Politics & Globalization

We live in a time of change, when people are questioning old assumptions and seeking new directions. In the ongoing debate over health care, social justice, and border security, there is, however, one overlooked issue that should be at the top of everyone’s agenda, from Democratic Socialists to libertarian Republicans: America’s longest war. No, not the one in Afghanistan. I mean the drug war.

For as long as climate change has been a part of America’s national consciousness, it’s been talked about in dire terms, evoking images of some hellish, “Mad Max”-style dystopia. The title and much of the content of David Wallace-Wells’s recent book is a variation on the same theme, stirring up hundreds of pages of images’ worth of an “Uninhabitable Earth” to make the case that the conversation has not been dire enough.

The Green New Deal is generally treated as a wild-eyed scheme of the Congressional Democrats’ liberal youth caucus, most particularly of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But, if she is the fresh face behind the “aspirational” climate fix that was put on the nation’s table in February, proposing significant new public works and policies to move America away from carbon, what about the seventysomething Edward Markey, who joined her to introduce the resolution in the U.S. Senate?

Bills to clamp down on pipeline protests have spread to at least nine new states this year, part of an industry-backed push that began two years ago to heighten penalties for activists who try to block fossil fuel infrastructure projects.