Last week, President-elect Joe Biden announced he was looking at Brian Deese, global head of sustainable investing at investment firm BlackRock, to lead the National Economic Council. Despite the sound of his current title, Deese’s track record of supporting the expansion of fossil fuel extraction when he worked in the Obama administration did not make climate activists particularly optimistic, and the New York chapter of the Sunrise Movement staged a protest against his appointment.
Others protested the protest. Former Vox journalist Matthew Yglesias accused the Sunrise movement of “doing enormous damage to the cause of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” criticizing it for wasting time sparking “intra-party fights,” and for being “simultaneously detached from actual policy analysis AND political reality.” Among the many people Yglesias pissed off with these remarks was MSNBC climate columnist Emily Atkin, who responded in her newsletter Heated, “Yglesias appears to have forgotten about scientific reality.”
It was only a matter of time before Biden’s first moves as President-elect would spark clashes along familiar fault lines and between those with competing visi... Read more
