Though it seems like a lifetime ago, I opened the blog this year with a post I’d titled—with entirely unintentional and unforeseen irony—“A 2020 Vision of Hope.” In it, I discussed a number of auspicious signs that America was on the cusp of finally making a meaningful commitment to addressing the climate crisis—from regional sustainability initiatives, to Gen Z activism, to carbon pricing, to the November election. So determined was our movement, it couldn’t be derailed by even a global pandemic. Over the summer, in “What Comes Next: Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from Hamilton,” I shared my enthusiasm for the promising ambition of the Biden climate plan, a document that appeared by all evidence to be a real-time reaction to the interconnected crises of global warming, economic inequality, and systemic racism—all of which reached a boiling point this year.
On December 8, I delivered a presentation on the Biden climate plan to the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project; I have reproduced the text of that talk below.
There is no doubt about it: The tireless work of environmental activists over the past two years moved President-elect Biden appreciably to the left on the matter of the climate crisis. Everyone here—all of you who selflessly and compassionately allocated time and energy from your busy lives to prioritize this issue, whether by training with Vice President Gore, attending a climate-strike rally, merely dialing in to this very meeting—made a difference. President-elect Biden hears our collective voice; he shares our sense of urgency.
And though the incoming president will only go so far as to say the Green New Deal provides a “crucial framework” for meeting the challenges we face, much of the language from his campaign speeches, as well as his extensively detailed climate plan, echoes phrasing from the Green New Deal verbatim—a testament to and direct consequence of the pressure and the power of our movement. In the two years since I trained under Mr. Gore, the climate breakdown has gone from a political lightning rod to a political litmus test. All of us take a share of credit for that.
Like the Green New Deal, Biden’s comprehensive climate plan, which he intends to fund by rolling back the Trump tax cuts, takes a holistic approach to solving our interconnected crises by calling for a $2 trillion accelerated investment in infrastructure, transit, the power sector, housing, agriculture, and—most crucially—environmental justice, with the bulk of those resources to be deployed during his first term. The overarching goal is to set the United States on an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050, and, in the process, facilitate a just transition by creating millions of good-paying union jobs—yet more language adopted directly from the Green New Deal.
Does the proposal pass every environmentalist purity test? No. But the Biden Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future—oof, that’s a mouthful—is an exhaustive plan with a commensurably exhaustive name that I encourage everyone to read, but let’s talk for a minute about a few of its key goals with hard timelines attached.
Within his first term, Amtrak Joe wants to expand high-speed rail lines across the country, prompting a “second railroad revolution” that will reduce pollution, connect workers to good union jobs that can’t be outsourced, slash commute times, and spur investment in communities that will now be better linked to major metropolitan areas. I mean, just imagine for a moment, my fellow Californians, being liberated from the purgatory of routine highway and airline travel!
By 2030, all new buildings and American-built buses will meet zero-emissions standards. Biden also intends to create a quarter million jobs plugging abandoned oil and natural-gas wells and reclaiming deserted coal, hardrock, and uranium mines, thereby both cleaning up and creating employment opportunities in many hard-hit and frontline communities.
By 2035, his plan calls for a carbon pollution–free power sector, creating millions of jobs in the process of building a green infrastructure and manufacturing the materials required for it. The plan explicitly draws on—and scales up—best practices from state-level clean-energy standards, so all the work we’ve done here in California, for instance, may very well be serving as a model for aspects of the Biden plan. We’re starting to see a policy feedback loop now, in which regions that imposed standards in spite of Trump’s environmental disdain are now inspiring a climate-friendly administration to implement those very practices nationwide. That’s amazing.
And, as mentioned, the foundational principle of the plan is one of environmental justice, a term I’d never even heard before I trained under Mr. Gore in 2018. Forty percent of the spending on our clean energy infrastructure will go to historically marginalized communities, providing accessible municipal transportation, affordable housing, workforce development, clean water, and overdue remediation of legacy pollution. In fact, the Biden Plan to Secure Environmental Justice and Equitable Economic Opportunity is an entirely separate addendum to his already voluminous climate plan, which suggests to me that the intent is not to take the usual corporately compromised, political half-measures toward progress on this particular issue.
All that said, Biden won’t himself be unilaterally empowered to enact a climate plan this ambitiously aggressive. Much of what he hopes to do—including providing tax incentives for the development of green technologies, as well as cash rebates and low-cost financing for their adoption by consumers—will require legislation, which means Congressional support is crucial.
And even if we flip the two Senate seats in Georgia—which we absolutely need to do—Biden would still only have a razor-slim “majority,” meaning he can only reach as far left as the most moderate Democrat in the Congress is willing to go, like, for instance, Joe Manchin in West Virginia coal country. So, it’s easy to imagine this moment of triumph devolving next year into the kind of dispiriting political gridlock we’ve become all-too-accustomed to, with an endless series of compromises and capitulations resulting in exactly the kind of “incremental progress” that has stymied meaningful climate action for far too long. So, not only is the fight not over, we in fact need to double down in 2021 on precisely the kind of grassroots pressure that moved Biden to the left in the first place.
To that end, Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats—the political action committee responsible for getting many upstart progressive candidates on the ballot and into Congress, including Representative-elect Jamaal Bowman in my home district of the Bronx, New York—recently said something that I believe should be the animating mantra of every climate activist in the year ahead:
Lincoln was not an abolitionist, F.D.R. not a socialist or trade unionist, and L.B.J. not a civil rights activist. Three of the most transformative presidents never fully embraced the movements of their time, and yet the movements won because they organized and shaped public opinion.
Astead W. Herndon, “A Biden Landslide? Some Democrats Can’t Help Whispering,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 2020
That’s the fight for all of us in the year to come. While it certainly has room for yet greater transformative ambition, we’ve got a climate plan that prioritizes justice and investment—and an incoming president ready and willing to enact it. The good news is, we no longer have to fight for that—we’ve got it! Now we need to fight to make it policy—to make it the law of the land. Biden will take office with an electoral mandate, and with a reserve of political capital, and—hopefully—with control of the Senate.
I absolutely believe he wants to seize this historical moment—his climate plan is a testament to that ambition—but the forces of resistance, and of institutionalized thinking, will start bearing down on him from Minute One. We’ve got to hold his feet to the fire if we’re going to get our due. That means educating our friends, our neighbors, and our colleagues about what he has planned and why it’s so crucial—so exigent—as well as meeting with our elected officials in Congress, as both constituents and Climate Reality Leaders, and urging them to formally express their full-throated support for the Biden climate plan. We fought for the plan and got it; now we need to fight twice as hard for its full passage and implementation.
It isn’t merely activists who will play a crucial role in the year(s) ahead. We’ll need artists with the moral imagination to envision—and creative courage to tell—the stories of what’s possible. I wrote a number of essays this year that directly explore that subject, including “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown: A History of Hollywood’s Hero Detective,” on the problematic way policing is portrayed in popular fiction; “The Road Back: Revisiting The Writer’s Journey,” on the desperate need for principled storytellers in our culture of utterly pointless—and insidiously status quo–affirming—movies and television shows; and “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga,” my impassioned plea for a renewed appreciation for cathartic narrativity—stories that inspire both emotion and action. My thanks to all who took the time to read and/or comment on these posts; I wish you health, happiness, love, and creativity in 2021.
Wondering what kinds of ‘clean energy’ he’s talking about. I went to the link and it mentioned ‘advanced nuclear’ but nuclear energy isn’t clean, not if you have to bury nuclear waste, which is an ongoing concern in the farming communities surrounding Bruce Nuclear up here. I hope he’s going to invest in wind and solar as well as hydro. The idiots currently governing in my province have pulled down wind farms because some people think they’re noisy. I guess it’s true–a nuclear explosion makes much less sound.
Years ago, I worked at a mom-and-pop video store with a know-it-all gasbag who was basically the Cliff Clavin of our neighborhood. One slow weekday afternoon, we were watching Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and we got to the scene in which Linda Hamilton has her holocaustic vision of Los Angeles going up in a mushroom cloud. The resident know-it-all turned to me and said, with full confidence as though from firsthand experience, “That’s what a nuclear explosion looks like, you know.”
Nuclear is a fraught subject in the green community, Suzanne — one on which I am by no means an authority. I am personally not in favor of it — because there are inherent dangers in nuclear, and, more to the point, I don’t think we need it to move to a fully sustainable energy grid — but some proponents (even agnostics) will point out that it is a zero-emissions energy source… even if its waste products are problematic in other ways.
As far as I know — again: not an expert — there are no plans to build new nuclear reactors, and the old ones across the United States are being retired all the time. So, the technology is being phased out — faster than it seems — and I think the idea is to (temporarily) rely on the preexisting nuclear facilities as we transition from brown energy to green, then move on entirely from that outmoded source of energy. And we are moving on:
Such is why I think all the “controversy” about nuclear plants and bird-murdering wind turbines is overblown. That’s all smoke, designed to obscure an inconvenient truth for both fossil-fuel extractors and conservatives desperately clinging to a white-patriarchal worldview: Change is coming… whether they like it or not. Don’t take my word for it: The free market — as Mr. Gore demonstrates in the citation above — has spoken. Remember when conservatives set their watch by the free market?
And where the United States goes, the rest of the world — including Canada — will follow. That’s why President-elect Biden will be under such (welcome) pressure to pass major climate legislation before the COP26 in Glasgow next autumn: That’s the timeline for reestablishing America’s commitment to lead on climate. So, I’ll keep putting pressure on my leaders and you put pressure on yours. A new world awaits.
Thanks for being such a supportive friend, Suzanne. Happy Holidays to you and yours.
SPC
I saw this post pop up, Sean, and was eager to read it. You’re so right that the work is only half done – if that. Great ideas are easy. It’s the implementation that’s hard, especially those first steps before momentum takes over. Thank you for your dedication and leadership. 🙂
Aw, thanks for that, Diana. When I applied to be trained by Vice President Gore in 2018, it was because I wanted to do something about the climate crisis, and I was completely perplexed as to why no one seemed to care about what I viewed as a dire existential threat! During the training, I learned that many, many people care deeply about this issue, it just hadn’t “gone mainstream” yet — mostly because of disinformation campaigns by fossil-fuel extractors and conservative media. And here we are, two years later, with an incoming administration that campaigned on climate, and is now poised to set its entire agenda around the issue! I never could’ve imagined such a thing! As Mr. Gore is known to say, “Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen faster than you thought they could.”
So, this talk was my way of acknowledging the work of my fellow activists, and — I hope — inspiring them to recommit to their passion in 2021, because there’s still a lot of work to do. But as a climate colleague of mine recently said, the difference now is that we have the wind at our back. I mean, look at all we managed to accomplish when we were bucking headwinds, and now it’s in our sails! And everyone can be a climate leader: Talk to your family and friends about the Biden climate plan, and have them write their representatives in Congress to urge their support for it. As we say in the green game: Politicians don’t create political will — they respond to it. And political will is a renewable resource.
Thanks for being such a kind and loyal friend to this blog, Diana. I wish you a happy holiday season, and only the best of health and creativity in ’21!
Sean
I just read on the news about the nomination of Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior. OMG. I’m so happy I could cry! It’s happening, Sean.
This is what I’m talking about, Diana: Even Biden skeptics — and he was far from the first choice of most environmentalists, myself included — have to take heart and take hope from the appointment of Representative Haaland to lead the Interior Department. It’s not merely a resounding statement on the new administration’s commitment to combating climate change — it’s a sign that Biden is taking racial equality and Land Acknowledgment into account when he makes these critical cabinet decisions. He is taking the very holistic approach I discussed in my presentation — inspired by the ethos of the Green New Deal! As Biden himself might say, “This is a big f**kin’ deal!”
I would encourage everyone to praise President-elect Biden’s choice on social media. As much as we need to call out our leaders when they fail to live up to their promises and stated ideals, they deserve public credit when they do the right thing. If nothing else, it shows them we’re watching and listening.
This is great news — worthy of celebration! Thanks for dropping by to share your enthusiasm, Diana!
Biden’s policy is exactly the same as Drumpf’s: Drill, baby, drill! There is no reason to think the boy will do anything but the bidding of fossil fuel giants.
The thing about cynicism, Michael, is that it doesn’t require a nuanced consideration of the facts — because everything’s equally bad, and everyone is equally corrupt. Your reply — which I do appreciate, my friend, because I am always open to debate in good faith the issues I address in my posts — hasn’t directly challenged a single point I’ve raised here, merely dismissed (without evidence) the premise itself as fatally flawed.
Therefore, operating on your premise — and in the spirit of good-faith debate, because I am genuinely curious — what would you have us, as Americans, do now with a new president that’s just as bad as the last one? Throw up our hands? Bitch into the void? Absolve ourselves from even a scintilla of responsibility or agency — because what difference does anything we do make in the end, anyway?
That’s just not my worldview, sir. I don’t need or expect the conditions under which I endeavor an objective to be optimal. I’d even go so far as to say that resistance is what gives our efforts meaning, because we learn what really matters to us when we are made to fight for those things. The appalling murder of George Floyd this past summer didn’t inspire cynical resignation — Well, one cop is just as rotten as the next, and what’s to be done about any of it? — but rather galvanized an army of citizens against systemic racism.
I’m even predicting a decade of revived civic engagement ahead — be it through voting or activism or organized protests or what have you — because many of us learned to place renewed value in democracy itself when it came under threat by Trump. Fighting for things that matter — even and especially when the odds are long — is a sign you care. It’s an act of optimism. And optimism — a belief that you can not only change the world, but that the world is worth the effort — takes courage.
Unlike the MAGA crowd re: Trump, I don’t view Biden as an infallible savior; I’m not in a cult. A card-carrying democratic socialist, I voted Bernie in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and even if he’d been elected, I wouldn’t have viewed him as a messiah, either. I invest faith only in myself, and my convictions, and the beautiful activists who fight alongside me in the climate trenches. I’m not placing a bet on Biden… but if Biden is reading the tea leaves, he’s placing a bet on us.
Happy Holidays, Michael. Thanks for all the time spent here over the past year.
SPC
I am actually fairly cynical myself
I did not vote for Biden; I voted against Trump
I suspect many of the 80 million plus votes Biden got were against Trump
In the end though, we are all Curt Richter’s rats. Some of us just think if we swim long enough, despite what happened in the original study, we may yet reach dry land
I am NOT one of the optimistic rats. But I keep swimming anyway
What choice do I have?
CW: Animal cruelty
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/kidding-ourselves/201405/the-remarkable-power-hope
The condition you describe, Dell — one of movement compelled by inertia but unmotivated by hopeful agenda — is very much in harmony with the desultory values of a postnarrative world. Goals offer purpose, and purpose engenders hope. Andy Dufresne remained hopeful through nineteen years of wrongful imprisonment because he was working toward a defined goal.
The most hopeful periods of my life have almost exclusively been those characterized by a prescribed objective. As a boy, I was always leading my little grade-school gang on “missions,” like the time, disguised as Boy Scouts, we sold candy in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, or when we plotted to steal the answer-key editions to all our workbooks from the faculty lounge at school (we succeeded, by the way). Few of our juvenile adventures were freeform; most has an explicit goal. When I was abruptly removed from those friends in high school, I became aimless, and soon irretrievably depressed. It was only in senior year, when a new group project unexpectedly presented itself — the opportunity to produce a homemade sequel to The Lost Boys — that I found purpose, direction, and hope again. That set me on a course that dictated the path of my adult life, including an eventual move to Hollywood.
When my once-promising screenwriting career catastrophically imploded in 2014, I went right to work on a new epic project — my first novel — and I set about launching this blog; devastated though I was, I refused to wallow in the dust cloud of misfortune. When the manuscript was finished and the blog established, I turned my attention toward an interest I’d peripherally nursed my entire adult life: environmental activism. I committed on New Year’s of 2017 to training under Vice President Gore, and by the following summer, I was a Climate Reality Leader. Since then, I helped launched the San Fernando Valley Chapter; I’ve given public presentations on the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act and now the Biden climate plan; I brought Los Angeles into the County Climate Coalition; and I’ve taken meetings with elected officials and/or policy aides from the offices of the L.A. Board of Supervisors, Congressman Brad Sherman, and both the Bronx and Manhattan Borough Presidents.
I offer none of this to flout my credentials, such as they are, only to say that I can speak firsthand to the benefit of “getting outside yourself.” What do I mean by that? Throughout the last year, I’ve observed — generally speaking — that people who’ve contributed to a cause outside their own lives have remained optimistic for the future, whereas those (of means) who’ve stayed insularly focused only on their own jobs/families/concerns are more likely to indulge in nihilistic and/or conspiratorial thinking — and that includes people on the right and left. A liberal I know — a Biden voter — is absolutely convinced that the coronavirus and the vaccine were cooked up simultaneously in a Chinese lab to enrich Big Pharma. As though to confirm the thesis of “Changing the Narrative,” he literally said: “How many times do you have to see this plot in a James Bond movie before you realize someone actually did it?!”
Through my work with the Climate Reality Project and L.A. Animal Services, I know a lot of people who invest their time and energy into their community, and every one of them has stayed optimistic and levelheaded through the pandemic, despite firsthand experience with some of its saddest consequences. (I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met through the Pet Food Pantry program here in L.A. who rely on that public service just to feed their dogs and cats, so desperate is their financial situation.) So, my advice to anyone who may feel pessimistic or purposeless is to find a cause outside your own life and volunteer your time to it — even if that’s only thirty or sixty minutes a week. Being out amongst your neighbors and making a positive contribution to your community, in whatever capacity you can, is the best antidote to pessimism — I promise you. Opposition energy — like voting against Trump — is fine; there’s absolutely a place and purpose for it. But contribution energy — being for something — is what feeds your soul, if you’ll forgive that embarrassingly saccharine sentiment.
By the way, Dell: I make no assumptions about your life or how you may live it. Nothing I state above is intended to be a lecture or, worse, an invective. Not at all. It’s simply that you always bring such a valuable perspective to these posts, and I saw your comment as an opportunity to promote volunteerism/activism for its many benefits — not least of which is one’s own mental health. I should also add here that I fully acknowledge how lucky I am to be so privileged as to be able to “step outside” the concerns of my own life; too many of our brothers and sisters aren’t nearly as fortunate. It’s been exactly thirty years since the late, great George Michael released “Praying for Time,” and its message is lamentably more relevant than ever. Given that, I know what my obligations are — but only my obligations.
My friend, your contributions to this blog are always greatly valued. I wish you happiness, health, and hope in 2021.
Sean
I know I’m usually happiest when I’m starting a new project
And usually most depressed when the project comes to a crashing failure (whether or not it’s my own fault)
I absolutely know the hopeful, energizing thrill of starting a new story, Dell — building an imaginary world brick by brick, and living in that world for the duration of the project. That’s why I’ve tried, through this blog, to impart some of the wisdom I’ve picked up along the way to encourage writers to succeed — to realize their visions long after that initial thrill of inspiration gives way to the months-long, often arduous creative process: from starting with a logline, to plotting with method and moral imagination, to imposing a writing schedule that sets you up for success. Nearly everyone I know has talked at one time or another about their ambition to write a novel, or a screenplay… but few actually ever do it (let alone repeatedly).
As for what happens when a project fails? Well… I guess that depends on what you mean by “fails.” Are you talking about a story that just didn’t cohere creatively, despite your best efforts? Or are you talking about a spec novel/screenplay/comic that failed to sell to a publisher, and is now what we refer to in Hollywood as a “dead spec”? If we’re talking about the former, I tend to choose my projects very, very judiciously, because I know how much work it takes to write a novel (even a novella or a screenplay), so I’ve learned to select concepts that I know will sustain my interest and attention over the long haul. As long as I’m interested and focused, I can complete a given project to my satisfaction. Granted, I think it was the late Joel Schumacher who said that creative works always fall short of what the artist envisioned — because it was perfect in your head, and you can always see the “seams” once it’s been reified — but even allowing for that, I can look at most of the work I’ve produced (at least recently) and take pride of ownership in it.
In terms of projects that fail to sell, well… I’ve got an entire file cabinet full of those! Ha-ha! And it wasn’t merely prodcos that passed on my pitches and screenplays; my former agent and manager routinely told me how inadequate my writing was! I’d fire off the latest draft to them in an e-mail, and before I’d even popped the cap on my celebratory Sam Adams, my manager would call and say, “I just read the first twenty pages and none of it works.” He’d usually put me through half a dozen more rewrites before deciding he wouldn’t even take the project to the marketplace. (Needless to say, this sadomasochistic relationship was one of the prime things that drove me from Hollywood.)
And now I’m in a situation in which, despite my most herculean efforts over the past three years, I can’t get any prospective literary agents or publishers to read my manuscripts. (I’ve gotten several to agree to read them, but it’s the actual reading that never seems to happen.) Does that mean the material is a failure? I don’t know — I guess that depends on one’s metric. I think my last manuscript, Spex, is the best piece of fiction I’ve ever produced, but if a book falls in the forest and no one reads it…? Know what I’m saying? I don’t really get depressed about it — occasionally frustrated, perhaps — because I’ve done all I can do: I wrote a great piece of material, and my pitch/query scored a request for pages. Beyond that, I can’t put a gun to anyone’s head and make them read it. So, I take pride in the creative and moral imagination of the work itself, and I don’t get dispirited by things I can’t control. As I noted in “What Comes Next,” that’s probably what makes me such an effective climate activist: I remain tenaciously undaunted in the face of long odds and the likelihood of disappointment. Like that old Pink lyric:
I will say this: Part of the way I temper any frustration I may have over the ream of unpublished (and mostly unread) stories in my proverbial drawer is through the creative and expressive outlet of this blog. I get tremendous satisfaction from conceiving an idea for an essay (and it isn’t always easy; some months I feel like I don’t have anything interesting or original to say), writing and revising the post over the course of about of a week, publishing it, and then engaging with readers like yourself. Without that — if I were only writing long-form fiction that went routinely unread — I might very likely fall into the trap of placing all my eggs in that basket, then succumbing to disappointment when nothing came of it. The blog gives me a vehicle to express myself — often in real time — and to get immediate satisfaction and feedback from that. Short-form nonfiction exercises a different set of intellectual and creative muscles than long-form fiction, too, so there’s that. And, of course, the issues that I explore and develop on this blog then contribute to more thoughtful, morally imaginative storytelling on my part: Spex, for instance, explores themes of boyhood friendship, of outgrowing childish things, and the ways in which nostalgia and memorabilia keep us imprisoned in the past. By forcing myself to think through those issues so thoroughly and academically here, I’m able to lace them into my fictional narratives with a greater degree of thoughtfulness and artfulness.
I’ll close with this, Dell: Someone once told me that creative people never fail… they just give up. So, I say… bring on your eighteen-wheeler!
Great summary of what needs to come Sean. Yes, you need those 2 senate seats in the worst way, to let anything start happening and to take away most of MM’s power. We can only hope Biden gets to implement these changes and start the road to healing. And being that his plans will take years, let us pray not another repub comes in to undo and not continue the growth and healing in the years to come. 🙂
Thanks, Debby! There’s a lot we can do right now in the United States to urge public officials at all levels of government to support policies that ensure a hopeful, prosperous, just, and sustainable future (including a green COVID-recovery package). And it goes without saying that the president of the United States is uniquely empowered to champion such initiatives, so, accordingly, we need to keep the pressure on the incoming administration and Congress. But there are all sorts of reasons to be hopeful outside of this new opportunity here in the States to set the political agenda:
For all of those reasons, I don’t think it’s going to be as simple, moving forward, as a new Republican administration simply “undoing” the environmental achievements of the previous Democratic president, as Trump has done vis-à-vis Obama. As Mr. Gore notes, we’re at political tipping point now. Even if a Republican were to win the White House in ’24 — something definitely not worth worrying about yet! — I suspect by then we’ll be too far down the road of a global fossil-fuel phaseout to halt or even reverse the progress. So, our job now is to pressure/support the administration and the Congress as needed to assure the “irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions” promised in the Biden Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future. Anyone searching for hope needn’t look any further than the mirror.
Best of health and creativity to you in the New Year, Debby!
Sean