You don’t have to look too hard these days to find events rooted in the broader crises we face, but two pieces of news last week, reported within 24 hours of each other, form a particularly dark but instructive conjunction. The first was Joe Manchin’s final torpedoing of a slimmed-down climate bill before the end of this congressional session; the second was Joe Biden’s immoral trip to Saudi Arabia to essentially beg for that country to open its oil taps, with photos of his fist bump with MBS capturing the essential humiliation and defeatism of the visit. Taken together, these two events handily evoke the straitjacket in which the U.S. has placed itself in terms of its ability to respond to global warming and climate chaos.
In the first instance, we see a nearly-united Democratic Party stymied by the corruption and anti-science attitudes of a single member. But less noted is that Manchin holds such a veto because his pro-fossil fuel attitude is shared by all 50 Republican senators, none of whom are willing to cross the aisle and give their vote to even the most limited plans to save the planet from indescribable damage and suffering. In this respect, Manchin’s scuttling of the bill can be seen as an outdated and self-destructive mindset reaching out and throttling plans for a better future that would actually take into account the reality that adding more carbon to the atmosphere heats the planet. In other words, as loathsome and corrupt a character as Manchin is, his actions are being conducted on behalf of a broader constituency and worldview that cannot see past the profits to be made by pumping ever more oil and natural gas, despite the clear dangers of doing so to the continued viability of life as we know it. It’s not too much to say that he represents a movement that has embraced a sort of nihilistic madness, in which the reality of human lives and the glorious but fragile web of life possess no reality next to the abstract flow of dollars into bank account.
In the second event, we see not only the price of Joe Biden’s lack of vision, but how our country is hamstrung by the terrible decisions of the past — specifically, the many times our political leaders chose not to start weaning us off of oil starting many years ago. And so, in the absence of a saner energy foundation, Biden becomes a supplicant before a corrupt oligarch who has already demonstrated his dark alliance with America’s dictator in waiting, Donald Trump, let alone his complete indifference to the necessity of slowing global warming. That Joe Biden, a man who has indeed made a good faith effort to achieve a green energy package, is simultaneously pressing other nations to pump more oil, is a sad and excruciating sight. If there is one thing the world needs more than any other right now, it is that we pump (and burn) far less fossil fuel. For Biden to achieve success in achieving the opposite, while failing to pass a climate bill, represents less a personal failure by the president, and more an illuminating encounter with the structural baggage and insane death wish mentality that has long haunted the politics of energy.
But in this dark conjunction of a single openly corrupt senator blocking essential progress, and our president simultaneously demeaning the nation by begging an enemy of democracy to pump more oil, we can at least try to use these events to better grasp the essential incompatibility between these two world views: one rooted in greed, fantasy, nihilism, and domination; the other in facts, reality, cooperation, and a basic prioritization of, well, life on Earth. One approach is illegitimate; the other is essential to protecting life as we know it. One makes not a lick of sense; the other is the only path forward.