The Climate Trust.

Welcome to the final installment of our “5 Non-Negotiables of the Left” series where we detail three short-term goals to take back the country and two long-term fights that must be waged for the sake of our democracy and the planet. This fifth entry speaks to the now back-burnered but ever-present threat to life on this planet. Climate change.

Chapter One: Diet, Exercise and Nuclear Power

I was late to the climate change discussion. And I’ve been having it since 2005, a year before Al Gore’s groundbreaking and polarizing pseudo-documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I say pseudo because even then it felt as self serving as it was revelatory. As a practical matter, we’re all late to the conversation because a scientist named Eunice Foote discovered the heat trapping effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 1856.’

My introduction to it was in a book by an acerbic critic of fossil fuels and suburban sprawl named James Howard Kunstler. The book is called The Long Emergency: Surviving the end of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Between his caustic grumpy uncle prose and vituperative attitude toward the rapacious behavior of oil and gas companies, I was instantly hooked. I credit his work and this book specifically for my now two-decade fascination with crude oil and the fossil fuel economy.

Sadly, over the years Kunstler attended the same fuckwit ashram at Matt Taibbi and has gone full MAGA grift. I swear there was something in the water at Rolling Stone that poisoned these fucking dickwads. Probably leftover shit in the pipes that turned Hunter Thompson’s brain into a pile of misogynistic and racist mush. I digress.

Nevertheless, Kunstler was my gateway. He was less scientific about climate change than current authors are, as much of the science had yet to become public knowledge. And he was far more focused on the notion that we were running out of cheap oil than he was on the effects of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The book is more social science than hard science in this regard. Like famed geologist M. King Hubbert before him, Kunstler underestimated the desire and ability of energy companies to locate fossil fuels and disturb the Earth to get them. We have many more decades than Hubbert and Kunstler presumed to fuel our unyielding appetite for fossil fuel-led growth.

What Kunstler was able to see clearly, however, was the impact that our quest for oil would have on the planet, even with limited exposure to the hard science and metrics we have now 20 years on.

“We surely will have to reform our land-use habits and the oil-based transportation system that has allowed us to run our car-crazy suburbana environments. We’ll have to drastically change the way we grow our food and where we grow it. Social organization may be quite different in the decades ahead. Features of contemporary life that we have taken for granted, such as commercial aviation and canned entertainments, may fade into history. Politics that evolved to suit the fossil fuel fiesta, both on the right and the left, may morph beyond recognition around new forms, patterns, and values. But if we want the enterprise of civilization to continue as a general proposition, we’ll have to keep the lights on, and the only way to do that by the mid-twenty-first century will be by using nuclear reactors to generate electricity.”

Many in the scientific and environmental community have come around to this view. Perhaps the most prominent voice being Michael Shellenberger, himself a polarizing figure for doing an about face on renewable energy as a highly regarded climate activist to become the face of nuclear energy in the country.

But energy production is just a sliver of the climate conversation. There are a million tributaries that stem from this discussion. To be clear, I’m not advocating for a pivot to nuclear energy; nor am I promoting wind, solar, seaweed, green roofs, carbon capture, afforestation, LED lights, regenerative fishing, electric cars, mass transit, protein substitutes, vertical farming, tidal energy, sustainable jet fuel, biodiversity over monoculture, bitcoin mining bans, desalinization, decoupling, degrowth or decarbonization of any kind. I mean, I am because they’re all necessary, but I’m not because we are who we are.

I’m not advocating for them in the same way I’m not promoting exercise, a clean diet and eight hours of sleep. I stopped exercising a year ago, eat like shit and haven’t slept eight straight hours without weed or bourbon since I had kids. I’m killing myself with eyes wide open so who the fuck am I to preach about how to save the planet?

So we’re just giving up? What’s happening here?

In certain ways, yes. We know how to have a healthy planet just like we all know healthy food, plenty of sleep and exercise are good for you. But if you’re not in a mental, emotional and physical state to make these things happen, it doesn’t matter. I’m paying more today for less tomorrow. We all are. So this is less of a story about today and more about tomorrow.

Chapter Two: The Social Cost of Carbon

In his 2025 book Climate Justice, Cass Sunstein talks about this phenomenon in great detail. As a former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the now Harvard professor was on the interagency task force under Obama charged with identifying the social costs of carbon (SCC).

Is it priced in terms of domestic impact or globally? Who’s responsible for paying whom? What are we even paying for?

Sunstein’s group included members from the following agencies:

• Council of Economic Advisors
• Council on Environmental Quality
• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Commerce
• Department of Energy
• Department of Transportation
• Environmental Protection Agency
• National Economic Council
• Office of Energy and Climate Change.
• Office of Management and Budget
• Office of Science and Technology Policy
• Department of the Treasury

Everyone it seems, but the Department of Defense. It was a pretty big deal. Just not big enough to include the one department that was way ahead of all the others in terms of modeling climate change and certainly a big part of the problem. But more on that later.

Here’s how they went about it.

“It is customary to divide climate policy into three categories: mitigation, adaptation, and resilience…Mitigation refers to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The difference between adaptation and resilience is less simple. Resilience is sometimes taken to refer to the capacity to absorb and respond to the effects of potentially hazardous events. Adaptation is sometimes taken to refer to adjustments to expected effects or risks, so that harms are moderated.”

Under Obama, the group did in fact put a price on carbon, based on elements of four arguments: epistemic, interconnectedness, moral cosmopolitan and reciprocity. If you want to know more about them, read the book. Otherwise, just know they put a lot of thought into it.

Determining who to pay out, what projects to support and who else would come along with us was all being considered under the working group after they determined the SCC. But the question of American consumer behavior remained a sticking point. Our consumption is, after all, the driver of the global economy. All social experiments to shift behavior such as labels that clearly stated, “if you pay X more today for this efficient thing you’ll save Y over the next ten years,” were pretty unsuccessful as you might imagine; basically for the same reasons I eat like shit, don’t sleep enough and stopped exercising.

This life, this economy, the stress and anxiety that accompanies it all and the self indulgent goals we’re supposed to have…it leads to something called “present bias.” Also referred to by the working group and other social sciences as “myopic loss aversion.” Sunstein goes into detail about trying to model our behaviors through incentives and information; something called “choice engines.” Basically, “here are your options. We trust you’ll make the right choice.” The less choice, the more paternalistic the engine and the more resistance from people and politicians that value liberty over life.

(Sounds a lot like the gun control debate.)

The problem with these choice engines and our attitude toward them is that our consumption produces externalities—costs imposed on others outside of our decisions. So our addiction to fossil fuels, to growth at any cost, to drive more, fly more, eat more, work more; more, more, more…has affected places that experience none of this because we only get one planet to fuck with.

By the time Gore’s film was released, the language of environmentalism was already beginning to move away from global warming to climate change, and the effort to discredit the science behind it had begun a few decades prior. As this is our fifth and final entry in our Five Non-Negotiables of the Left series, I’m going to dispense with the buildup and give you the last line of the story first.

We’re fucked.

Chapter Three: Settling into Reality

The toothpaste is out of the tube. The tube itself is sitting in a landfill somewhere and the toothpaste was spit down the drain long ago. To show you how dramatically the interpretation of our situation has shifted in just under 20 years, here are three quick passages from highly respected authors representing the past, present and future of how the United States views climate change.

The first is from Lester Brown’s landmark book Plan B 3.0 published in 2008.

“Participating in the construction of this enduring new economy is exhilarating. So is the quality of life it will bring. We will be able to breathe clean air. Our cities will be less congested, less noisy, less polluted, and more civilized. A world where population has stabilized, forests are expanding, and carbon emissions are falling is within our grasp.”

The next is from Cass Sunstein’s Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World—and the Future.

“Wildfire, drought, extreme heat, and flooding are very much with us, and bound to get worse. Adaptation is receiving increasing attention, and rightly so.”

And the future vision as seen by author Tad Delay in his book Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change.

“Capital trudges along and charts new ways to reap profit from fires and wars even as economies plummet into never-ending crises. Nationalists respond with growing demands for trade tariffs. Louder still are their roars for blood. Economic growth stalls out below 1 percent, and hopes of lessening inequality disappear. The start of the permanent depression, the normal and the frightening kinds. The oligarchs close ranks and retreat to bunkers or walled cities. New fiefdoms. Amusement parks for their rotting souls”

The optimism brimming in Brown’s book is palpable and real. It was the third update from the original (penned in 2003) and while well-intentioned, it relies on the myth of free market interventions to self-correct. The solutions offered at the time seem quaint in retrospect; caught in a capitalist fever dream of sorts at a time when Flo Rida and T-Pain’s “Low” was topping the charts, Barack Obama just entered the presidential race and Brangelina was a thing. And then Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the stock market collapsed. Big thinking on climate and investments into a Lester Brown-style future would have to wait.

Obama wasn’t about to blow his political capital on a green economy initiative at a time when Americans were losing their homes and 401(k)s. But his administration wasn’t about to ignore it either. So it went into full policy and bureaucrat mode to build the aforementioned working groups. If nothing else, we were going to have a framework for how to think about developing a plan that someday would be implemented. All of this is laid out in Sunstein’s first-hand account of developing a basic formula for the Social Cost of Carbon. Eight years of the Obama administration to develop a framework to calculate the dollar value of carbon.

Now think back to Lester Brown’s words around the same time: “Participating in the construction of this enduring new economy is exhilarating.”

That’s the hangover of the New Democrat thinking right there. The market got us into this, it’ll get us out. All we have to do is figure out what the price of carbon is. Put a dollar amount to it. We joined the Paris Climate Agreement and told the world about our fancy new formula. Created executive orders, agencies and working groups. Attempted to financialize our way out of this mess somehow. And after eight years, progress was made. In fact, Obama bragged that under his stewardship the economy and carbon emissions had “decoupled.” GDP grew faster than carbon emissions.

But as our buddy Tad Delay points out, “a full third of US emissions decline is due to switching electricity from coal to natural gas. Obama was bragging about alternating from one fossil fuel to another.”

Of course, we were also struggling to recover from the financial crisis during this period so your starting point to measure growth matters. Not much else fundamentally changed so when growth resumed so did emissions. Oh, and something else happened at the end of Obama’s term: The Democrats didn’t get re-elected.

Every working group was dismantled. Every executive order—dumped in the trash can. The pandemic slowed Trump’s roll but pretty much all that hard work determining the social cost of carbon went out the window. But honestly, did it matter?

When Biden came into office, they reinvigorated several of the committees and formulas. We rejoined the Paris Agreement. We allocated trillions of dollars to repair our crumbling infrastructure. Sure, the vast majority of programs contemplated under the Green New Deal were left on the cutting room floor. Schumer and Pelosi promised the Progressive Caucus that they would revisit them aaaaannnnny minute.

Still waiting on that one.

So what if Biden opened up drilling leases to increase fossil fuel production to the highest levels ever achieved by a country? We put a dollar value on carbon.

Trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending, more oil and gas than we know what to do with and so much money going to charging stations…for Teslas. (How did that work out?) Oh, and tax credits. So many tax credits and options to monetize tax credits through direct pay provisions. So basically, organizations could:

“Elect to treat these tax credits as refundable payments of tax. Such entities are eligible to receive a direct payment from the IRS for any amount paid in excess of their tax liability for credits. The Inflation Reduction Act also allows eligible taxpayers that are not tax-exempt entities to transfer all or a portion of certain tax credits, including the ITC and PTC, to an unrelated party.”

That’s a direct quote from the EPA. Try translating that to the public. Yeah. We’re all going to fucking burn.

The Democrats, bless their hearts. So wonky. So well intentioned. Obsessed with the neoliberal, New Democrat, financialization of salvation policies. Outside of the fact that none of these policies work to actually reduce carbon emissions or mitigate the effects of climate change, there was a fatal flaw in the overall design. One they couldn’t possibly have seen coming. Because the big stuff like tax credits were all baked into omnibus spending bills and not really legislated…and because the task forces and working groups were discretionary…and because executive orders governed most of the policies anyway…they left our climate initiatives exposed to unforeseen threats like losing an election to Donald Trump, something that had never happ—oh, wait. This was the second time. That’s right.

And so now, here we are again. In a matter of weeks, it’s all been undone and then some.

Chapter Four: We’ve Known It All Along

Here’s the thing.

In 1856, Eunice Foote wrote, “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” describing the phenomenon we now call the greenhouse effect, the main cause of climate change in a paper, titled “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.”

In 1863, John Tyndall followed up on Foote’s findings and published Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion based on 12 lectures revealing findings from his experiments that showed that molecules of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone are the best absorbers of heat radiation, and that even in small quantities, these gases absorb much more strongly than the atmosphere itself.

In 1865, William Stanley Jevons wrote about the folly of efficiency saying, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” This became known as the Jevons Paradox, essentially stating that advances in fuel efficiency would lead to more consumption, not less.

If you’re not into Civil War era science that proved theories and models still in use today regarding climate change, maybe the turn of the Century will persuade you.

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius calculated how variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations could influence Earth’s surface temperature.

Still not convinced? Let’s take a huge leap forward. Here’s an excerpt from Future of Denial. In 1978:

“Exxon scientists discuss the greenhouse effect and predict the collapse of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. Internal reports soon speak of widespread disaster, including a multimeter sea level rise and the flooding of Florida and Washington, DC. an alerted public might force them to strand assets and shutter operations. Exxon launches a misinformation campaign nearly a decade before the public learns the term ‘global warming.’”

In 1990, a report issued by the Naval War College, predicted that, “nearly every aspect of the world’s political, cultural and economic interests will be affected. Basic human needs, such as water supply and quality, food production, and health conditions, are threatened within the developing nations…In some low lying coastal nations, large segments of populations may become environmental refugees, stressing neighboring nations’ resources and good will by their forced migration to safer ground.”

In 2007, the Pentagon published “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” under Bush. In it they asserted, the coming decades would include extreme weather events, drought, flooding, sea level rise, retreating glaciers, habitat shifts, and the increased spread of life-threatening diseases.

In 2008, The CIA released a report titled “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030” in which they predicted, “intra and interstate conflict particularly over access to increasingly scarce water resources.”

In 2014, The Department of Defense under Obama authored the Department of Defense 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, stating, “Climate Change will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the Nation and poses immediate risks to U.S. national security.” Even the Trump administration DOD released updated versions of prior reports, though it was forced to exclude direct references to human impact on climate.

The military’s interpretation of climate change is as cold and clinical as one might expect. One concept they regularly explore when modeling scenarios for the future is something called a threat multiplier. It’s never a singular event that spooks them. It’s a confluence. For example, the nexus of food-water scarcity will cause an increase in food prices in an already high demand environment to feed an ever-growing global population.

Add existing poverty, unstable government systems and extreme weather events that disrupt global supply chains and wreak havoc on infrastructure and it totals mass migration, uprisings and violence.

So we know how we got here and, if we’re to believe climate scientists, researchers, private industry and the U.S. military, we know how this ends.

This is the part where I would typically tie in some of our previous findings and relate them to our other Non-Negotiables. Perhaps I would give you a pep talk about how we eliminated chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and then hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) from the atmosphere because we trusted the scientists who told us that the release of these elements were blowing a hole in the ozone layer; literally the thing that kept my generation up at night along with nuclear war with Russia and quicksand. And how scientists discovered in 2017 that the ozone was beginning to repair itself and the hole was shrinking, because we adhered to something called the Montreal Protocol and kept our promises. Industry, government, citizens and the scientific community all working together, across the Carter and Reagan administrations to solve an existential crisis facing humanity.

Or I’d tell you how the Rodale Trials, which began in earnest in 1981, produced the longest side-by-side comparisons of organic and conventional grain cropping systems in North America and found that, “organic farms are competitive with conventional yields after a 5-year transition period and produce yields up to 40% higher in times of drought. Farmers earn 3-6X greater profits. Organic farms leach no toxic chemicals into the waterways, use 45% less energy and release 40% fewer carbon emissions.”

I would tie this into our civilian labor corps Non-Negotiable because making this information actionable would mean that we need more farmers. And how we’d have to train them because we would need to limit acreage dedicated to monoculture crops to generate more biodiversity.

Our emphasis on monoculture has led to extreme overuse of both freshwater and soil, both of which need to regenerate. This goes for the oceans as well. And both land and sea have been polluted by the industrial chemical applications required to maintain these massive monocultures that it’s beginning to affect yields and quality. So microbes and insects necessary for healthy soil are dying on land and critical breeding systems are rotting in the ocean. The need for more organic, biodiverse farming and fishing practices means more jobs. It’s the perfect alignment.

Or how about this big hairy audacious idea from author of The Economics of Sustainable Food, Nicoletta Batini: “If less than 10 percent of the oceans were to be covered in seaweed farms, the farmed seaweed could produce enough biofuel to replace all of today’s fossil fuel use while removing 53 billion tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere, restoring pre-industrial levels.” This is because seaweed is capable of trapping and storing five times the amount of carbon dioxide as trees.

These are big ideas that have real promise. Now imagine realigning our economy to promote the things we mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Imagine a global initiative to generate seaweed beds in the ocean. To commit ourselves to wind, solar, hydroelectric and nuclear power. Green roofs and electrified mass transit in our urban areas. Protein substitutes, vertical farming, tidal energy, sustainable jet fuel, biodiversity over monoculture, bitcoin mining bans, desalinization, decoupling, degrowth or decarbonization of any kind.

We have so many answers to get to a net zero emission future. And according to the science, if it all happened tomorrow, then in 50 years we could bring the Earth’s temperature back into the current equilibrium. If we did all of it. Tomorrow. You see, carbon is cumulative and what was set in motion 50 years ago is what we’re living with today. That’s how this works.

35 years ago, the Pentagon already knew what was going to happen.

50 years ago, Exxon Mobil knew.

130 years ago Svante Arrhenius knew.

170 years ago Eunice Foote knew.

The science was there all along.

It’s religion that has been holding us back this whole time. The doctrine of capitalism and consumption. The doctrine of more.

Non-Negotiable #5: The Climate Trust

The only way to fix things going forward is to go backwards. Economic degrowth and population control. So here’s what I propose.

Nothing. Not for us at least.

What I propose for our fifth Non-Negotiable is a new trust: The Climate Trust.

In conjunction with lifting the cap on social security deductions to ensure the solvency and fairness of the Social Security trust in perpetuity, I submit that every Social Security tax dollar collected on earnings of $400,000 per individual or household per year transfers to a Climate Trust.

Here’s some basic math.

Individuals or households that earn over this amount make up about 2–3% of income earners, but represent 15–20% of all income. Translating this into dollars, if total personal income in the United States was around $22 trillion in 2023 then the top 2–3% of income earners took in around $4 trillion. A 6% tax on these earnings would net the Trust around $240 billion a year.

Then, we lock it up to earn interest for 15 years. Can’t touch a penny of it until 2040, the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) experts believe we will reach 1.5°C, above preindustrial temperatures. The so-called point of no return. If all the scientists are right and we’ve properly fucked the planet, then future policy makers will have the ability to break the trust and pay for the damage. 78% for ourselves and 22% for climate refugees from other parts of the globe. That’s the figure believed to represent our cumulative contribution to carbon from 1850–2021. 22% of all emissions, despite having 5% of the population because we’re the best.

Why lock it up? Because we can’t be trusted. We blew it. We were shitty parents who worked their whole lives to hoard money while ignoring their family. So I suggest we leave it to our kids and grandkids, like the robber baron who dies miserable and alone, having alienated everyone who ever loved them, leaving their probate attorney to distribute the funds with an apology note. An unrestricted, untaxed distribution to the world. Republicans love that shit. Those are terms they’ll understand.

If we’re lucky enough to turn back the tide of fascism and regain control of the country by focusing on our first three Non-Negotiables of the Left, then we still have time to implement some or all of the policies and actions mentioned above to mitigate the harmful effects of climate change—but with the knowledge that none of us will likely be here to see it, because that’s just how science works. And we’ll only get there if we achieve the fourth Non-Negotiable of getting money out of politics, which we demonstrated will take 20 years in and of itself. A lot has to go right in this equation, but it’s worth fighting for the lives of our children and grandchildren if we’re to believe in anything.

The Climate Trust is an admission that we failed but that we believe in future generations. At this point, it’s literally the best we can do.

Here endeth the lesson.