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The year is 2023, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 50 percent higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution, and the so-called “climate president” has decided to go ahead with industrializing the Arctic wilderness, a region already warming four times faster than the rest of the world. 

If we had to make one overarching argument about what makes a good executive branch official, whether at a massive cabinet-level department, a medium-sized agency, or a tiny commission, it is this: a habit of skepticism about corporate claims. 

Last week a shocking story from NPR largely slipped under the radar. The headline: “Why the EPA puts a higher value on rich lives lost to climate change.” Climate Correspondent Rebecca Hersher shared the “twisted tale of math, ethics and climate change” that is the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to decide what’s been called the most important number you’ve never heard of: the social cost of greenhouse gases. 

Since the early days of the pandemic, the federal government has been pre-purchasing Covid vaccines at an average cost of around $20 per dose (around $29 per dose for the bivalent boosters) to ensure public access to vaccination at no cost. However, with Congress no longer willing to fund Covid treatment, the Biden administration has indicated that it intends to end the Covid public health emergency in May, and more or less hand over control of Covid prevention to the healthcare industry.

Last Friday marked the exact midway point of Biden’s presidential term. With this newly divided Congress, there are scant possibilities for legislation in the next two years. By and large, this next stage of Biden’s presidency should be all about the executive branch: implementing recent laws, enforcing existing laws, and enacting much-needed regulation. (Biden should have been overseeing these things all along, of course—that’s what the Presidency is for!)

We’ve barely begun wading into the troubled waters of the 118th Congress, and House Republicans are already out for the blood of their longtime nemesis: federal workers.

With the Senate’s rejection of Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting reform legislation as a notable exception, last week was a bad one for fossil fuel disasters and corporate accountability. In Kansas, a Keystone pipeline leak caused the largest US crude oil spill in a decade. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, investigators found ongoing gas leaks in Equitrans’ pipeline storage facilities that released massive amounts of methane in November — enough to erase 50% of emission gains from US electric vehicles sales this year. 

Sam Bankman-Fried may have been arrested, but his influence campaign in DC is continuing unabated, with Members of the House and Senate looking to use FTX’s collapse to push for SBF’s hand-picked regulatory framework and undermine the work of SEC Chair Gary Gensler. 

Simply put, we would ask for more rigor from the wonks who would like a say in how we redesign America’s energy systems. The challenge is massive, yes: to better serve more people with more efficient, less wasteful, less toxic energy infrastructure, while restraining the human footprint on the planet, so that other forms of life can also thrive. But it is also an energizing challenge, and eminently worthy of human effort. Any theory of climate change mitigation that is inflexible and unimaginative enough to involve bulldozing those who stand in its way is just another partial paradise, a green veil thrown over the same extractive relationships that got us here. 

If rail workers are so important to our economy that a single week of striking could cost the economy $1 billion, and if their demands are so modest that any decent employer would easily exceed them, then meeting their demands seems like the obvious solution. But the American balance of power is such that railroad bosses have the allegedly most pro-labor president in history doing their dirty work for them.

Hello everyone, and welcome to a special holiday edition of the RDP Newsletter. Since we’re off for Thanksgiving tomorrow and Friday, this week’s edition will be a bit more off the cuff and includes some material that would normally be in our Hack Watch newsletter. So sit back, relax, and enjoy.