After the legislative process got off to a rocky start, our most important congressional ally, Joy LaFray, moved the shock collar through the House Energy Committee while Judith Kastor led a small but brave contingent of Green Tea Republicans to yea votes. While much of the political-entertainment complex focused for a month on what it meant that President Randall had begun to wear her hair in natural curls, LaFray-Kastor, a 2,500-page piece of legislation that would remake American life, was muscled through by seven votes in the second month of Randall’s presidency. Of course, the Pollution Reduction, Infrastructure, and Refund Act was not perfect. Fresh enemies were made. Everyone accused everyone of various betrayals. The compromise was good enough, though: a rising tax on fossil fuels at the point of origin, with the money to be redistributed to every taxpayer and some set aside to buy off industry and invest in adaptation efforts; an additional host of regulations would be phased in, and the government would spend $2.8 trillion over ten years to accelerate decarbonization, help move displaced workers into the clean tech economy, and begin work on drawdown efforts and other environmental remediation projects with half the money to be targeted at a variety of impoverished and vulnerable communities. It wasn’t everything we’d been angling for, but as one of the bill’s principal authors, Ash al-Hasan, explained to me, “It puts in place the mechanisms. Future legislation can build from these efforts.”
When I first met Ash through Joy LaFray, I recognized him as the pensive climate modeler who’d also advised Senator Cy Fitzpatrick. Strikingly handsome with a lean build, chiseled jaw, and menacing eyes, Ash was a strange and brilliant man. He wore the same suit and tie every day, wrote notes to himself mid-conversation, and made odd gestures without appearing to realize it. He was viewed as one of the most serious thinkers in climate policy circles, and many people loathed that he preferred math to ambitious vision. Senator Fitzpatrick said of him, “Guy’s heart probably beats once an hour.”
I was dispatched to a particularly tense meeting after a group of vacillating reps made clear the price of their support would be a subsidy for utilities that had coal plants still online. LaFray was apoplectic.
“Why should we buy any of them off?” she demanded. “We’re going to end up with the European cap-and-trade system—just an ineffectual hodge-podge of goodies for the industries we’re trying to snuff out.”
“Trust no one but firemen,” Ash said. Everyone in the meeting looked at him.
LaFray demanded, “What’s that have to do with the price of tea in China, Hasan?”
“Just to say, the fireman has only one job, and that’s to stop the fire any way he can. We are forcing a number of vested interests to walk the plank, so to speak, and these interests are demanding that instead of using a sword to walk them to the precipice, we use a shovel. Or a hammer. The only thing that matters is maintaining an incentive system that will degrade the political constituency currently invested in burning hydrocarbons.”
He paused to look around the room. A bunch of blank faces gazed back at him. “Apologies. I’ve long been enamored with similes and metaphors. Mostly because I’m so bad at them.”
“Man, I thought those were great,” I chimed in. “I’ll use the fireman thing on my dad.”
After the meeting let out, he approached me to ask, “Would you like to eat a slushie with me?”
We began meeting outside the Russell Building to go for slushies near the Mall. Ash always ordered blue raspberry, his lips and tongue turning indigo as we spoke.
“We need the Senate to include a low-carbon tariff in its version,” he explained, slurping syrupy ice. “So at least there’s a chance we can force it through during reconciliation. I fear, though, industry is only beginning to organize. The alligator’s jaw muscles are built to snap shut; they take a long while to wind open.”
“Man, you’re great at metaphors. I don’t know who’s telling you otherwise.”
Ash was right, though. The carbon lobby was caught flat-footed by the speed with which Mary Randall captured the nomination, won election, and passed a bipartisan bill in the House. Even longtime Washington insiders were staggered by the lobbying campaign that followed. Over three thousand lobbyists were deployed, half of whom were former government officials. Aboveboard advertisements filled every niche of public life, from the NFL to the Oscars to Slapdish feeds. The chum slick of glossy greenwashing felt omnipresent, as oil and utilities declared themselves reformed and “working around the clock to bring a just version of the Green New Deal to our great country.” Scuttling beneath the surface of this corporate sheen was a vicious subaudible smear campaign and conspiracy blitz. From Fox News to Renaissance, conservative media ran amok with rage. Russ Mackowski would get on the Sunday shows and fan all this nonsense, and the rest of the Right tended to follow his panpipe. Renaissance Media’s star, Jen Braden, began calling our coalition the “new Gestapo,” and that stuck while she dog-whistled at every scientist, politician, or activist who had any hint of a Jewish background. Tony Pietrus came in for particular vitriol when it was disseminated that he was a quarter on his mother’s side, and his book became a virtual Protocols of the Elders of Zion of conspiracy baiting. White power groups began to harass every congressperson who’d voted for the House bill, filling up their social media, tailing them at public events, showing up with assault rifles outside town halls, and eventually circulating documents with addresses, as well as information on their aides, who then began quitting or demanding security or having nervous breakdowns as the intimidation ratcheted. One of our key congressional allies, Tracy Aamanzaihou, had to close her Houston offices after most of her staff quit following coordinated death threats against their families. As she told an interviewer, “You don’t spill this much acid in public without consequences.”
I didn’t want to know about the threats we were getting. Liza’s team handled that issue. But then she gave us a presentation on what was going on behind the scenes. It was easy enough to conjure a make-believe army to harass people online. There were stories about the troll farms set up in India, the Philippines, and Russia where wealthy interests could contract out an avalanche of hate and bile as easily as ordering food through an app. By simply dripping the nectar, one could draw real hornets. Then there was the sophisticated nudge tactics and AI targeting an individual’s psychology, based on their perception of the issue using predictive analytics.
“Whether you’re getting an ad telling you the bill is ‘betraying Climate X philosophy’ or a more standard Madison Avenue plug…” Behind Liza on the PowerPoint, a cartoon carbon capture plant hoovered black powder from a healthy blue sky with the SFC’s tag, WE ARE THE GREEN NEW DEAL. It was the kind of crap you couldn’t believe anyone fell for. “People are being fed news, opinion, and content tailored to specific fears and insecurities. On my feed, I might get a bit of body-shaming, warnings that my eggs might be dry, inter-Asian identity politics—it’s a highly specific psychological package. It’s not just the right wing getting goosed—our members and allies are being nudged like this. They’re getting opinion filtered to them that the legislation is a betrayal.”