8
‘We Needed More Time’: As Biden Leaves Office, His Climate Legacy Remains Incomplete
(insideclimatenews.org)
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
8 points (75.0% liked)
Politics
402 readers
127 users here now
For civil discussion of US politics. Be excellent to each other.
Rule 1: Posts have the following requirements:
▪️ Post articles about the US only
▪️ Title must match the article headline
▪️ Recent (Past 30 Days)
▪️ No Screenshots/links to other social media sites or link shorteners
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. One or two small paragraphs are okay.
Rule 3: Articles based on opinion (unless clearly marked and from a serious publication-No Fox News or equal), misinformation or propaganda will be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, will be removed.
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a jerk. It’s not acceptable to say another user is a jerk. Cussing is fine.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Media owners, CEOs and/or board members
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I fully understood the lazy cliche being applied in this case. If I hadn't understood it, I wouldn't have taken time to address it directly and point out some flaws in its application here. Thanks for trying to talk down to me about it, and echoing the cliche again, instead of addressing anything I said.
Did you do anything? Protest, letters to congress, anything like that?
I was busy organizing the largest union in my industry.
Sounds good. Here's some of what the CWA had to say about the NLRB under Biden:
https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/cwa-statement-nlrb-funding-amid-increase-worker-organizing
I'd put that in the same category as US climate policy. It's been fucked for so long that it's easy to get cynical about any given level of improvement. Instead, what the CWA is doing is the right answer: Acknowledge the success while still pushing hard for more. Imagine if that press release had said, instead, "typical liberal Biden, NLRB is still fucked as it always is, they always need more time I guess."
I doubt you picked CWA by coincidence, but in case you did, I'm a member. I don't consider that the same thing at all, because just as CWA says the administration didn't do enough to keep the election process quick enough with current funding. On top of that, it's not the government or CWA forming these unions, it's the workers. We celebrate our victories in private, and then fight like hell for more in public. I do the same thing with climate change.
I did not.
True that. It takes many different parties, all fighting, for anything good to happen. And actually, I'm not convinced that anything "the government" does can really help in any lasting sense. I think the victory has to be won by the workers themselves, and then codified by the government if anything. What we're seeing now with our horrifying governmental system is the result when too many of the working people delegate that fight to an official class of politicians who work everything out for them, and then supposedly hand it to them as a done deal. The result isn't good.
But that said, if you want to have a view of what happens when the workers are forming those unions and fighting that fight without having the NLRB also fighting in their corner, wait for the next few years, and see how the CWA does for itself. I actually think the scope of the problems with Trump will be so existentially massive that little issues like your employment and your union may start to seem trivial. But, also, your union will suffer a lot without the help the NLRB has been giving it.
Sounds like you denigrate the people who helped your victories, in public. At least as far as climate. If you're also celebrating them in private, then great, I guess, but I think fighting for more would be better than turning your guns on your allies in public.
We're wandering away from the point of the discussion, but I can tell you with certainty that CWA isn't going to slow down their efforts. My union has existed since before the NLRB, we'll just have to stand on our own again. My local is leading the charge with class struggle unionism in CWA, and that sure as hell won't stop with Trump's admin.
Biden did some good things for climate, but it wasn't enough. I don't think it even makes up for 2024 being the record breaking year of most crude oil produced. My allies are in my class, not in government. We can't settle and let them think they did good when we needed far more than they gave.
Oh, I'm sure not. I was just saying that you will slow down your successes, now with explicit enemies in government instead of allies.
Not even close, no. He did about as much as one president could realistically do in our death-cult of a government, but we need five more terms of that kind of action, and we needed it to start 20 years ago when there was still time.
If anything I was saying was sounding like I thought our government is doing good on climate change, or that it's time to relax, that was not at all what I was saying.