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A conversation with Danielle Arigoni, author of the new book Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation
When we talk about climate solutions, we often hear the word resilience. It’s the catch-all term for all the things we’re doing to prepare for the impacts of climate change — things like building seawalls and hardening homes and switching to renewable energy sources. But planning for the future is a tricky thing, and, argues Danielle Arigoni, author of the new bookClimate Resilience for an Aging Nation (Island Press), there’s one section of American society that is left out of resilience as we think of it today: older adults.
Arigoni spent much of her career working as an urban planner for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but it was only once she started working at the AARP that she came to see how aging populations were often left out of urban design considerations. Now the managing director for policy and solutions at National Housing Trust, Arigoni spends her time working on climate-friendly affordable housing solutions.
Resilience, she writes in her book, is not just a matter of hardening physical infrastructure to keep the natural world out, but should incorporate the social connections that shape our days. As the country’s population ages, designing climate solutions that take older adults into account will be crucial not only for saving the lives of older adults, but for creating a more just future for everyone.
I spoke with Arigoni about her research, and what a more aging-friendly form of resiliency looks like. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How does climate change affect older populations in particular?
I mean, in a lot of ways. Certainly in disasters, we see that for a whole bunch of reasons, whether it’s mobility, or frailty, or cognitive decline, older adults are not able to respond in the same ways that younger people do. I think that’s partly a failure of emergency management to anticipate those conditions.
But even outside of disasters, we see that older adults oftentimes are living from a precarious financial standpoint. Fifteen percent of older adults live at or below the poverty line, which means they just do not have any available funds to decamp for a few days to safer ground or to weatherize their home or to stockpile resources.
And all of those things compile to a set of circumstances where older adults are either living in homes that they can’t afford to heat and cool in response to changing conditions, or they’re living in places where their homes are deteriorating because of climate impacts and they’re unable to fix them, which then sets off a kind of snowball effect of health problems as well. Something like 80% of all people over 65 have two or more chronic conditions, and when that gets layered on top of extreme heat and wildfire smoke and indoor mold and all of these other things, that multiplies the effects.
Does heat affect older adults in a different way from the larger population?
Heat is the deadliest extreme weather phenomenon in our country, and 80% of the casualties are older adults. And that is for a lot of reasons. To begin, older adults can’t process heat in the way that young bodies can; our ability to sweat changes as we age. So that’s part of it.
But heat also complicates and sits on top of underlying medical conditions and prescriptions. So there might be symptoms of heat illness that get masked because they resemble the effects of things like heart disease, or COPD, or respiratory challenges, or the effect of the medication, so it goes untreated.
And then when you layer on top of that the number of older adults who live alone, who may not even have someone to recognize that they’re starting to be disoriented and lose their balance, or that they are sitting in a house that’s 80 degrees when it really needs to be set at 72 because that person is too afraid of what their utility bills are going to cost that month.
All those factors compile and really just accelerate the risk for older adults in extreme heat. Extreme heat also isolates people further; they can’t go and knock on a neighbor’s door to ask for help if it’s 110 degrees out.
In your book you pointed out that there’s a link between where older adults live and climate risk.
Yeah, something like 50% of the older adults in the country live in about nine states. And those nine states are, for the most part, the states where climate risks are the greatest. So it’s places like California, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona, the last of which just saw six straight weeks of 100 degree temperatures this summer. And yet Phoenix is one of the fastest growing areas for older adults. So you have to, at some point, stop and kind of scratch your head and wonder how we can better inform people so that they aren’t moving into areas where they are taking on greater risk.
Phoenix, to its credit, has already said they’re stopping new development because they’re running out of water. That was a recognition of the intersection between resources and habitability and development patterns. I don’t think we’ve necessarily done that, for the most part, in many communities. I think that’s a decision no local official wants to make. They don’t want to say they’re anti-growth.
There’s an interesting political conundrum here. Some of these places, like Florida and Texas and Louisiana, are places with legislatures that aren’t, shall we say, very climate-forward. And these older adults you’re concerned about might not care much for it either. So how do you navigate that?
It has to be education, right? There’s something in the lived experience of seeing that hurricane season is becoming longer and more frequent. That is testing even the presumptions of people who’ve been in Florida for a long time thinking they can live through it. When you’re experiencing more and more disasters to the point that it’s truly interfering with your well-being or maybe your financial viability —, like if all of your money is tied up in your home and your home is now in a floodplain, for example —, it prompts some very real and very timely conversations about what to do. So it’s just a matter of time before the real cost of being in some of these places becomes hard to ignore.
There’s a section in your book titled “Climate Planning and Disaster Resilience Tools Generally Fail The Age-Friendly Test.” What does resilience look like today, and how is it falling short for the elderly?
I think one arm of resiliency is the energy efficiency and carbon reduction set of activities, which is where we’re striving to reduce our carbon emissions. And we’re going to put in place a whole bunch of policies and programs to drive down the cost of that initiative. Another pillar is in hazard mitigation planning. FEMA unlocks a lot of hazard mitigation dollars for states and communities that have completed a plan before disaster strikes.
So those are kind of two disparate pillars: One is climate mitigation, and the other is risk mitigation. Neither of those think about age in a concerted way right now. In the requirements that FEMA just updated for state hazard mitigation plans that had been in place for like nine years, there’s one mention of considering demographic change when you’re writing your plan, but they don’t say you should project who your population is and what their needs are.
I think it’s a real missed opportunity, because those mitigation plans set the course for all the FEMA funds that follow. Oftentimes they become a vessel which other public resources are poured into as well. If you’re not identifying the needs of older adults right at the outset, you’re really missing that nuance in terms of what risk mitigation looks like for them.
Similarly, on the climate mitigation side, there’s a whole set of activities around, for example, making New York state a great place to age, but they don’t tie into the climate plan that New York state has put in place. Wouldn’t it make sense if we focus those investments in bringing utility costs down, in incorporating renewable energy and making energy efficiency investments, in those same places where we know older adults are already paying too much for their housing and are unable to afford to keep their utilities running or upgrade their homes? That would reduce their risk too.
I’m curious about the shortfalls of the solutions that we do build. I think a lot about how in places that are hurricane-prone, for example, you see a lot of houses on stilts. And I’m wondering if there’s just a simple mobility problem here.
I think that there’s sometimes a failure to acknowledge mobility challenges, certainly with elevating homes, but also just in terms of accessing transportation options, and relocation or evacuation options. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t accessible elevated homes, I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t seen any with my own two eyes. But I don’t necessarily know that that’s a really thoughtful solution. Even when we think about cooling centers that are being established for heat waves, it’s great that those exist, but I’m not sure that planners are always thinking about how people are getting to them. Those kinds of breakdowns that are part of the problem.
The harder conversation, frankly, is how do we relocate people out of harm’s way when elevating maybe is not going to be a very sustainable solution? Relocating is such a thorny topic, I think particularly so for older adults who may have lived their entire lives in one location. The notion of moving and being displaced because of climate change is a very, very difficult kind of identity crisis. It’s a pretty philosophical challenge, in addition to all the logistical challenges of moving your home, your community, and your livelihood.
What does climate resilience geared towards older populations look like? It sounds like you’re advocating for essentially an overhaul of a lot of things, because there are all these interconnected systems.
Yeah, it’s not a simple solution. When I think about what a climate-resilient community looks like, it certainly includes all the hard infrastructure that you would want — sea walls or levees, the sort of infrastructure that we think could mitigate risk. But it would also include a lot more thoughtfulness about how we’re designing our communities to live in every day. So thinking about different ways of designing housing, for example: how do we create communities where there’s more housing choice, so people can live in smaller units that will consume less energy and encourage more organic interaction than you see in suburbs? Hopefully they’ll be fueled by renewable energy as well so you’re eliminating that utility cost burden that is really problematic for low-income older adults.
There’s also making sure we have a robust transportation system so that you have not just a public transit system that works and gets people where they need to go every day of the year, but is also designed in ways that allow people to still use it when it’s hot. That means shade and seating, maybe even cooling factors at bus stops. Because otherwise, this transit system will not serve people if it is too hot outside. So you really have to think holistically about all of the elements that it takes to make a more climate resilient place.
I would also say communication and social connectedness is a huge part of it too. A good number of older adults do not have in-home internet or smartphones, so they don’t access the internet on a daily basis. So if you’re relying upon these systems to notify people or to get them to sign up for things that are going to reduce their risks, then you’re probably missing a whole bunch of people. So how do you cultivate a multi-pronged approach where you’re using all the levers you have available to you, including people like home health aides, or service organizations like Meals on Wheels, to get information to people in ways that they can access and utilize it?
Your point about home health aides reminds me that you drew a connection between climate and COVID-19 in your book. What lessons can we learn from the pandemic that can be applied to climate change?
Tragically, what we learned is that older adults are viewed as expendable. I think we somehow accepted the fact that a wildly disproportionate number of people who die from COVID-19 were older adults. It didn’t cause the kind of outrage that I think it should have. And I think some of that same thing is happening here with climate-fueled disasters.
COVID taught us the importance of getting information and support to people in their homes. I think there’s this presumption that when we plan for nursing homes we’ve checked the box, we’ve covered older adults’ needs. But that’s only true for a very small number of older adults — the vast majority live in their homes, often alone, particularly older women. And so how do you get services and information to folks in their home in ways that understand and appreciate their mobility challenges?
It’s interesting that so much of what you’re talking about is communication. I feel like when people hear the word resilience, they think of these big plans to transform the built environment.
I think communication is a huge part of why we’re here. And by that I mean the inability of these different siloed technical fields to communicate with one another. Emergency management and hazard mitigation people use a very different language than aging advocates do, who use a very different language than sustainability advocates do. They speak different languages, and they report in different structures, and they’re funded by different agencies. And never the twain shall meet. There are not a lot of opportunities where those things come together like they should.
My hope is that by communicating more effectively with aging advocates in terms that they understand, using programs that they are responsible for administering, they then see climate change as part of their mission. It needs to be the same way when talking to emergency managers about hazard mitigation plans: We can begin to unpack the unique needs of older adults that might be falling through the cracks in terms of their existing planning efforts. We really need to create this middle ground of understanding.
Do you have a favorite solution? Or maybe a favorite place that has implemented these solutions well?
The one that comes to mind — and I’m a little biased because I went to school there — is Portland, Oregon.
During COVID, they developed a framework to get supplies into the homes of an array of people in the city, to ensure they had what they needed, whether it’s food or diapers or adult incontinence supplies. These are things that were really important to get to people. Then they layered that with really effective community-based organizations that could reach committees that were hard to reach. So they had a Latino group reaching Spanish speakers, they had an Asian American group reaching Asian immigrants, and so on.
After the pandemic, Portland was able to use their relationships with those groups during two summers in which terrible heat waves hit the region. They quickly deployed those same organizations to get portable heat pumps into people’s homes, and they prioritized low-income older adults. They were able to do that because they’d already cultivated that tradition of serving people in that community through trusted organizations. And I can’t help but think that it saved lives.
What do you think the federal government should be doing differently around climate resiliency and aging? Are there particular policies you’d like to see that target aging populations?
I think it needs to happen at all levels, from the local to the regional and state levels. And that can be accelerated by work at the federal level. So for example they could require that hazard mitigation plans, and applications for HUD programs, or BRIC, which is a FEMA program, have to include an analysis of demographic change, and what that means for people over 65.
That’s a step forward, because then you’ve got state planners and local leaders thinking about what their aging population needs, because the share of older adults is only going to grow, it’s not going to diminish.
Similarly, the Older Americans Act is going to be reauthorized soon, and that funds all kinds of agency work that supports home and community-based services so that people can age in place. There’s a real need there to acknowledge the fact that climate change is going to interfere with some people’s ability to do that. And that might mean that they need more utility assistance, because now they have to run the air conditioner longer or put the heater on more frequently. Or it might mean that they need different kinds of supports, like making sure these folks can evacuate during a flood.
Is there something you found in your research that people seem to constantly get wrong?
There’s a general impression that older adults are living their best lives, they’ve got their retirement savings and are going on cruises and playing golf. But it’s just not the case for so many older adults. Something like half of all people who are unhoused right now are single people over 50. There’s a whole set of upstream financial challenges many older adults face, including paying way too much of their income for housing because rents have skyrocketed and they often have fixed incomes. Not to mention all the other expenses that go along with getting older, such as prescriptions. So climate Is a risk magnifier financially as well.
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Current conditions: Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo is blanketed in a layer of toxic smog • Temperatures in Perth, in Western Australia, could hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It is cloudy in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are scrambling to prevent a government shutdown.
The weather has gotten so weird that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding internal talks about how to adjust its models to produce more accurate forecasts, the Financial Timesreported. Current models are based on temperature swings observed over one part of the Pacific Ocean that have for years correlated consistently with specific weather phenomena across the globe, but climate change seems to be disrupting that cause and effect pattern, making it harder to predict things like La Niña and El Niño. Many forecasters had expected La Niña to appear by now and help cool things down, but that has yet to happen. “It’s concerning when this region we’ve studied and written all these papers on is not related to all the impacts you’d see with [La Niña],” NOAA’s Michelle L’Heureux told the FT. “That’s when you start going ‘uh-oh’ there may be an issue here we need to resolve.”
There is quite a lot of news coming out of the Department of Energy as the year (and the Biden administration) comes to an end. A few recent updates:
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, does not expect to meet its 2025 or 2030 emissions targets, and is putting the blame on policy, infrastructure, and technology limitations. The company previously pledged to cut its emissions by 35% by next year, and 65% by the end of the decade. Emissions in 2023 were up 4% year-over-year.
Walmart
“While we continue to work toward our aspirational target of zero operational emissions by 2040, progress will not be linear … and depends not only on our own initiatives but also on factors beyond our control,” Walmart’s statement said. “These factors include energy policy and infrastructure in Walmart markets around the world, availability of more cost-effective low-GWP refrigeration and HVAC solutions, and timely emergence of cost-effective technologies for low-carbon heavy tractor transportation (which does not appear likely until the 2030s).”
BlackRock yesterday said it is writing down the value of its Global Renewable Power Fund III following the failure of Northvolt and SolarZero, two companies the fund had invested in. Its net internal rate of return was -0.3% at the end of the third quarter, way down from 11.5% in the second quarter, according toBloomberg. Sectors like EV charging, transmission, and renewable energy generation and storage have been “particularly challenged,” executives said, and some other renewables companies in the portfolio have yet to get in the black, meaning their valuations may be “more subjective and sensitive to evolving dynamics in the industry.”
Flies may be more vulnerable to climate change than bees are, according to a new study published in the Journal of Melittology. The fly haters among us might shrug at the finding, but the researchers insist flies are essential pollinators that help bolster ecosystem biodiversity and agriculture. “It’s time we gave flies some more recognition for their role as pollinators,” said lead author Margarita López-Uribe, who is the Lorenzo Langstroth Early Career Associate Professor of Entomology at Penn State. The study found bees can tolerate higher temperatures than flies, so flies are at greater risk of decline as global temperatures rise. “In alpine and subarctic environments, flies are the primary pollinator,” López-Uribe said. “This study shows us that we have entire regions that could lose their primary pollinator as the climate warms, which could be catastrophic for those ecosystems.”
“No one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded.” –Heatmap’s Jeva Lange writes about the challenges facing climate cinema, and why 2024 might be the year the climate movie grew up.
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.
Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”
I have a slightly different take on the situation, though — that 2024 was actuallyfull of climate movies, and, I’d argue, that they’re getting much closer to the kinds of stories a climate-concerned individual should want on screen.
That’s because for the most part, when movies and TV shows have tackled the topic of climate change in the past, it’s been with the sort of “simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing” that The New Yorker’s Richard Brody identified in 2022’s Don’t Look Up, the Adam McKay satire that became the primary touchpoint for scripted climate stories. At least it was kind of funny: More overt climate stories like last year’s Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ show in which Meryl Streep voices a whale, are so self-righteous as to be unwatchable (not to mention, no fun).
But what if we widened our lens and weren’t so prescriptive? Then maybe Furiosa, this spring’s Mad Max prequel, becomes a climate change movie. The film is set during a “near future” ecological collapse, and it certainly makes you think about water scarcity and our overreliance on a finite extracted resource — but it also makes you think about how badass the Octoboss’ kite is. The same goes for Dune: Part Two, which made over $82 million in its opening weekend and is also a recognizable environmental allegory featuring some cool worms. Even Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a flop that most people have already memory-holed, revisitedThe Day After Tomorrow’s question of, “What if New York City got really, really, really cold?”
Two 2024 animated films with climate themes could even compete against each other at the Academy Awards next year. Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, one of the centerpiece films at this fall’s inaugural Climate Film Festival, is set in a world where sea levels have risen to submerge the Golden Gate Bridge, and it impresses on its audience the importance of protecting the natural world. And in Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, one of my favorite films of the year, a cat must band together with other animals to survive a flood.
Flow also raises the question of whether a project can unintentionally be a climate movie. Zilbalodis told me that making a point about environmental catastrophe wasn’t his intention — “I can’t really start with the message, I have to start with the character,” he said — and to him, the water is a visual metaphor in an allegory about overcoming your fears.
But watching the movie in a year when more than a thousand people worldwide have died in floods, and with images of inundated towns in North Carolina still fresh in mind, it’s actually climate change itself that makes one watch Flow as a movie about climate change. (I’m not the only one with this interpretation, either: Zilbalodis told me he’d been asked by one young audience member if the flood depicted in his film is “the future.”)
Perhaps this is how we should also consider Chung’s comments about Twisters. While nobody in the film says the words “climate change” or “global warming,” the characters note that storms are becoming exceptional — “we've never seen tornadoes like this before,” one says. Despite the director’s stated intention not to make the movie “about” climate change, it becomes a climate movie by virtue of what its audiences have experienced in their own lives.
Still, there’s that niggling question: Do movies like these, which approach climate themes slant-wise, really count? To help me decide, I turned to Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that encourages environmental awareness both on set and on screen. He told me that to qualify something as a “climate” movie or TV show, some research groups look to see if climate change exists in the world of the story or whether the characters acknowledge it. Other groups consider climate in tiers, such as whether a project has a climate premise, theme, or simply a moment.
The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, however, has no hard rules. “We want to make sure that we support creatives in integrating these stories in whatever way works for them,” Read told me.
Read also confirmed my belief that there seemed to be an uptick in movies this year that were “not about climate change but still deal with things that feel very climate-related, like resource extraction.” There was even more progress on this front in television, he pointed out: True Detective: Night Country wove in themes of environmentalism, pollution, mining, and Indigenous stewardship; the Max comedy Hacks featured an episode about climate change this season; and Industry involved a storyline about taking a clean energy company public, with some of the characters even attending COP. Even Doctor Odyssey, a cruise ship medical drama that airs on USA, worked climate change into its script, albeit in ridiculous ways. (Also worth mentioning: The Netflix dating show Love is Blind cast Taylor Krause, who works on decarbonizing heavy industry at RMI.)
We can certainly do more. As many critics before me have written, it’s still important to draw a connection between things like environmental catastrophes and the real-world human causes of global warming. But the difference between something being “a climate movie” and propaganda — however true its message, or however well-intentioned — is thin. Besides, no one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded; we want to be moved and distracted and entertained.
I’ve done my fair share of complaining over the past few years about how climate storytelling needs to grow up. But lately I’ve been coming around to the idea that it’s not the words “climate change” appearing in a script that we need to be so focused on. As 2024’s slate of films has proven to me — or, perhaps, as this year’s extreme weather events have thrown into relief — there are climate movies everywhere.
Keep ‘em coming.
They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.
Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress.
It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.
When those talks died, they also killed a separate deal over permitting struck earlier this year between Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. That deal, as I detailed last week, would have loosened some federal rules around oil and gas drilling in exchange for a new, quasi-mandatory scheme to build huge amounts of long-distance transmission.
Rest in peace, I suppose. Even if lawmakers could not agree on NEPA changes, I think Republicans made a mistake by not moving forward with the Manchin-Barrasso deal. (I still believe that the standalone deal could have passed the Senate and the House if put to a vote.) At this point, I do not think we will see another shot at bipartisan permitting reform until at least late 2026, when the federal highway law will need fresh funding.
But it is difficult to get too upset about this failure because larger mistakes have since compounded the initial one. On Wednesday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan deal to fund the government — which is, after all, a much more fundamental task of governance than rewriting some federal permitting laws — fell apart, seemingly because Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided they didn’t like it. If I can indulge in the subjunctive for a moment: That breakdown might have likely killed any potential permitting deal, too. So even in a world where lawmakers somehow did strike a deal earlier this week, it might already be dead. (As I write this, the House GOP has reportedly reached a new deal to fund the government through March, which has weakened or removed provisions governing pharmacy benefit managers and limiting American investments in China.)
The facile reading of this situation is that Republicans now hold the advantage. The Trump administration will soon be able to implement some of the fossil fuel provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso deal through the administrative state. Trump will likely expand onshore and offshore drilling, will lease the government’s best acreage to oil and gas companies, and will approve as many liquified natural gas export terminals as possible. His administration will do so, however, without the enhanced legal protection that the deal would have provided — and while those protections are not a must-have, especially with a friendly Supreme Court, their absence will still allow environmental groups to try to run down the clock on some of Trump’s more ambitious initiatives.
Republicans believe that they will be able to get parts of permitting reform done in a partisan reconciliation bill next year. These efforts seem quite likely to run aground, at least as long as something like the current rules governing reconciliation bills hold. I have heard some crazy proposals on this topic — what if skipping a permitting fight somehow became a revenue-raiser for the federal government? — but even they do not touch the deep structure of NEPA in the way a bipartisan compromise could. As Westerman toldPolitico’s Josh Siegel: “We need 60 votes in the Senate to get real permitting reform … People are just going to have to come to an agreement on what permitting reform is.” In any case, Manchin and the Democrats already tried to reform the permitting system via a partisan reconciliation bill and found it essentially impossible.
Even if reconciliation fails, Republicans say, they will still be in a better negotiating position next year than this year because the party will control a few more Senate votes. But will they? The GOP will just have come off a difficult fight over tax reform. Twelve or 24 months from now, demands on the country’s electricity grid are likely to be higher than they are today, and the risk of blackouts will be higher than before. The lack of a robust transmission network will hinder the ability to build a massive new AI infrastructure, as some of Trump’s tech industry backers hope. But 12 or 24 months from now, too, Democrats — furious at Trump — are not going to be in a dealmaking mood, and Republicans have relatively few ways to bring them to the table.
In any case, savvy Republicans should have realized that it is important to get supply-side economic reforms done as early in a president’s four-year term as possible. Such changes take time to filter through the system and turn into real projects and real economic activity; passing the law as early as possible means that the president’s party can enjoy them and campaign on them.
All of it starts to seem more and more familiar. When Manchin and Barrasso unveiled their compromise earlier this year, Democrats didn’t act quickly on it. They felt confident that the window for a deal wouldn’t close — and they looked forward to a potential trifecta, when they would be able to get even more done (and reject some of Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly compromises).
Democrats, I think, wound up regretting the cavalier attitude that they brought to permitting reform before Trump’s win. But now the GOP is acting the same way: It is rejecting compromises, believing that it will be able to strike a better deal on permitting issues during its forthcoming trifecta. That was a mistake when Democrats did it. I think it will be a mistake for Republicans, too.