HOW TO TRULY 'BUILD BACK BETTER' ON CLIMATE

This commentary was jointly produced by In These Times and Foreign Policy In Focus.The infrastructure and budget reconciliation bills moving through Congress are a mixed bag when it comes to health care, income support programs, and the care economy. On climate and environmental issues, however, they are not just inadequate but disastrous. They represent, at best, a huge lost opportunity to tackle the climate crisis at the required scale nationally. One rogue legislator, Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who has deep fossil fuel industry ties and is himself a coal baron, is hell-bent on preserving fossil fuel subsidies and gutting the proposed Clean Electricity Payments Program. That program was flawed to begin with, but thanks to Manchin's intervention, fossil fueled power plants could end up getting handouts that were supposed to subsidize clean energy.