worker and was later fired for violating Amazon’s vulgar-language policy, according to his attorney, Frank Kearl.
The NLRB did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Its spokesperson, Kayla Blado, has said the independent agency has been authorized by Congress to enforce the National Labor Relations Act.
“All NLRB enforcement actions against Amazon have been consistent with that congressional mandate,” she said.
In other objections, Amazon targeted how the labor agency conducted the election. It said the agency failed to control media presence around the voting area and didn’t have enough staff and equipment, which the company says created long lines and “discouraged many employees from voting in subsequent polling sessions”.
Both Amazon and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), a union that spearheaded a separate union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, have filed objections to that election.
The final outcome in Alabama is still up in the air with 416 outstanding challenged ballots hanging in the balance. Initial results show the union down by 118 votes, with the majority of Amazon warehouse workers rejecting a bid to form unionize.
RWDSU, which filed more than 20 objections, said in its filing Thursday that its objections are “grounds to set the election aside”.
A hearing to review the challenged ballots is expected to begin in the coming weeks.
Immigrants in an ICE detention center. (photo: Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images)
ICE suspended visitations at all detention facilities in early 2020 and has kept that policy in place.
Now, national and local immigrant rights groups – such as Advocates for Immigrants in Detention Northwest and La Resistencia – have started to push back, demanding that ICE open up detention facilities so that detainees don’t continue to miss out on opportunities to see anyone on the outside, for months, or possibly years, depending on how long their immigration case drags on.
More than 20,000 people are currently in immigration custody in the U.S. Close to 300 are at the one ICE detention facility in Washington state.
Visitations at federal and state prisons have largely resumed. Last year, for example, the Washington state Department of Corrections determined it was safe to reinstate visitations.
But those who want to talk to loved ones in ICE detention must still rely on old-fashioned phone calls or video.
Maria Leonides Perez Bahena lives in Kent. She says her 32-year-old son Santiago has been in ICE detention in Tacoma for more than two years.
While she waits for the courts to decide her son’s fate, she remains unable to see him. And Santiago can’t see his own son. It’s all having a psychological impact, she says.
“He sounds very stressed and depressed when he calls me,” she said in a recent interview in Spanish, referring to her son Santiago.
She also says the video chats she has with her son are sketchy, with the signal often cutting out.
Immigrant rights groups say the toll of isolation on detainees' mental health is too high. They are demanding that ICE change the visitation policy at the federally run immigration centers by following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance for correctional and detention facilities.
Detainees with lawyers are allowed to meet them in-person, but many lack representation.
Some groups, such as Advocates for Immigrants in Detention Northwest, have launched a letter-writing campaign directed at the Biden administration, asking that visitations resume.
When asked whether the visitation policy will change, a spokesman for ICE said the agency is currently reviewing its policies and may update them soon.
Pro-choice protesters march outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin. (photo: Sergio Flores/Getty Images)
The Starr County Sheriff's Office arrested 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera on Thursday.
The story was first reported by The Monitor. TPR confirmed Friday night that Herrera remains in the custody of the Starr County Sheriff’s Office with bond set at $500,000.
Members of the La Frontera Fund, a Rio Grande Valley-based abortion assistance fund, protested Saturday morning outside the Starr County Jail.
“This arrest is inhumane. We are demanding the immediate release of Lizelle Herrera." said Rockie Gonzalez, founder and board chair of Frontera Fund. “What is alleged is that she was in the hospital and had a miscarriage and divulged some information to hospital staff, who then reported her to the police.”
“This is a developing story and we don’t yet know all the details surrounding this tragic event, what we do know is that criminalizing pregnant people’s choices or pregnancy outcomes, which the state of Texas has done, takes away people’s autonomy over their own bodies, and leaves them with no safe options when they choose not to become a parent,” Gonzalez explained.
In September, Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 8, which bans the procedure as early as six weeks into a pregnancy — often before many people realize they're pregnant.
SB 8, the most restrictive ban on the procedure in the country, deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or “aids and abets” a procedure.
“We want people to know that this type of legislation impacts low-income people of color communities the most when state legislators put restrictions on our reproductive rights,” Gonzalez told TPR.
As legal challenges make their way through the courts, thousands of Texans have gone out of state to get abortions.
Carbon emissions due to tropical deforestation are accelerating, a new study has found. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Brazilian Amazon sees 64 percent jump in deforestation in first three months of 2022 compared with a year earlier.
From January to March, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rose 64 percent from a year ago to 941sq km (363sq miles), data from national space research agency Inpe showed.
That area, larger than New York City, is the most forest cover lost in the period since the data series began in 2015.
Destruction of the world’s largest rainforest has surged since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019 and weakened environmental protections, arguing that they hinder economic development that could reduce poverty in the Amazon region.
Al Jazeera’s Monica Yanakiew, reporting from Rio de Janeiro, said the new data was especially worrying because Brazil is in the midst of its rainy season – a time when loggers typically do not cut down trees and farmers do not burn them to clear the land.
“So there should be less activity, there should be less deforestation,” said Yanakiew.
She added that the figures came as representatives of 100 Indigenous tribes are in the capital, Brasilia, to demand more protection for their lands and denounce proposed laws that would allow the government to further exploit the rainforest.
“They’re protesting to make sure that Congress will not approve bills that have been pushed by the government to make it easier to exploit the Amazon [rain]forest commercially. President Jair Bolsonaro is trying to get this done before he runs for re-election in October.”
The president’s office and the Environment Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Reuters news agency on Friday’s deforestation data.
That data showed deforestation slowed by 15 percent for the month of March, but it followed two months of record highs.
The destruction is driven mainly by farming and land speculation in Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse and the world’s largest exporter of beef and soy. The country hosts about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest.
Raoni Rajao, a professor of environmental management at Federal University of Minas Gerais, said the situation in the Amazon is “quite dire”.
“The fact that we are already at a record high and actually [seeing] numbers that are usually to be expected mid-year – when it’s drier and it’s actually easier to access the forest and do some damage – is indeed worrying,” Rajao told Al Jazeera.
He said deforestation coupled with climate change has had a “substantial impact” on the Amazon, even in areas further from human activity. “Even in the areas far away from the agricultural frontier, we’re starting to see the forest drying up and also become more prone to fires,” Rajao said.
“And this is very concerning because it indicates that we might be getting closer to a tipping point whereby the damage to the forest might become irreversible.”
A United Nations climate panel report on Monday warned that governments are not doing enough to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert the worst effects of global warming.
While fossil fuel use is mostly to blame, deforestation accounts for about 10 percent of global emissions, the report said.
“Brazil is an example of what the UN climate report is saying when referring to governments not taking the necessary actions,” said Cristiane Mazzetti, a forest campaigner in Brazil for Greenpeace. “We have a government that goes deliberately against the necessary steps to limit climate change.”
Oil pumps. (photo: History)
For 30 years, the debate has largely ignored the soaring costs of inaction.
It was a pivotal moment: Seven months before, during an unusually hot summer, James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had warned Congress that the signs of global warming were already upon us, making the issue front-page news across the country. By the end of the year, politicians had introduced 32 climate bills in Congress, and the United Nations had established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists and policymakers intended to put global climate policy in motion.
In light of these developments, LeVine advised Exxon to temper the public’s growing concern for the planet with “rational responses” — not only arguing that the science wasn’t settled, but also emphasizing the “costs and political realities” of addressing rising emissions. In other words, the main problem wasn’t fossil fuel emissions, but that doing anything about them would cost too much.
This sentiment was echoed by John Sununu, then-President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, who worked to stop the creation of a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions soon after Hansen’s testimony. Sununu started a feud with the EPA administrator at the time, William K. Reilly, because he thought legislation to take on global warming would hinder economic growth. When Hansen was preparing to give Congress an update on the “greenhouse effect” in 1989, he was surprised by some strange edits on his draft testimony from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, run by an ally of Sununu. They wanted Hansen to say his own science was unreliable and to encourage Congress to pass legislation only if it would immediately help the economy, “independent of concerns about an increasing greenhouse effect.”
Today, the country faces a similarly pivotal moment. 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.
“Sometimes there are other things that we might want to value besides efficiency,” said Elizabeth Popp Berman, a sociologist who wrote the new book Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy.
For months, headlines about Build Back Better highlighted the price tag, which was eventually trimmed from $3.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion. The coverage often missed the necessary context: Those trillions were budgeted over 10 years, or $170 billion a year. And yet Congress passed a $768 billion defense budget in December with little criticism from the mainstream media. Even Manchin voted for it. “Why Doesn’t the Pentagon Ever Get Asked, But How Will You Pay for It?” read one headline from the left-leaning The New Republic.
The general public has a “highly skewed” economic understanding of climate change, said Benjamin Franta, a historian who studies climate disinformation at Stanford. He said there’s “a tendency to focus on the cost of action and not the cost of inaction.” He blamed this, in part, on a coordinated industry effort to emphasize the price tag of climate policies, with no mention of who they help (thousands of lives saved) or even how they could save the government money in the long run.
Not long after LeVine advised Exxon to highlight the economic costs of climate policies, the fossil fuel industry began paying economists to produce research that made legislation look prohibitively expensive. When people talk today about climate change costing too much, “the industry’s fingerprints are on that message,” Franta said.
The field of economics started dominating discussions around government spending decades before that infamous Exxon meeting in 1989, and it’s often taken for granted that money is a light to guide legislation. For many politicians, the first step is recognizing that there’s a problem; and the second step, unless it’s seen as an existential threat like a world war, is figuring out if it’s cost-effective to fix it. This way of thinking even shapes the words they use to talk about nature: Forests are “natural resources,” fish are “stocks.”
“Economics is the mother tongue of public policy, the language of public life, and the mindset that shapes society,” wrote Kate Raworth, a self-described “renegade” economist at Oxford, in Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist.
Economists themselves, however, haven’t always been comfortable with the authority granted to them. “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, the English economist whose ideas overhauled how governments spent money, in the 1930s. “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
Thanks largely to the success of Keynes’ ideas, the field’s privileged role in government only expanded from there. During World War II, economists helped the U.S. government find ways to finance the war and use military resources more efficiently; in the aftermath, they helped with rebuilding Europe and became embedded in the U.S. government more officially.
The Truman administration formed the Council of Economic Advisers in 1946, making economists the first social scientists with a presence in the president’s inner circle. Economic theory became more of a mathematical “science” as it incorporated computational modeling — giving it the appearance of being more scientific, and thus more authoritative than ever.
In 1965, inspired by how economists were managing the Pentagon’s budget with cost-focused analysis, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to expand the approach to other agencies. By the late 1970s, economic thinking had pervaded government policy, guiding legislation around poverty, health care, and the environment. In 1975, the Congressional Budget Office was formed to provide nonpartisan budget analysis for lawmakers, “formalizing that this is the way we should think about legislation,” Berman said.
The rising influence of money-driven decision-making had the effect of narrowing debates over public policies, dialing down ambitions to address environmental crises, compounded by a shift in focus among many mainstream economists to the risks of rising government debt and inflation. Consider the foundational pieces of environmental legislation in the United States, the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act of the early 1970s. They put in place strict standards for controlling pollution, regardless of economic consequences. But by 1990, environmental policy had moved away from this moral framework that stigmatized polluters, according to Berman.
“There was a big push to try to reframe environmental policy around thinking about really considering cost explicitly,” she said. Pollution was simply seen as an “externality” to put a price on, rather than something to try and stop altogether. A top-down regulatory approach had been replaced by a cost-sensitive strategy, which is inherently at odds with ambitious government action. “I think many of the landmark pieces of social policy legislation wouldn’t have existed if we had thought like that about them at the time,” Berman said.
By the time that Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, some people already viewed legislation to address the problem of the “greenhouse effect” as a threat to economic growth. Bush’s chief of staff, Sununu, worked to block climate initiatives at every turn. He saw efforts to restrict emissions as part of a larger, conspiratorial plot by environmentalists — some of whom worried that the combination of economic and population growth would lead to societal collapse. “Some people are less concerned about climate change and more concerned about establishing an anti-growth policy,” Sununu told the New York Times in 1991. The following year, he convened a “Workshop on Global Climate Change” for economists to discuss how reducing emissions would harm growth.
The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s largest lobbying group, took a similar tack and began commissioning studies to put numbers behind the idea that climate policies would hurt the economy. In 1991, David Montgomery, an economist at the consulting firm Charles River Associates, calculated that a carbon tax — a fee imposed on fossil fuels — of $200 a ton would shrink the country’s economy by 1.7 percent by 2020, a finding that appeared in the Associated Press, CNN’s Moneyline, and the New York Times.
“The costs [of climate policy] would be high,” Montgomery told USA Today in 1992. “Economic benefits are uncertain, distant, and potentially small.”
The 30-year-old strategy is still going strong. When former President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017, he repeatedly cited industry-funded estimates of its cost, dropping peculiarly specific numbers: “2.7 million lost jobs by 2025,” “$3 trillion in lost GDP,” “households would have $7,000 less income.” These statistics, Stanford’s Franta said, were from some of the same industry-funded economists that had been quoted in newspapers in the 1990s.
In February, the leaders of several organizations working to undermine climate action — the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and JunkScience.com — held a press conference to discuss Biden’s “harmful climate agenda” ahead of his State of the Union address. “Overwhelmingly, Americans do not want to pay for the cost of climate action, especially when such actions will hold negative consequences for the economy and America as a whole,” a media advisory describing the event said. (Grist’s requests to attend the event never received a response.)
“We see a rinse-and-repeat pattern with climate legislation,” Franta said. “It’s often the same players, it’s often the same talking points. You know, ‘This is too expensive. It’s not going to work.’” Whenever the federal government was considering taking action — from when the Clinton administration proposed a carbon price in 1993 to when Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman introduced a bipartisan national cap-and-trade program in Congress in 2003 — the industry trotted out economists’ models that conveniently ignored the economic upsides of the policy.
One of the economists who used to analyze climate policies at Charles River Associates, Paul Bernstein, now advocates for passing a price on carbon emissions and volunteers with the Hawaii Chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. He regrets that his models only looked at the costs, not the benefits.
“I think the models are good, I think the economics is good,” Bernstein told Grist. “But one problem with it is the messaging around not telling the whole story. That’s, I guess I would say, my biggest regret … Almost always, all we were asked to do is report on the costs. And in terms of benefits, the benefits we reported were the amount of emissions that were reduced, but there were no dollar figures attached to that.”
For a long time, Berman said, economists didn’t have the tools they needed to calculate the benefits of regulatory policy; it was more straightforward to calculate the costs. As corporations that wanted to avoid regulation started pushing for more attention to costs, they formed alliances with economists, who weren’t necessarily hostile to environmental policy, but simply wanted to make it more cost-effective. “That just lined up really well with also what industry was trying to achieve in weakening environmental protections,” Berman said. They became “unintentional allies” in making cost and cost-effectiveness “the central way of thinking about environmental outcomes.”
This kind of thinking lingers, even in international reports that warn about the dangers of inaction. A report out this week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, calculated the costs of addressing rising temperatures separately from its benefits. In the report’s summary for policymakers, the panel noted that policies to cut global emissions in half by 2030 could hinder global economic growth “a few percent” by 2050 — if you ignore all the real-world costs that come with a hotter planet as well as the benefits of cutting emissions (less air pollution, healthier and more productive people). Why consider this hypothetical, unrealistic scenario at all? In a study from the journal Nature in November, researchers from Europe and Canada argued that these “overly pessimistic” calculations provide “a skewed image to policy-makers,” drawing their attention to the cost of taking action.
Such economic models render key aspects of this planetary problem invisible, from soaring temperatures and oppressive heat waves to the slow unraveling of Earth’s life-supporting ice, ocean, and land systems. As John Sterman, an expert on complex systems at MIT, once observed, “The most important assumptions of a model are not in the equations, but what’s not in them; not in the documentation, but unstated; not in the variables on the computer screen, but in the blank spaces around them.”
Of course, opponents of a particular policy, whether it’s health care reform, public transit projects, funding education, or providing emergency relief, frequently point to its upfront cost. “GOP senators balk at $1.9 trillion price tag for Biden’s COVID-19 bill,” read a headline from CBS News last year.
Climate change is simply an egregious example because the cost of doing nothing is astronomical. Economists estimate that by around 2030, the consequences of heating up the planet could include a $240 billion COVID-like economic shock every five years. Democrats have leaned into this message — in November, Biden tweeted that “every day we delay, the cost of inaction increases.” The upper-end estimate for the price tag of unchecked global warming? $551 trillion, more money than currently exists on Earth.
Many politicians still haven’t come to terms with those estimates. Last month, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Biden’s nominee for a top post at the Federal Reserve Board, was forced to withdraw after facing opposition from Republicans and Manchin for making the case that the central bank has a role to play in shifting away from carbon-heavy assets and helping to prevent a climate change-fueled financial crisis. In her withdrawal letter, Raskin wrote that she feared that “many in and outside the Senate are unwilling to acknowledge the economic complications of climate change and the toll it has placed and will continue to place on Americans.”
In the past, the price of failing to address climate change seemed theoretical, decades down the line. Today, we’ve already begun paying for it. Last year alone, the United States spent $145 billion on the 20 worst climate and weather disasters, from the wildfires in the West to Hurricane Ida in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, 2021 was the third costliest year for disasters in U.S. history, according to a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
More severe weather patterns are already impeding economic growth. Climate change has slashed agricultural productivity in North America by roughly 13 percent over the last 60 years (though other factors have increased overall productivity), according to a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February. Americans are beginning to grasp the situation. In a recent survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, a third of respondents said they were not just concerned, but alarmed about global warming. Political action in the U.S., however, has been slow to catch up.
After the House of Representatives passed Build Back Better last November, the bill stalled in the Senate. It all fell apart in December, when Democrats failed to meet Manchin’s demands to trim the bill by cutting other policy items, such as expanding child tax credits. Now, seven months before the midterm elections, when Democrats risk losing their narrow majorities in the House and Senate, discussions around Build Back Better are restarting — amid political turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and surging gasoline prices.
Democrats, including Manchin, have agreed on many of the climate aspects of the bill, which would put $555 billion toward incentives for renewable energy and green transportation. But the funding is tied up with all the other elements of the package — like prescription drug reform and more affordable health insurance.
And all of them come with a price tag.
Economics provides a useful way of looking at the world, but it isn’t the only way. So how do we fill in what economic models have so often left out, all those blank spaces, and make what’s been hidden visible? There are a lot of different ideas, from highlighting the benefits of climate action when it comes to drawing up legislation to focusing on more concrete, local needs that get lost in big-picture debates.
Adie Tomer, an infrastructure policy and urban economics expert at the Brookings Institution, has proposed scoring legislation for “climate impacts, not just budgetary impacts.” That could mean that every bill would get a standardized metric (like “greenhouse gas emissions per dollar”) that would help track progress toward emissions-cutting goals, as well as help politicians and voters understand “the sometimes-invisible climate impacts of legislation,” Tomer wrote in a blog post with Caroline George, a research assistant at Brookings Metro.
“We do not yet have a standard form of legislative environmental scoring in the United States,” Tomer told Grist. That makes it hard for people to compare the outcomes of, say, the Clean Electricity Performance Program introduced in the House of Representatives last year — which would have rewarded utilities for producing clean power — to the clean energy tax credits currently being considered as part of Build Back Better.
Several countries already use a form of green budgeting. France, for instance, does an environmental analysis of its budget before it even goes up for discussion, providing information to the members of the National Assembly on what the bill would mean for climate change, land use, water resources, waste systems, and plant and animal species. “The long-run costs are what also needs to be communicated,” Tomer said. “It’s not just, ‘Hey, these are the budget impacts upfront,’ but in fact, ‘What could be the long-term impacts on society?’”
Others want to get away from the big-numbers approach altogether and focus on specific, local needs. Shalini Vajjhala, a former Obama administration official who now helps cities prepare for the threats brought on by climate change, says that generalities aren’t helping. “Nobody needs to hear that we need trillions of dollars for adaptation,” she said. To drive more money toward climate projects, people need to hear what it needs to be spent on, where it could go, and who, specifically, would benefit. What will prevent a wildfire from burning down the neighborhood? How can we stop homes from flooding in the next hurricane?
Steering conversations toward something concrete and vivid — and away from polarizing topics like climate change and far-off future scenarios — can speed up action, Vajjhala said. “When people are debating about doing something, I will ask, you know, ‘Are you aware of how much money you’re losing if you don’t do this?’”
Take transit agencies as an example. Extreme heat melted streetcar cables in Portland last summer. Hot temperatures can warp steel tracks and overheat engines and have caused long delays for trains in the Bay Area and speed restrictions on Amtrak trains on the East Coast in recent years. So during heat waves, transit agencies have been sending out fewer trains and running them more slowly, Vajjhala said. That means older adults and transit-dependent workers are stuck outside waiting for the train on the hottest days of the year, and in the meantime, transit agencies are also “hemorrhaging money,” she said. Pointing this out changes the direction of a conversation: It’s no longer about “if” or “when,” but simply “how” to fix it.
As for economists, they’re getting better at quantifying why avoiding catastrophic climate change is worth so much. Franta says there’s a new generation of economists looking at the costs of flooding, storms, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and other disasters, quantifying the damages and how much can be attributed to climate change. “I think society needs them to step up and do that full analysis, you know?” Franta said. “Not just do part of the picture, not just look at the cost of a policy because that’s what they are hired to do, but use it to serve society and look at the entire problem with the entire picture.”
Economics is a necessary part of policy discussions, but it has come to dominate them to the point that people have started to see other perspectives as irrational and unreasonable, Berman said. The moral arguments that once brought the Clean Air Act into being have ceded ground to approaches that tinker with the market. Relying on clean energy tax credits, as Build Back Better does, is a lot less ambitious, and harder for normal people to understand, than declaring that you’re going to try to completely phase out fossil fuel production.
“Applying economics in a political context isn’t necessarily going to get us to where we want to go in political terms, right?” Berman said. “There’s a gap between abstract models of how things should work and what it actually takes to create change in the world.”
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