Biden’s infrastructure plan passes the Senate
Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°102 | 10 August 2021
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Situation
Now it goes to the House. Some centrist Democrats in the House insist on voting on the thing as a standalone bill, but the party line seems to be that it’ll get a No vote if it isn’t in some way attached to the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, which is now serving as a lifeboat for the progressives policies that Biden cut out of his infrastructure bill. Originally it was planned to be more of a companion piece of legislation.
All the pressure to deliver climate funding is now on the reconciliation bill
The infrastructure plan was supposed to be Biden’s answer to the Green New Deal, at least in terms of meshing jobs with infrastructure with climate. In its current form it doesn’t do much of any of that. Climate took the biggest hit.
Combined with the outsized military budget proposed by Biden and then increased by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Biden’s agenda is so far very much a net negative for the environment. The US military is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases (a very good COW study on this, here) and its budget for FY2022 is on track to be over 12x the average annual amount climate programs get under Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Thanks for your time,
Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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