It’s even worse than that, as Will Peischel wrote for TNR last week. Blue governors are also openly embracing natural gas as part of an “all of the above” energy strategy (a phrase long since discredited as having led, under the Obama administration, to a disastrous boom in fracked gas and methane emissions). “We have gas pipeline expansion on the Algonquin—that’s good!” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey recently said, although in 2022 she bragged about blocking two other pipelines in her work as attorney general. Hochul recently approved the Williams NESE pipeline “after the project twice failed to gain required approvals from state environmental regulators,” Peischel noted. And Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont “supports building a compressor in the town of Brookfield, which would cram more gas through an existing pipeline.”
There are lots of other ways that politicians could champion affordability politics without abandoning climate change. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s free bus proposal could incentivize the use of public transit instead of cars while helping people cut one of the infamous “big three” costs: housing, food, and transportation. Pretty much any program encouraging public transit could help both emissions and pocketbooks. That includes, as Liza Featherstone notes this week, congestion pricing, a policy frequently (and, as subsequent data has shown, misleadingly) demonized as hurting working people. While the right wing and some moderates often portray congestion pricing as imposing further burdens on commuters, “given the volatility of gas prices and car insurance, relieving people of the need to drive by using revenue to improve public transit is an urgent matter of economic justice,” Featherstone argued.
Energy efficiency, in general, is one of the easier ways to help people save money. True, it can take some time to kick in: Paying for homeowners and landlords to install insulation and awnings, for example, isn’t an instant fix. But there are also ways to speed things up, such as via point-of-sale rebates. And cost savings from the new pipelines Healey and Hochul are advertising are somewhere between long-term and entirely fictional: New fossil fuel infrastructure takes a lot of time to build and is typically paid for by the consumer via utility bill hikes.
There’s little excuse at this point for politicians accepting and perpetuating myths about a trade-off between climate policy and affordability. Data abounds that climate-friendly policies can save people money, and that climate change will put the cost-of-living crisis into overdrive.
What I’m Reading
The frantic, high-tech fight to stop climate-fueled dengue fever
In the United States, mosquitoes are viewed as a nuisance, rather than the public health disaster they have long been in tropical nations like Brazil. That wasn’t always the case: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, was established in 1946 to fight malaria around U.S. military bases. It was wildly successful in that mission, all but eradicating the disease from the country by the early 1950s with the help of the devastating chemical DDT. The agency learned a valuable lesson through that effort that still resounds today: Eradicating vector-borne disease is possible “in nations with temperate climates and seasonal malaria transmission.”
“Tropical mosquitoes that can transmit encephalitis, West Nile virus, and other diseases,” the report said, “are likely to further expand their ranges, putting millions of people and wildlife species at risk of these diseases.”
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
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