“Infrastructure week” is an old gag in Washington, used in jokes to skewer the unveiling of plans by presidents with no hope of having their ideas come to fruition. But a real infrastructure week is actually here, with the Senate on Tuesday authorizing $550 billion in actual infrastructure spending, in a plan hashed out by moderate Republicans and Democrats with help from the Biden administration.
There is still an infrastructure week joke to be made, however. Unfortunately, it's at the entire planet's expense. As Kate Aronoff noted for the New Republic, the bill primarily seeks to address climate change by putting $15 billion toward electric vehicles (EVs) over the next decade--de facto science denial in terms of the urgent need for decarbonization. Every member of the Democratic caucus and 19 Republicans voted for the legislation the day after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report, which warned that in just ten years, the current rate of global carbon emissions will likely send the planet beyond the point-of-no-return leading to catastrophic outcomes for millions, if not billions of people. Under the Senate and the White House plan, EVs will only be driven by a slim minority of U.S. motorists by the mid-2030s, when people in this country will likely be increasingly piling into buses and cars to flee coastal flooding, wildfires, droughts, and major hurricane disasters caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
The senate did manage to avoid the most embarrassing outcome, even though its actions still represent the world's only superpower reacting to impending planetary disaster with a disinterested shrug. Lawmakers stumbled into a legislative package that preserved new tax reporting requirements for cryptocurrency brokers, which includes those who finance “proof-of-work” problem-solving algorithms used to obtain cryptocurrency. This means that there will be higher taxes for some of the Bitcoin miners who are producing carbon emissions equivalent to the total energy consumption of Argentina.
This a step in the right direction, in terms of climate policy. It is also a step in the right direction, for other reasons. Cryptocurrency is primary used to protect the identity of its owners, which includes hedge funds and cyber thieves. After its last global market collapse in early 2018, cryptocurrency escaped the oversight it deserved and tripled in size to become a trillion dollar industry, albeit one with questionable long-term value. If humans laboring to create actual value are compelled to contribute some of their compensation to the state, surely the owners of computers that burn energy to solve problems that produce records that the computer owner can then sell for whatever reason should do the same.
Increasingly influential lobbyists for so-called digital asset ventures had been howling at this prospect. They claimed that tax reporting requirements would kill their industry. They appear to have been wrong, as the millions of people who have given tax reporting info to a fantasy sports or stock-trading app could have predicted. The price of Bitcoin actually went up as it became clear that the crypto broker definition would be expansive enough to kill the industry, according to lobbyists. It seems that the trillion dollar industry will survive a little extra paperwork and an additional tax burden of $2.8 billion per year.
But because this happened in the United States Senate, a legislative body once commonly referred to as “the millionaire's club,” the worst outcome was only avoided by accident. The three senators who drafted the crypto language—Mark Warner (D-Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), and Rob Portman (R-Ohio)—wanted to narrow their initial definition of “broker” to exclude miners, but their amendment was only formally proposed after the legislation had already cleared key procedural hurdles. The revision therefore would have required unanimous consent to pass the Senate, and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) ultimately objected.
One of the three senators to push the initial tax, Warner, is also an industry-friendly lawmaker who came to his desire to tax crypto for all the wrong reasons: because the national security state demanded it. He is wholly devoted to the tech industry, illustrated by the $200 million that he personally made in telecommunications during the 1980s and 1990s, and the $27,800 that he received in campaign donations from top Amazon executives in 2019, while supporting subsidies to the conglomerate to open a second headquarters in his home state. Warner's abiding fondness for tech once fully extended to cryptocurrency, which he described in 2018 as “transformational,” comparing it to the cell phone industry and predicting that it could be worth $20 trillion by 2020. But Warner, the head of the Senate intelligence committee, changed his tune earlier this year after a series of so-called ransomware attacks, in which hackers hid the proprietary data of major corporations and only returned it in exchange for cryptocurrency that preserved their anonymity.
“The number of companies that are getting hit on a regular basis with ransomware attacks and quietly paying in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, I think would shock most folks in business,” Warner said in May. By June, he supported tougher regulations on crypto, saying: “There ought to be more transparency if a company does pay, so we can go after the bad guys.” If not for the senator's bid to placate law enforcement, Bitcoin miners might still be faced with a minimal tax bill, and the Infrastructure Week joke would have been as cruel as possible this year.
Room for Improvement
When the House takes up the infrastructure bill, it's possible that the legislation will become less of a football spiraling toward the world's groin. The Congressional Progressive Caucus warned on Tuesday that most of its 96 members would vote against the proposal if it wasn't paired with a $3.5 trillion legislative package, which includes money for healthcare, childcare, renewable energy and conservation. The bill also mandates reductions in fossil fuel use, which could see coal and natural gas use decline from 60 to 20 percent of total U.S. power consumption by the end of the decade.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to her credit, appears uncharacteristically open to the idea, saying on Friday that legislation with bipartisan support in the senate won't get a look in the lower chamber if it means “going forward with leaving people behind.” And the senate itself moved forward Wednesday morning with the first step toward passing a second package without any Republican support: by approving a budget resolution, spearheaded by Sen. Sanders, that would enable the upper chamber to pass the $3.5 trillion legislation with a simple majority.
Fifty votes are still far from guaranteed. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) aren't currently backing the total package, and only agreed to the resolution to move deliberations forward. But steps in the correct direction have been happening unexpectedly lately. On August 3rd, the Biden Administration did an about-face on the CDC eviction moratorium after protests outside the Capitol led by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.). And on August 6th, the White House suddenly moved to extend the moratorium on student debt repayment to January 31, 2022, buying organizers four months to try to bully President Biden into canceling up to $50,000 in individuals' debt, as some Democratic senators have been urging him to do.
But people could be forgiven for assuming outcomes toward the sub-optimal end of the spectrum, especially with hopes pinned on Sinema and Manchin. President Biden's record on the climate, thus far, has also been abysmal. While the administration put the United States back into the Paris Climate Accord, it is on pace to approve of the most oil and gas leases on federal land in a single year since the drill-happy years of the George W. Bush administration. President Biden's appointees have also defended leases issued last year by the Trump administration to allow a massive drilling project in Alaska, in a plan that will require cooling agents to support extractive equipment because the permafrost is melting, because of the warming climate. Not a bad example of how capitalism is struggling to cope with climate change, but it’s awful for the planet and the Biden administration's credibility.
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