Pirate's Cove

It’s interesting that Slate’s Christian Cauterucci failed to ask US Representative (and massive Jew hater) Pramila Jayapal about her own outsized travel via fossil fueled flights and vehicles

Climate Change Is Bad. Cherry Blossoms Are Good.

I had been strolling beneath the cherry blossoms with Rep. Pramila Jayapal for about 15 minutes on a recent morning in March when she was greeted by her first fan of the day. “Thank you for taking care of America!” a white-haired man in a baseball hat yelled out, with the enthusiasm of a tourist getting more than his money’s worth on a visit to the nation’s capital. (snip)

The early arrival of the white and pink flowers, hastened this year by an unusually warm February, was the reason I had asked Jayapal to take a walk around the Tidal Basin with me. It was “peak bloom,” an enchanting and fleeting period during which 70 percent of cherry tree buds are in full flower. But the season has also been flecked with a guilty unease: These trees wouldn’t be blooming so early without the rising temperatures of a warming climate.

I asked Jayapal if she was familiar with the concept of “apocabliss”—the feeling of delight at unseasonably warm weather, even as one recognizes it as an omen of a catastrophically less habitable climate to come. “Totally, because I live in Seattle. And Seattle is typically cloudy and rainy and cold,” she said. “And yet, in Seattle for the last many years, we have seen these massive weather changes. Some of them are good in the moment, the apocabliss kind of changes.” She described a recent visit to her hometown in late winter, when it was 65 degrees and sunny, the mountains around the city were visible, and “everything was sparkling.”

This is a sign of a cult, where, no matter how things are, the apocalypse is always right around the corner.

Still, weaning the United States off of fossil fuels will be harder than many people realize, she said. “I think, for a lot of people, they think that once we pass the legislation, we’re done.” But federal agencies still have to write rules about how each piece of legislation is implemented and the appropriated funds distributed. Lobbyists are swarming all over that process. Last year, Jayapal introduced the Stop Corporate Capture Act, which would reduce corporate influence over the rulemaking process by, among other things, jacking up penalties for companies that lie to regulators and creating an office to advocate for members of the public who stand to benefit from regulations.

And how many fossil fueled flights is she taking between Seattle and D.C., along with other places? Why can’t she take the train? Does she drive around in fossil fueled vehicles in D.C. and Seattle, or, take mass transit, a bike, or walk?

There is something like a contradiction, here, in the role Jayapal plays on climate. On one hand, she is one of the few people on Earth with anything approaching real power to change the calamitous trajectory of the planet, an issue that has a way of making everyday people feel infuriatingly powerless. On the other, when you get right down to it, whether or not the U.S. moves aggressively enough to forestall a looming climate apocalypse is almost entirely dependent on a handful of people—many of them, like Manchin and Biden, named Joe—who don’t seem to approach the problem with the life-or-death resolve it warrants.

Why is it not up to We The People? Pretty sure we are not living in an authoritarian nation.