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The one thing I love about this job is that even the little things are big. My work on paying interns, my work on telehealth, and my work on raising the smoking age to 21 never made it to Meet the Press. But these are some of the more significant achievements of my office.
Q: You chaired the special panel on the climate crisis that Senate Democrats created in 2019. Where is the action now? How doomed is the planet without a climate bill?
A: I don’t look at it that way. The tendency in Washington is simply to think of problems in binary terms, but climate is the challenge of our generation, which means we’re going to have to work on it for decades and decades and decades.
If we pass the perfect climate bill tomorrow morning, we’ll still have to keep going. And if we failed to pass a bill this year, we still have to go ahead. This is a planetary emergency, and both the scale of the challenge and the scale of the opportunity demand that we not allow ourselves to become discouraged. But we also shouldn’t engage in magical thinking where we believe that if we just pass one piece of legislation, then the planet is saved. It doesn’t work like that.
The Special Commission on Climate Crisis was a way to raise the issue of climate when the Democrats were not in charge. Now that we are in charge, the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee, the Environment and Public Works Committee and the Energy and Natural Resources Committee is where climate action will take place.
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