Amid a record-breaking heat wave in the Northwest and a long-lasting “heat dome,” President Joe Biden and a handful of moderates in the U.S. Senate came up with a bipartisan plan for an infrastructure bill. Gone was nearly all of the climate change portion of the bill that Biden proposed, which would have rolled climate change solutions into a much larger bill.
Biden and the moderates are so desperately trying to get largely climate-denying Republicans on board in the name of “bipartisanship” that the sweeping measures needed to fight climate change are continually at risk of getting weakened.
I sure hope Democrats are able to jam through a big climate change bill using reconciliation. Of course, that’s not as friendly and bipartisan as we’d hope, but the days of a sane Republican Party are over . . . so bipartisanship is effectively over, too. Between Republicans’ climate denying and election denying, I say if Democrats are able to do things to save our country and the planet, they should go ahead and do it, no matter what the genteel traditions of the Senate might be.