The Single Proposal that Would Beat Manchin and Republicans

Climate change is a winning issue, and Democrats would dominate ’22 and ’24 if they ran on one policy

Mitchell Peterson
5 min readNov 9, 2021

Democrats don’t realize that global warming is something they could win on. Recent Pew research shows there are enough Republicans that care — it’s obviously not the majority but a significant percentage know it is coming. Swing that block into your camp and boom, you win. Even in red states, most see the writing on the wall, and a lot of those in denial have a direct financial reason to cling to fossil fuels.

To win, all the Democrats have to do is embrace economist Bob Pollin’s idea of A Just Transition.

It is cheap. It is the right thing to do. And it is ONE POLICY that could completely change the game and help the Democrats sweep in ’22 and ‘24.

But they’ll never do it.

Democrats need Wall Street and private equity money, and if you dig deeper, you see that big oil is actually, in large part, owned by Wall Street and private equity. That’s one of the reasons Democrats talk a big game but are so damn slow on climate change. In the words of journalist Paul Jay and others, “they are between a BlackRock and a hard place.”

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Mitchell Peterson

Freelance writer who spent nine years outside the US, currently in rural America writing the Substack bestseller 18 Uncles.