Daniel Sherrell Guardian UK
08 November 21
My rage against the senator might consume me if I couldn’t set it down here
Late in the evening on Friday 15 October an alert appeared on my phone that seemed at last to portend the end of the world. Two weeks before the UN climate summit in Glasgow – a make-or-break moment for American leadership and international ambition – Senator Joe Manchin had decided to gut our country’s best, and perhaps last, attempt to save itself. With three decades left to decarbonize the global economy, and a window of Democratic control unlikely to recur for years, Manchin’s benefactors in the coal and gas industry had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, killing the Clean Electricity Performance Program that would finally have brought their lucrative global arson spree under control.
It was hard not to feel like this was game over, a sensation I’d grown accustomed to after a decade working in the American climate movement. It was the same feeling I’d had after the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks, and the defeat of the Waxman-Markey bill, and the election of a president willing to drown the world to buoy his ego. But though each of those moments felt crushing, the news on the 15th felt worse.
After all, we have many fewer years left now to act. And we are so close this time, so excruciatingly close.
My rage might consume me if I couldn’t set it down here: not only is Joe Manchin devastating the constituents he claims to work for, consigning them to a future of constant, devastating floods. Not only is he shilling for an industry that has ravaged his home state, snaring West Virginians in a resource trap. Not only is he making a choice that could single-handedly warm the planet by several tenths of a degree, precipitating millions of avoidable deaths and dimming the prospects of my entire generation.
The truly maddening thing is that he refuses to look his decision in the face, hiding instead behind the debunked and convenient lies furnished by his donors, who maintain that they can burn coal into mid-century without risking a catastrophe. Whether he genuinely believes these fantasies is anyone’s guess. But for the sake of our lives and those of his grandchildren, I pray he changes course.
A few days after the news broke, I gathered with dozens of young people outside the yacht where Joe Manchin makes his DC home. Our signs echoed our disbelief: how was he so sanguine, risking the fate of human civilization? As a practicing Catholic, how could he spurn the pope, who just this month called for an urgent transition away from fossil fuels? It is hard to overstate how surreal it felt, knowing that the fate of our children, and our children’s children, and the many generations beyond them, rested on the whims of a single man enjoying his evening on the second boat from the end of the wharf, the one called “Almost Heaven”. As a friend put it, “Almost Hell” would feel more apt.
Since then, many young people have taken to the streets and gone on indefinite hunger strike, pleading with him not to torch the world we were meant to inherit. When one of the strikers – seven days into her fast – confronted Manchin outside a donor luncheon, he offered the weakest of moral sidesteps: “All the emissions are coming from Asia.” (In fact, the US has contributed more to global emissions than any other country. And China, unlike Manchin, has thrown its weight behind a detailed plan for decarbonization.)
As young people work feverishly to overcome this intransigence and prevent our future from slipping through our fingers, it’s worth asking a basic question: what exactly does hope look like now?
It feels increasingly clear to me that I don’t have hope. It’s not that I’ve succumbed to fatalism. I just no longer think that hope is something you can “have”. The past two weeks have made unmistakably vivid to me that hope is a kind of discipline; it is something you do. I have felt the daily effort of it: gritting my teeth and wrenching some glimmer from the gloom.
On most days, this has looked like calling my best friend and grasping together at the latest straw. Maybe Manchin could be convinced to support a carbon tax! He has since rejected the idea, threatening to bring down a crucial methane fee along with it. Maybe a call from Pope Francis could remind him that Catholic virtue demands not setting fire to the planet! If such a call has been placed, no one has reported on it. Maybe the Biden administration’s plan B will actually work. Maybe we can meet our Paris targets with all carrots and no sticks, plowing $550bn into clean energy without actively drawing down on fossil fuels.
This last one remains to be seen, though our reasons for confidence are shaky. But hope is not something we do because we know we’re going to win. Hope is something we do for each other. It’s a gift we grow together then spread outward, a communal act of unconditional grace. It is looking past the headlines at the people we love and telling them we haven’t given up.
In this way, hope is like any other co-constructed human story – marriage, or money, or God. The more people tell it, the more power it wields. So I’m going to tell it again, for its own sake, with our opponents at center stage:
The fossil fuel industry is scared. They are hanging on by a political thread. There is a single old man standing between them and the regulation they despise, and his entire party is telling him to stand down. Meanwhile their grift keeps getting exposed. Their rationalizations are ringing false. Their cultural capital is running dangerously low. And you need only watch last week’s public excoriation of the CEO of Shell to understand how their historical legacy is taking shape. Like the fuels they drill from the dirt, their grounds for hope are finite, costly and getting harder and harder to reach.
Ours, on the other hand, cannot be exhausted. Our hope is stubborn, and furious, and born in one another. We are its source and its horizon. And we know what we’re capable of. It was young people who led the charge to defeat Donald Trump; young people who compelled the Biden administration to feel our climate urgency, while electing the progressive caucus that’s given that urgency teeth.
No matter how many brutal setbacks we’re forced to swallow, we will always have a reason to keep fighting. We are our reason to keep fighting. And unlike Manchin’s fading coal industry, we are never, ever going away.
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