REP Watch

ica’s culture wars, reflected in a striking divide between blue state and red state policies, as Ronald Brownstein highlighted in The Atlantic last year. The federal Energy Information Administration calculates how much carbon each state emits from its energy sector per dollar of economic activity within its borders. Of the 19 most fossil fuel reliant states, 18 voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, while Republicans hold unified control of their governorship and state legislature in 15 of them. (Joe Biden won all 16 states that were least fuel reliant.)

damage on themselves.

“The Hawaii Supreme Court gets our predicament. The burning of fossil fuels is, right now, killing and sickening workers and residents who simply breathe the air where we live.”

Perhaps most strikingly, 19 states have enacted legislation to preempt local regulation of fossil fuels. There are also “critical infrastructure” laws that make nonviolent protest near oil, gas, electrical, and other forms of infrastructure a felony in 19 states “due to the efforts of the conservative legislators’ organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the meticulous lobbying of powerful oil and gas companies,” Bolts magazine reported.

“These fossil-fuel-reliant states are nearly all among those moving most aggressively to restrict voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights; to ban books; and to censor what teachers and college professors can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation,” Brownstein wrote. “Almost all of the states fighting the energy transition are expressing equally intense resistance to social change. In effect, they are fighting the future on both fronts.”

They’ve taken a wide range of actions to protect fossil fuel companies and punish renewables. But in doing so, they’re also punishing themselves. A 2021 International Monetary Fund report found that “Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8% of GDP [Gross domestic product].” America’s share was a staggering $662 billion. Only 8% were explicit subsidies, 92% were for “undercharging for environmental costs and foregone consumption taxes.” But these implicit subsidies cost 3.8% of global GDP, along with 900,000 air pollution deaths, in addition to the climate costs. Red states are willfully inflicting this

In January, the Washington Post reported that Ohio passed an Orwellian law legally redefining methane (“natural”) gas as a source of “green energy,” which ALEC also plans to push in other states. This redefinition would allow it to pass muster with some ESG investors. But red states have also begun passing broader anti-ESG laws as well, under the rubric of fighting “woke capital.”

Straddling the Divide

This is how America’s culture wars imperil the whole planet’s future. Nationally, President Biden is trying to straddle this divide, coaxing red America over with his enthusiasm for big electric trucks, for example, first the Ford F-150, then the Hummer EV. “On my watch, the great American road trip is going to be fully electrified,” Biden tweeted out with a picture of him in the Hummer EV. As the Washington Post’s Shannon Osaka noted in January, as of right now, “a Hummer EV driven on the average power grid in the United States emits about 276 grams of carbon dioxide per mile; a Toyota Corolla running on gasoline, meanwhile, emits 269 grams,” so it’s not a net plus for the climate. But it is “an attempt to get people who aren’t remotely en- cil attorney David Pettit said. The permit “can be changed,” he said, “but I think that there would probably be CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act] consequences if P66 began a new, polluting use that was not analyzed in the current EIR [environmental impact report] proceeding.”

This doesn’t seem likely. But Biden approving the Willow project seemed far more unlikely when he was elected in 2020. What’s needed is a decisive shift in thinking: to make such decisions unthinkable, as opposed to unlikely, to follow the Hawaii’s Supreme Court’s example, and commit to the broad systemic changes outlined by the Climate and Community Project report. In today’s world, political forces are nearly evenly matched, but that’s not so for the world’s youth — even in red America. The fight to secure a just and livable future for all is inextricably embedded in the broader matrix of American politics.

“We are socializing risk and privatizing profits for the benefit of the goods movement and fossil fuel industries, while conservative ideologues claim our Constitution offers the people no recourse,” Warren said. “Hawaii shows a way. We need to move against the bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court that GOP dark money has built.”