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Category: Debbie Dingell

  • Progressives Introduce Huge Climate Bill That Rivals Biden Infrastructure Plan

    Derrick Davis, a member of West Virginia New Jobs Coalition, hangs up signage during a community gathering and job fair as West Virginians take action for an economic recovery and infrastructure package prioritizing climate, care, jobs, justice and call on Congress to pass the THRIVE Act on April 8, 2021, in Charleston, West Virginia.

    Progressives on Thursday introduced a $10 trillion climate and jobs bill that would reduce emissions, rebuild infrastructure and address environmental justice over the next decade. The bill rivals President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, which calls for a much smaller investment.

    While Biden’s bill calls for a $2 trillion investment in infrastructure over the next decade, the Transform, Heal, and Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy (THRIVE) Act calls for $1 trillion per year over 10 years for investment in infrastructure, jobs and climate initiatives. The proposal is being led by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) and it aims to cut climate emissions in half by 2030 and is centered around equitable change.

    Highlighting the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic and the American Rescue Plan, Dingell said in a press call organized by the Green New Deal Network, “[As the nation is] pivoting from relief to recovery, we’re working together to advance good paying union jobs, racial equity and climate action.”

    “The pandemic has shined a light on the cracks of our society. It’s placed a burden on vulnerable communities,” said Dingell. “That’s why we need a bold economic renewal plan, and the THRIVE Act is exactly what we need.”

    “The climate crisis is here. It’s here. This is not some future issue.” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado), a sponsor of the bill, highlighting wildfires in his state and public health issues due to air pollution. “The most expensive thing our nation has ever done is not be ready for this pandemic. So we have to do the right thing and make investments now to be prepared to save lives” and address the climate crisis, Crow said.

    One of the main focuses of the bill is job creation — a March report by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that the THRIVE Act would create about 15.5 million jobs per year. The bill stipulates that the jobs must be high quality, with at least a $15 an hour wage and with benefits like paid family and sick leave.

    “Unions and the environmentalists have come together and are working together to ensure that we rebuild our country’s economy with a focus on justice and healing,” said Dingell.

    The bill would also ensure that historically oppressed groups are at the front line of the transition to a greener nation by creating a 20-member board of representatives from frontline communities, unions and Indigenous nations to help guide where investments should be made. Fifty percent of investments from the bill, it stipulates, must go toward frontline communities, which suffer the most from climate impacts.

    “Policymakers cannot ignore the realities that are facing millions of Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant and working families all across America. The four crises facing America are literally killing us. They are climate change, the public health pandemic, racial injustice and economic inequality,” said Markey in the press call. “We can’t defeat any of these crises alone. We must develop a roadmap for recovery that addresses them all.”

    The bill pays particular care to Indigenous people, and requires the government to respect Indigenous nations in the investments put forth by the bill. It attempts to ensure that Native communities would be consulted and their consent sought before things like pipelines are built on Indigenous territory.

    The THRIVE Agenda and corresponding THRIVE Act was originally introduced by the former Rep. Deb Haaland (D-New Mexico), who now serves as the first Indigenous Interior Secretary, and who has long been a champion of Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Polling from Data for Progress last year showed that the THRIVE Agenda pillars, including investing in green infrastructure and recognizing Native sovereignty, are popular — and the agenda has gained over 100 co-sponsors since Haaland introduced it.

    The THRIVE Act also has the support of Democrats like Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) and Representatives Ilhan Omar, (D-Minnesota), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Ro Khanna (D-California). Though it has little hope of being passed into law, elements of the bill could end up being incorporated into Biden’s infrastructure plan, just as parts of the Green New Deal have been embraced by Biden.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Winning Climate and Political Approach

    I don’t have any regrets about the work, and the 32-day hunger strike, that I did last fall to get Joe Biden elected. I knew what we would be getting: first and most important, an end to Trump in the White House and second, someone replacing him who wasn’t a climate denier.

    I support the Green New Deal idea, embodied in Congress in the Thrive Agenda, introduced in February by Senator Ed Markey and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell. That agenda is much stronger than what President Biden put forward last week, much more realistic as far as what is needed to prevent worldwide societal breakdown via climate and environmental catastrophes. But, thinking big picture, it is a major improvement from the Trump years to have an opening-up, three-way, public debate between Republican climate change skepticism, centrist Democrat proposals not-to-the-scale of the need, and the progressive Green New Deal/Thrive Agenda.

    It is absolutely essential that the much more realistic progressive approach continue to grow in popular understanding and support, this year, next year and as long as necessary. If the Biden proposal is the best that can be passed this year, then it should be supported and passed, but with a clear understanding that it is a beginning, not an end.

    This three-way debate over government policy is not going away. One of the latest examples is an article, “What To Do About Natural Gas,” published in the April issue of Scientific American. It is authored by Michael E. Webber, a writer, educator and Chief Science and Technology Officer at ENGIE, a global energy and infrastructure company. From my research, ENGIE seems to be an all-of-the-above kind of energy company, though it’s selling some of its coal assets. Webber is definitely big on gas pipelines and infrastructure.

    One of his sentences about hydrogen in the article is revealing: “Anticipation feels similar to what arose during the very early days of fracking shale: a huge resource is out there, if engineers can figure out how to harness it cheaply and safely.”

    There’s not a word of substantive criticism of fracked gas in Webber’s article. Nothing about how people living near gas wells, compressors and pipelines have been poisoned. There is no mention of the fact that, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the overwhelmingly primary ingredient in gas, methane, is 86 times more impactful as a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20 year period.

    Also unmentioned is the clear need to stop building out new gas and oil infrastructure, stop the decades-long, rubber-stamp approval of industry expansion permit applications.

    Webber quickly dispatches renewables in his third paragraph because of transmission issues. Then he never looks back as he proposes various ways to keep the gas and pipeline industries in business for seemingly forever through various still-to-be-proven proposals. In his final paragraph he opines that “climate change requires many solutions. Declaring who cannot be part of those, such as natural gas companies, only raises resistance to progress.”

    Reading this yesterday, I was reminded of how Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm spoke in an interview April 1 on PBS. Talking about fossil fuels, she never used any language to the effect that we need to reduce, much less get off, fossil fuel use. She kept saying that what we need to do is “clean up fossil fuel emissions.”

    That approach is directly tied to support of the holy grail of industrial carbon capture and sequestration, something I have been following since I became a climate activist in 2003. So far, 18 years later, it has yet to be commercially viable but, clearly, the fossil fuel industry and their active or passive supporters in government have every intention of getting as much money as they can for this failure of an approach to solving the climate emergency.

    I’m not opposed to some funding going into research into potential new ways to advance genuinely clean technologies and reduce emissions. But that is not the same thing as research to prop up 20th century industries in a 21st century that must move as rapidly as possible to truly clean, renewable energy as the dominant energy sources. Fortunately, with the technology improving, the prices of solar steadily dropping, and the growth of battery storage technologies, renewables dominance can happen this decade.

    And with polls for many years consistently showing that 75-80% of all US Americans, including about half of Republicans, support wind and solar, this is a political winner.

    Progressives, let’s keep our eyes on the prize.

    The post A Winning Climate and Political Approach first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Winning Climate and Political Approach

    I don’t have any regrets about the work, and the 32-day hunger strike, that I did last fall to get Joe Biden elected. I knew what we would be getting: first and most important, an end to Trump in the White House and second, someone replacing him who wasn’t a climate denier.

    I support the Green New Deal idea, embodied in Congress in the Thrive Agenda, introduced in February by Senator Ed Markey and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell. That agenda is much stronger than what President Biden put forward last week, much more realistic as far as what is needed to prevent worldwide societal breakdown via climate and environmental catastrophes. But, thinking big picture, it is a major improvement from the Trump years to have an opening-up, three-way, public debate between Republican climate change skepticism, centrist Democrat proposals not-to-the-scale of the need, and the progressive Green New Deal/Thrive Agenda.

    It is absolutely essential that the much more realistic progressive approach continue to grow in popular understanding and support, this year, next year and as long as necessary. If the Biden proposal is the best that can be passed this year, then it should be supported and passed, but with a clear understanding that it is a beginning, not an end.

    This three-way debate over government policy is not going away. One of the latest examples is an article, “What To Do About Natural Gas,” published in the April issue of Scientific American. It is authored by Michael E. Webber, a writer, educator and Chief Science and Technology Officer at ENGIE, a global energy and infrastructure company. From my research, ENGIE seems to be an all-of-the-above kind of energy company, though it’s selling some of its coal assets. Webber is definitely big on gas pipelines and infrastructure.

    One of his sentences about hydrogen in the article is revealing: “Anticipation feels similar to what arose during the very early days of fracking shale: a huge resource is out there, if engineers can figure out how to harness it cheaply and safely.”

    There’s not a word of substantive criticism of fracked gas in Webber’s article. Nothing about how people living near gas wells, compressors and pipelines have been poisoned. There is no mention of the fact that, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the overwhelmingly primary ingredient in gas, methane, is 86 times more impactful as a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20 year period.

    Also unmentioned is the clear need to stop building out new gas and oil infrastructure, stop the decades-long, rubber-stamp approval of industry expansion permit applications.

    Webber quickly dispatches renewables in his third paragraph because of transmission issues. Then he never looks back as he proposes various ways to keep the gas and pipeline industries in business for seemingly forever through various still-to-be-proven proposals. In his final paragraph he opines that “climate change requires many solutions. Declaring who cannot be part of those, such as natural gas companies, only raises resistance to progress.”

    Reading this yesterday, I was reminded of how Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm spoke in an interview April 1 on PBS. Talking about fossil fuels, she never used any language to the effect that we need to reduce, much less get off, fossil fuel use. She kept saying that what we need to do is “clean up fossil fuel emissions.”

    That approach is directly tied to support of the holy grail of industrial carbon capture and sequestration, something I have been following since I became a climate activist in 2003. So far, 18 years later, it has yet to be commercially viable but, clearly, the fossil fuel industry and their active or passive supporters in government have every intention of getting as much money as they can for this failure of an approach to solving the climate emergency.

    I’m not opposed to some funding going into research into potential new ways to advance genuinely clean technologies and reduce emissions. But that is not the same thing as research to prop up 20th century industries in a 21st century that must move as rapidly as possible to truly clean, renewable energy as the dominant energy sources. Fortunately, with the technology improving, the prices of solar steadily dropping, and the growth of battery storage technologies, renewables dominance can happen this decade.

    And with polls for many years consistently showing that 75-80% of all US Americans, including about half of Republicans, support wind and solar, this is a political winner.

    Progressives, let’s keep our eyes on the prize.

    This article was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2021 at 1:22pm and is filed under Climate Change, Politics, Renewables.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Progressives Unveil $10 Trillion Green Infrastructure, Climate Justice Bill

    Congressional progressives on Monday unveiled a new bill to invest $10 trillion in renewable energy, green infrastructure and climate justice initiatives over the next decade. The Transform, Heal and Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy (THRIVE) Act, counters President Joe Biden’s yet-to-be-unveiled $4 trillion infrastructure package.

    The bill is “a new roadmap to build back better and build back greener,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) in a press conference. Markey and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) are the lead sponsors of the bill in the Senate and House, respectively. The bill, which will be formally introduced in April, has the support of much of the rest of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

    “We are facing a series of intersecting crises: climate change, a public health pandemic, racial injustice and economic inequality,” said Markey. “We can’t defeat any of these crises alone. We must develop a roadmap for recovery that addresses them all.”

    One of the bill’s main goals is to cut emissions. It aims to cut climate pollution in half by 2030 and establishes goals to achieve zero emissions from both new buildings by 2025 and the electricity sector by 2035. It would also extend public transportation options to most Americans by 2030, and states that the funding cannot be used for fossil fuels, emissions offsets or geoengineering.

    “Our nation has rarely been challenged like it’s been in the past year,” said Dingell in the press conference. “Though we’re beginning to see brighter days on the horizon, we aren’t nearly out of the woods yet.” Dingell said that “the moment is now” to act boldly on climate and justice and points out that policies like Social Security were born in times of national crises.

    The new bill directs that half of the climate investments in the bill are directed at frontline communities, which suffer the brunt of the climate crisis and economic crises facing the country. It aims to even out generations of racial and economic health inequities and includes provisions like upgrading and replacing corroded water infrastructure. Frontline communities are less likely in the U.S. to have access to clean water.

    An analysis by the Sierra Club found that the THRIVE Act could create 15 million jobs while cutting pollution. The Sierra Club is part of the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of 15 environmental, progressive and labor groups coalescing around the THRIVE Agenda who helped shape the bill.

    The THRIVE Agenda, a nonbinding resolution which was introduced by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland when she was a New Mexico representative, outlines commitments to labor rights, robust climate policy, and addressing socioeconomic and racial injustices. According to polls by Data for Progress, the agenda’s pillars are popular among the public.

    “We need a plan that will end the unemployment crisis, but we need this plan to also fight systemic racism, protect public health and drastically cut down on climate pollution,” said Markey on Monday. “We cannot go back to business as usual. We have a chance to truly, in this moment, to build back better and greener than ever before.”

    Those involved with the agenda and bill told Kate Aronoff of The New Republic that they view it as a “down payment” on the Green New Deal — a way to lift the country out of the pandemic and propel it forward from where it was before on many fronts. But THRIVE is generally built to capture a wider swath of Democrats; Dingell, for instance, didn’t co-sponsor the Green New Deal resolution when it was introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) in 2019.

    Though the bill isn’t yet fully fleshed out, it could include provisions that Democrats have introduced over the past months, such as BUILD GREEN Act’s $500 billion investment over the next decade to help electrify public transit, or a $454 billion proposal to create a more robust electric car manufacturing chain in the U.S. The bill itself endorses the Protecting the Right to Organize Act that the House passed earlier this month.

    The bill rivals Biden’s upcoming infrastructure bill and places progressive pressure on the White House from the left. The infrastructure bill, which is reported to have ballooned from $3 trillion to $4 trillion in the past week, has received criticism from the left. Groups like the Sunrise Movement, which has proposed its own $10 trillion Green New Deal down payment, say that the bill is not ambitious enough to meet the scale of the crises in the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • One Year Into Pandemic, 109 Democrats Get Behind Renewed Medicare for All Effort

    Protesters demonstrate outside of the New York County Republican Office in New York City on July 5, 2017.

    Two Democratic lawmakers, joined by over 100 cosponsors, introduced a Medicare for All bill on Wednesday, reinvigorating the call for single-payer health coverage in the United States they say is needed now more than ever.

    Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) introduced the measure while speaking at a virtual town hall event on Wednesday afternoon. The pair of lawmakers noted the need for the proposal was especially evident in light of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. that have occurred over the past year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    “It was exactly one year ago that every single state across this country had a confirmed Covid-19 case, and in the 365 days since, the case for Medicare for All has never been clearer,” Jayapal said during the live streaming event.

    Those remarks matched ones she made earlier in the week, prior to the official unveiling of the proposed legislation.

    “Everybody is seeing the chaos and the destruction that the pandemic has caused. And it’s really making people look and [ask], could we have had something different had we had a Medicare for All system in place?” Jayapal said on Tuesday.

    In a tweet she wrote on Wednesday, Dingell noted that, in addition to providing health coverage to millions of Americans, Medicare for All would also help alleviate economic burdens for many in the U.S.

    “In the wealthiest country in the world, people shouldn’t be launching GoFundMe pages to pay for lifesaving health care,” Dingell said. “#MedicareForAll will guarantee everyone access to the health care they need without going broke.”

    The bill currently has 109 cosponsors, all Democrats, and a majority of the party’s caucus in the House of Representatives. However, it faces steep opposition and an uphill battle at passage, as it’s likely that every Republican in the House would vote against the measure, and some Democrats would do so as well — and that’s if the bill could even get out of committee, which no Medicare for All bill has done as of yet.

    Supposing the bill could pass the House, it would face even more difficult odds in the divided Senate. Even then, the measure would not likely be signed into law by President Joe Biden, who campaigned in 2020 against similar proposals.

    “Throughout his campaign, the President did not support Medicare for all. He campaigned on his own plan and that is the plan the American people voted for,” a White House official said to The Washington Post regarding the proposal. “He is continuing to pursue his own plan, not Medicare for All.”

    Concerns about the current, for-profit system of health care, however, and how it has functioned during the pandemic, are valid. In fact, a report from the medical journal The Lancet stated last month that the U.S. health care system had contributed to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the years prior to COVID-19, adding that employing a system of care similar to what other wealthy nations have could have resulted in 40 percent fewer deaths from the virus.

    Indeed, that same report went on to suggest that the remedy for reducing excess deaths in the U.S. is a single-payer program akin to Medicare for All.

    Such a system of healthcare could “reverse the harmful shift toward the commercialisation of care that began in earnest in the 1980s,” and “could inaugurate a new era of respect for the human right to health and health care,” the report added.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • House Dems to Revive Medicare for All Bill 1 Year After COVID Reached All States

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal is seen on the House steps of the Capitol during a vote on the Protecting America's Wilderness and Public Lands Act, on February 26, 2021.

    Amid a deadly pandemic that has further exposed the absurdity and immorality of tying health insurance to employment, Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingell are planning to introduce the Medicare for All Act of 2021 this coming Wednesday — exactly one year after the first coronavirus cases were confirmed in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

    The bill’s official introduction, set for March 17, “is an attempt to link the cause of universal care with the devastation wrought by the pandemic,” Politico reported.

    “Mark your calendars!” tweeted Jayapal (D-Wash.), a longtime single-payer advocate who was the lead House sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2019, which experts at the time characterized as the gold standard for universal healthcare legislation. The bill proposed a two-year transition to a Medicare for All system that would provide comprehensive healthcare to everyone in the U.S. for free at the point of service.

    Since the coronavirus crisis began last year, millions of people across the U.S. have been thrown off their employer-provided health insurance — the nation’s most common form of coverage — due to pandemic-induced mass layoffs that have persisted in recent weeks. Last week, an additional 1.2 million people in the U.S. filed for unemployment insurance.

    “This past year makes it incredibly clear why we must pass Medicare for All,” said Nina Turner, a Democratic congressional candidate in Ohio’s 11th District.

    While progressives such as Jayapal and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have called for an expansion of Medicare to cover the newly uninsured — and everyone else — for the duration of the pandemic, congressional Democrats went a different route in the newly passed American Rescue Plan, which significantly expands eligibility for Affordable Care Act subsidies and fully covers private premiums under COBRA, an expensive program that lets laid-off workers stay on their employer-provided insurance.

    Speaking to the New York Times last week, Jayapal — the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — made clear her disagreement with that approach.

    “I don’t think this was the most efficient way to do this,” Jayapal said of the American Rescue Plan’s expansion of private insurance.

    The nearly $2 trillion relief package, which President Joe Biden — a Medicare for All opponent — signed into law on Thursday, also includes funding to incentivize states to expand Medicaid, an offer that’s unlikely to be taken up by Republican governors.

    Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy organization, tweeted in response to the coming introduction of the latest iteration of the Medicare for All Act that “tying healthcare to employment was ridiculous and cruel before the pandemic.”

    “And now, with millions more Americans unemployed, it’s horrific,” the group said. “We must guarantee healthcare as a human right — not as an employment benefit. We need Medicare for All.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.