Twenty five years ago, on this day, January 10th, 2001,
A letter by John Podesta to the New York Times, defending the Clinton Record from an attack by Bill McKibben, is published.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/10/opinion/l-white-house-acted-on-global-warming-358517.html
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 370ppm. As of 2026 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that 8 years of Al Gore as Veep hadn’t ushered in the ecotopia. There was the “BTU tax,” foiled by fossil fuel interests in 1993 and then the pre-emptive strike against the Kyoto Protocol. So, not much to post about.
The specific context was that Gore had had the 2000 election stolen out from under his nose by the Supreme Court mates of his opponent’s dad – George HW Bush.
What I think we can learn from this is that there are no saviours. At absolute best politicians can be forced to nudge things into a slightly less rapidly suicidal direction. You want actual change, you need social movements. But they tend to flame out after a few years (repression is exhausting, after all)
What happened next is Gore dusted himself off and gave the world “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obv
Also on this day:
January 10, 1978 – World Meteorological Organisation outlines World Climate Programme…
January 10, 1991 – “Separate studies rank 1990 as world’s warmest year” #ShiftingBaseline
January 10, 2023 Labour launches a Climate and Environment Forum
2 replies on “January 10, 2001 – Podesta defends the Clinton-Gore climate record from Bill McKibben’s criticism”
I for one think McKibben was more right than Podesta, and that given the previous Bush administration’s efforts to enact cap-and-trade for certain GHGs aside from CO2 (see https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/1990-clean-air-act-amendment-summary), it would’ve been a cakewalk for Clinton and Gore to run on rebuilding infrastructure with climate as a high priority, besting Bush in ‘92. After all, they ran as economic populists back then. Of course, that would’ve meant they’d stray from their message of fiscal discipline, but deficit, schmeficit…
Side note: for Podesta, he did oversee IRA implementation as best as he could, but I’m disappointed that Joe Manchin stripped out a lot of direct spending provisions and got the IRA to lean on tax credits and IRS capacity (this is what political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls ‘submerging the state’). If only he’d realized what building lasting programs actually takes.
Agree with all that!
And thank you for the Mettler idea – it looks fascinating. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo12244559.html