Obama and the Mayoral Race in NYC

If you haven't heard, the mayoral race in NYC ended up being extremely close with independent incumbent Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire, defeating Democrat William C. Thompson Jr. by just 51-46. The mainstream media reported widely on how this was a surprise, because Bloomberg had a good approval rating and spent $90 million on the campaign. Most reported on how that absurdly high level of campaign spending and his repeal of the term limits law to stay in power pushed a lot of voters over to Thompson. Very few, however, reported on how the national Democratic party failed to get behind Thompson. That refusal to get their hands dirty in the NYC race demonstrates a lot about the centrist and even right economic beliefs of Obama and the national Democratic leadership.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a great post on his blog (btw, great blog if you're into civil liberties, antiwar, and media issues) the other day on the tiff between Rep. Anthony Weiner and the administration on this matter. Weiner publicly criticized the President for spending resources to support Gov. Corzine in NJ but not doing the same for Thompson. The Politico reporter allowed a White House aide to respond anonymously, childishly taunting Weiner for deciding not to run for mayor himself.

Glenn focused on so many mainstream media outlets allow Obama aides to comment anonymously. Frequently they use that anonymity to bash those on the left in his own party who criticize him for being such a centrist. He also notes the irony of American media criticizing left-wing leaders in Latin America who change term limits laws to extend their terms and failing to do so in the case of right-winger Uribe in Colombia and Bloomberg.

I think it also says a lot about the Obama administration's stance on political economy. The refusal to campaign for Thompson suggests some level of comfort with Bloomberg on the part of Obama. Bloomberg is a social liberal and is great on environmental issues. However, on economic issues, which a mayor has much more control over than social issues, he is quite conservative. As this Nation article states, Bloomberg opposes a living wage ordinance, favors regressive taxes like the sales tax instead over the progressive income tax, and consistenly favors big developers and big finance. He presides over a higher than average unemployment level while manufacturing has sunk to just 2% of the city's economy. The Nation article predicted a Thompson loss because of his failure to present an alternative economic vision for the city, which I think is right.

The Working Families party, which does have that vision, endorsed Thompson, which suggests that he would be far better on these issues, even if he didn't make them the centerpiece of his campaign. What if Obama had come to NYC and campaigned briefly for Thompson every time he was in the area to do so for Corzine? New Yorkers love Obama; he might have allowed Thompson to close the gap.

The fact that he didn't suggests that Bloomberg's economic policies are just fine with him. It reinforces that Obama is a centrist, not a progressive. He espouses a mostly Keynesian view of debt-funded public investment during recessions with some programs to protect the poor and middle classes and the environment (typically weak ones), but has no intention of reducing the massive socio-economic gap in our country between the super-rich and everyone else.

Bloomberg is a symbol of American finance, as that's where he made his fortune. The Democrats' comfort with him is a symptom of their closeness to Wall Street. Let's not forget that the mildly liberal Corzine, whom Obama backed strongly, is a Goldman Sachs alum. Those of us who want a fair economy need to stop supporting the Democrats without strings attached, because it's not getting us very far.

LTJ Bukem

I've never blogged about music before, but I love music, ergo I will henceforth. Recently I've been really getting into drum'n'bass music. If you haven't heard of it, it's a form of electronic music with super fast and heavy beats and pretty spare bass and keyboards. I love dem BPMs! Ha my girlfriend hates when I play it because it makes her anxious, but I love the energy in this music.

LTJ Bukem is a great producer from the UK who's huge in d'n'b. To the speedy beats and heavy bass he adds some great 70's jazz fusionish electric keyboards. Lots of BPMs, but really spacey at the same time. Check the song out below, it's one of his early tunes from the early 90's.

Krugman: We need more stimulus!

In the 3rd quarter of this year, our economy grew at an annualized rate of 3.5%. Good news?: yes. Is everything all better?: definitely not. A lot of economists are predicting a so-called "jobless recovery." On top of that, it's entirely possible that reduced demand from unemployment and a continuing credit crunch might drag our economy back down. Our government has a lot more work to do to fix the economy.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has been calling for more and more effective (ie. less tax cuts, more direct spending) stimulus in his NY Times column for a long time. His column today continues that motif and lays out an excellent case for more economic stimulus.

He writes that the growth numbers show that the stimulus is working. That spending will continue to go out over the next year and a half. However, the rate at which it is going out, and thus its effect on growth, is currently peaking, meaning that the stimulus won't continue to increase growth. If that rate of growth is going to continue, private spending will need to increase as the stimulus tapers off by the end of 2010. Krugman doesn't see that happening.

On top of that, even if growth continues, it will take an unacceptably long time to put a dent in unemployment. Krugman points out that our 3.5% annualized GDP growth rate in the 3rd quarter is roughly the same as annual growth during the Clinton administration, very interesting. If job creation proceeds as it did at that growth rate in the 90's, it would take a decade to get to "something like full employment."

So it's clear that we need more stimulus, despite the huge deficit resulting from Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, the creation of Medicare Part D, and immoral and unnecessary wars. The deficit hawks on the right and left worry that our debt-fueled stimulus will present a big debt burden in the form of higher taxes to the next generation of Americans. As Krugman writes, that generation, my generation, is feeling unemployment the most (yes I am one of them). Krugman's colleague Bob Herbert at the Times had a great column on that subject on Saturday. High unemployment will be a huge drag on our generation for an extended period of time, not just directly through unemployment but also through unemployment hampering growth.

That argument alone trumps the deficit hawks' weak arguments. However, he adds something I hadn't thought of:

Even the claim that we’ll have to pay for stimulus spending now with higher taxes later is mostly wrong. Spending more on recovery will lead to a stronger economy, both now and in the future — and a stronger economy means more government revenue. Stimulus spending probably doesn’t pay for itself, but its true cost, even in a narrow fiscal sense, is only a fraction of the headline number.

It almost echoes the supply-side argument of the Reganites except in reverse. And except that it actually makes sense.

So will the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress push for more deficit spending to fuel stronger re-growth in our economy? Right now they're patting themselves on the back for how the stimulus worked, and they should. However, they need to move forward on job creation, and currently it doesn't look they will.

In the meantime, they seem perfectly willing to borrow money to continue a war in Afghanistan. Sounds like they got their priorities straight, huh?

Paying for health care reform: Why it matters big time

As Bill Moyers said, health care reform is a means to social justice. Getting almost universal coverage and bringing down costs for working families is crucial not just because health care is a human right, but also because the middle class livelihood is becoming untenable for more and more families in America. The gap between the wealthy and everyone else has grown by leaps and bounds since the Reagan years. Reducing what working families pay for health care makes the middle class accessible to more people and makes it more secure for those already there.

Back in August, I laid out the three fundamental goals of health care reform that we need to keep our eye on. But there's also principles for going about health care reform that are important as well. Unlike the goals, these are more subjective and vary a lot from person to person. An example of a health reform principle: a lot of pundits from the center-left and the right have been crowing about increasing competition, a panacea for these free marketeers. Competition doesn't necessarily reduce costs or expand coverage (it actually expands them, but that's not my point here), so it doesn't have anything to do with the goals of reform, but it's how these people want to go about reform. The principles of reform are different from the goals in that they mostly deal with how to reach those goals.

One important principle for those of us who see health care as a means to social justice is paying for expanding health care coverage in a progressive way. This means that the funding for health care reform ensures that reform overall transfers wealth downward. Expanding coverage and lowering cost will benefit working families, but if we pay for that by taxing working families then it might not benefit them overall economically.

The mandate-and-subsidies approach that the Congressional Democrats have taken to health care reform won't reduce health costs very much as I've written earlier. Nothing will change for workers who get coverage from their employers, and the un-insured will have to pay more than they did before because of the individual mandate. As such, if Congress chooses to pay for the subsidies by taxing the middle class, it may actually increase overall costs for working class families. Given that the idea behind goal #2 of reform is to make health care less of a cost burden on working families, the principle of paying for reform progressively becomes elevated to a goal and a must under the mandate-and-subsidies approach.

House Democrats proposed to pay for their bill, HR 3200, by creating a surtax on the wealthy. This is the preferred approach. The wealthy have benefited so much from the Bush tax cut and our general economic policy of the last 30 years, so it's only just that they pay to cover the un-insured. The House has also discussed taxing sugary drinks as well. Although this is a regressive tax, I would find it acceptable if paired with a surtax on the wealthy because it would improve our nation's health and lower health care costs overall.

President Obama proposed to pay for reform by limiting tax deductions for the wealthy. This would also be a satisfactory approach because it would rely on funding coming from the rich, although it seems unlikely to be included in the final health care bill.

In the Senate only the Finance Committee has the jurisdiction over taxes. The bill currently in that committee, proposed by its chairman Max Baucus, would fund the subsidies by taxing so-called "Cadillac" health care benefits over a certain amount at 35%. The NY Times ran a great article today that this tax would hit middle class union workers who negotiated for better health benefits instead of higher wages, small businesses that typically have more expensive plans, and people who live in areas with high health care costs like California and Massachusetts, despite being designed to tax the benefits of the wealthy. The threshold is indexed to inflation, so over time most employer-based coverage would be hit by the tax. The Baucus bill would also place $88 billion in taxes on insurance companies, drug companies, labs, and device makers. As Maggie Mahar writes on her excellent blog, most people think these taxes will simply be passed on to consumers in higher premiums. On top of those taxes on working families, the bill would limit tax deductions for medical expenses. The committee amended that approach because it would hit the elderly very hard, but it still remains in the bill for everyone else, and it will mostly hit the middle class as well.

Unfortunately the Baucus bill seems to be the most likely to win over the conservative and moderate Democrats needed to pass any bill. So there's a decent chance that health care reform will be funded in large part on the backs of the working families that it's supposed to help.

Because Congress's approach does little to reduce overall health care costs, it has to be funded by taxes on the wealthy to truly benefit most Americans. Our progressive members of Congress need to stand firm against the Baucus bill and any other plan that would tax the middle class to pay for itself, especially if like the Baucus bill it does not contain a public option to hold down costs. It would be better to put off reform than make the middle class pay even more.

Note: How to pay for reform would be important in a single-payer bill as well, but it would be a principle instead of a goal. That's because single-payer would save so much in health care costs that even if we taxed everybody at a flat rate to pay for it, all working class families would be better off than they are now. Obviously those of us who want a more just society would want the tax to fund single-payer to be progressive, but it wouldn't be as necessary as with the mandate-and-subsidies approach.

HR 676 would pay for itself partially through flat payroll taxes on employees, but also a payroll tax on employers, a 1/3 of 1% stock transaction tax, a surtax on the wealthy, and closing corporate tax loopholes. It satisfies my principle and all 3 health reform goals, which is why Congressional leaders should push it instead any mandate-and-subsidies bill.

Sekoff v. Simmons on the Ed Show last night

The fight over the public option has forced the Democrats to show their true colors. It has become easy to distinguish principled progressives fighting for a fairer economy from corporate Democrats eager for more campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy. This has been true not only for Democrats in Congress and the President (we know where he and Rahm stand), but also for liberal advocacy groups and media figures. The Ed Show last night demonstrated this difference so clearly in a transition between two segments.

In the first, Ed spoke with Roy Sekoff from Huffington Post. Sekoff criticized the President for caving on the public option and favoring the Baucus bill. He urged Obama to forget about the Republicans and "bring out the brass knuckles" on conservatives in his own party, pointing out that the President sure wasn't afraid to tell Gov. Paterson to go. Finally he raised the excellent point that if we pass weak reform that is ineffectual and costly it will only make more people think that government can't solve problems. As I wrote here, a bill that takes the mandates-and-subsidies approach without a public option won't cover everyone, won't bring down costs, and thus won't be sustainable long-term, leading to Sekoff's scenario.

The segment that followed was a discussion by 3 media figures on a couple issues (see transcript here). One of the figures was Jamal Simmons, a "Democratic consultant." Ed asks Simmons if a public option trigger would be acceptable, and Simmons gives an unequivocal yes. Simmons says, "It's competition. It's affordability." Isn't that what the public option brings? Simmons thinks we should "give the private market a chance." Wait, this guy is a Democratic consultant? Last I heard the private insurance market led to health care costs twice as high as other industrialized countries and left tens of millions without coverage. It's enough of a compromise that the Democrats are allowing the insurance companies to continue to exist.

Simmons is deeply concerned about Democratic seats in red states. He thinks a failure to pass health care reform will cause those Dems, many of them Blue Dogs, to lose their seats. However, polls in a couple of these states show that a plurality of swing staters favor the public option, as a plurality of Americans do. The right-wingers are going to call health care reform a government take-over, public option or no, so they'll lambast conservative Dems who vote for legislation either way. Why not push the Blue Dogs to play ball and get a decent bill instead of a shite one that is a handout to insurance industry?

Simmons is one of these tepid liberals who thinks that the Democrats need to pass something, anything to avoid the debacle of 1994 in which the Republicans gained a stranglehold on Congress after the failure of health care reform. Phoenix Woman points out at Firedoglake that the losses of 1994 had as much to do with the demoralization of the Democratic base after NAFTA as failure on health care reform. Progressives aren't excited to get out and vote for Democrats if the Democrats fail to pass meaningful reforms. If Democrats can't pass health care reform this time because conservative Democrats oppose the public option, they can blame it on the Republicans and do just fine in 2010 because their base will still be with them. I wouldn't be too concerned if some of the Blue Dogs lost their primaries along the way.

It's become clear that the 1994 argument is code-speak for concern that progressive reforms will stem the flow of corporate campaign contributions to Democratic coffers. The reason why Blue Dogs and members of the Democratic Leadership Council are so coveted by Democratic party leaders is because they are the most successful at raking in contributions from the insurance companies, coal companies, and the like. But the problem is more than the Blue Dogs. It pervades the party's power structure. We continue to have these DLCers and moderates running the show: Clinton, Obama, Reid, Hoyer, Emanuel, etc. etc. The face of the Democratic party is consultants like Simmons instead of the middle class Americans that supply most of the votes.

I look at the differences between Democrats and Republicans, and wish that the Democrats' base acted more like the Republicans' base. The right wing demands that Republicans pay homage to them and be uncompromising with the left. Obviously this has hurt their party lately as the Republicans associate themselves more and more with the birthers, bigots, and anti-science crowd. However, I don't think the same would happen for the Democrats because progressives aren't so nutty. If the Democrats had a strong base that forced the Democrats to the left, what would the opposition say? That the Democrats are moving us to socialism. Only the Republicans' base will buy that crap, especially as the country's demographics change. In addition, a more progressive Democratic party would pass stronger reform legislation that could show more Americans that government can do things well, and that it should.

I'm tired of listening to "consultants" say why the Democrats should cave to monied interest again and again. I'm tired of liberal advocacy groups saying that we need to "support the President." What's the point in electing Democrats if they never pass real reform? Down with the consultants, up with the base!

Public Option or Bust!!!!!

I outlined HR 3200 the other day. The bill has some serious deficiencies in several different areas, but it has turned out to be far better than the Sen. Baucus's bill that the Senate Finance Committee is poised to take up. The biggest difference between the two bills is that HR 3200 has a public option and the Baucus bill does not. Let's take a look at why the public option is so important, and is an absolute necessity for this approach to health reform.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that single-payer is the most efficient approach to universal coverage. HR 3200's biggest deficiency is simply that isn't single-payer: it doesn't get rid of the private insurance companies that take a piece of the action for their Wall Street investors on every transaction. Instead it uses mandates, an expansion of a Medicaid, and subsidies to get us to universal coverage.

The bill will only leave 3% of Americans without insurance, which wouldn't happen under single-payer, but it's way better than 20%. So it does pretty well in terms of goal 1 and thus goal 3 of health care reform. However, it doesn't do too well in goal 2. Outside of important reforms in Medicare, the bill does very little to drive down costs except with the public option. With private insurance companies still covering most Americans, the plan doesn't get rid of their incentives that drive up costs so much, profits and competition.

The consumer reforms in the bill to prevent under-insurance are great. They would put a big dent in the incidence of medical bankruptcy. But they probably won't save money overall. They will force insurers to pay for their sick clients' coverage, but those costs could easily be passed on to everyone in higher premiums.

Expanding insurance coverage increases health care costs simply because more people are getting health care. Proponents of the mandates-and-subsidies approach claim that prevention of illness by expanding coverage will bring down costs because people will be healthier. However, most studies indicate that preventive care, although it is crucial for having a healthier society, does not reduce costs and probably increases them (see this PNHP blog post).

The bill uses an "exchange" where individual and small businesses can go to shop for insurance plans. This actually does bring down costs a bit because insurance companies don't have to spend as much on marketing, but the savings are small compared to the cost of expanding coverage. Giving people subsidies to buy insurance on the exchange is great in terms of affordability for low and middle-income families, but it encourages private insurance companies to keep premiums high with the bill going to taxpayers. Not very efficient, except one provision in the bill that reins in these bad incentives.

The public option! It's another plan consumers can buy on the exchange, run by the government as a non-profit entity, but otherwise similar to any other insurance plan. With lower administrative costs and the ability to charge Medicare rates to providers, it will be able to offer low premiums. The CBO estimates that the bill will cover 10 to 11 million Americans, so it will bring down costs in that way alone. On top of that, it will force private plans on the exchange to offer lower premiums if they want to compete.

A public plan with 10 million Americans is disappointingly small, but it could still save a lot of money. The Commonwealth Fund found that having a public plan paying at Medicare rates on the exchange would save $265 billion in administrative costs over ten years, whereas expanding coverage with just an exchange would increase costs by $32 billion. While $265 billion over ten years is less than the $400 billion in administrative costs single-payer would save in one year, it's not chump change.

Requiring individuals to buy insurance without a public option is a big handout to insurance companies: it gives them tens of millions more customers with consumers and taxpayers together paying $297 billion more over 10 years than they would otherwise! If the subsidies aren't high enough, people won't be able to afford coverage. It would be highly unsustainable over time and lead policymakers to a difficult choice: pay ever-higher subsidies that would pad the profits of insurance companies, or force working families to pay more and leave some unable to afford insurance. The mandate-and-subsidize approach is inherently inefficient, and it needs a public option for it to work for consumers and taxpayers in the long run.

If the Democrats drop the public option because moderates don't like it, progressives should vote against the bill because it would be so inefficient that it would basically amount to corporate welfare for the insurance companies. Conservative Democrats have been threatening to vote against health care reform because they don't like the public option and the cost of the bill (HA I guess they don't see the inconsistency there!). If progressives stand strong for the public option, it forces the Congressional leadership and the White House to play hardball with the centrists if they want the votes for health care reform.

According to polls, 77% of Americans support the public option, so the Democrats don't have any excuse as the majority party in both chambers of Congress, whether they come from a blue state or a red state. Last I heard this was a democracy. Is it too much to ask for Democrats to do what 77% of Americans want?!!!!!

Ppm, shmeepm: clearer language in global warming advocacy

During the August recess, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth organized a coalition of more than 300 groups that signed on to a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer and the US Senate as a whole. The letter urges the Senate to pass global warming legislation stronger than the American Clean Energy and Security Act that passed out of the House this summer. The effort has garnered a respectable amount of press coverage, and fills a crucial vacuum. ACES was a terribly compromised bill that won't reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by very much and is riddled with loopholes and corporate giveaways. A lot of the mainstream environmental groups either let the compromising happen without a peep or actively encouraged it. It's nice to see some groups with a back bone!

I think what CBD and FOE are doing is excellent, from an organizing perspective. Their coalition is big, and it comprises more than just environmentally focused groups. Through their press attention, they are starting to create the notion that environmentalists are disappointed in the efforts of Congressional Democrats and to a lesser extent President Obama on global warming. We need to push back hard against moderate Dems who are in the pocket of the coal and oil industries! However, I think the vague manner in which they refer to climate science makes their efforts less effective than they could be, specifically in how they invoke the 350 ppm target of Dr. James Hansen.

The most important thing to improve in climate legislation is emissions targets, and the letter rightly starts there. It says, "The Senate bill must set an economy wide cap on greenhouse emissions that is consistent with the best available science." The problem is that the letter doesn't define what that means except in terms of the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere globally. Instead of providing a specific minimum acceptable target for emissions reductions by 2020 or 2050, it launches into a discussion of whether we should aim for 350 ppm or 450 ppm (if you're confused, don't worry, your Senator probably is too). Although conceding that ACES won't get us even to 450 ppm, it concludes that 350 ppm should be the goal without saying how we should get there. Not very clear, and thus probably not very effective.

Okay let's take a step back for a moment. You may be asking, what the hell does 350 or 450 ppm mean? ppm means parts per million, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climate scientists have used models to find the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere past which the effects of global warming would be dangerous. Of course dangerous is a pretty subjective term. But still, the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed that anything more than a 2 degree C rise in average global temperature would be dangerous, and to prevent that from happening we would have to keep CO2 below 450 ppm in the atmosphere. We're currently getting close to 390 ppm, after we started before the Industrial Revolution at 275 ppm, so we don't have a lot of room to maneuver. (See this paper by Joe Romm of Climate Progress)

So what's the deal with 350? 350.org, as the name would suggest, has an excellent summary of why 350 is an important number. Dr. James Hansen of NASA, a climate hero who has been sounding the alarm since the 80's, wrote a paper recently stating that we must reduce the level of CO2 below 350 ppm "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted." Pretty scary stuff considering we're well past 350. The paper found that the planet is warming faster than scientists previously believed and that the impacts will be worse, making the 450 ppm target too conservative. So this coalition has told the Senate to shoot for 350 ppm. Clearly Congress can't decree our way to 350 ppm, especially because we're not the only polluter (though we are by far the biggest per capita). They would have to figure out how much we need to cut our pollution to do our part. Does the letter provide any specifics on that? No. For their call to have any concrete meaning, these groups need to provide a target for emissions cuts and they don't.

To figure out how to push the envelope on global warming legislation, we need to keep in mind where things are now. ACES would cut our emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Where does that compare with what the IPCC said we need to do? The IPCC found that developed countries need to cut their emissions 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Considering that as of 2007 our emissions were 16% higher than in 1990, ACES falls well short of what we need to do to get to 450 ppm. Furthermore, as Joe Romm notes in the paper cited above, the IPCC didn't include carbon-cycle feedback in its predictions. These are effects of global warming that release more carbon and make warming worse, such as the methane and CO2 release from the melting of the Arctic permafrost. So even 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 might not hack it.

Unless the EU beefs up its efforts and China makes big changes in the next couple years, ACES won't stop us from surpassing 450 ppm. If that's the case, would clamoring for 350 ppm to be the target have much of an impact? I highly doubt it, especially considering that nobody has determined how much developed countries would have to cut their emissions to get to 350 ppm as far as I know (let me know if I'm wrong). It currently is not part of our discourse on climate policy so it can't have a lot of relevance around legislation. It should be a part of that discourse, and these groups should work on that, but not in a letter to the Senate about the nitty gritty of climate legislation.

Instead they should demand that Congress hit a target for emissions reductions that is specific and practically meaningful. 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 is the minimum acceptable according to the IPCC for 450 ppm, and that would equate to a bit more than 35% below today's levels. So if we doubled the emissions reductions in ACES we would get there. It's very meaningful and easy to grasp that ACES fails in that it reduces our emissions only half as much as it should.

Now I doubt the Senate would get all the way to a 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 reduction, especially considering the filibuster and the disproportionate representation from coal states there. But a specific campaign to double the reductions of ACES might get them to make at least slightly deeper cuts. The recent science suggests that even if the developed world cut its emissions 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 we might not avoid disastrous impacts. But activists around the world need to work for as much cuts as we can within our various political systems to minimize the effects of global warming (that we're already seeing now!), and we have to think pragmatically about how to do it. As such, bringing 350 ppm into the discussion around details of climate legislation doesn't make a lot of sense.

So write your Senator. We must do better than the American Clean Energy and Security Act! Double those emissions reductions! (Tell them to get rid of the offsets too, but I don't have time to write about that now). This would be a more effective approach to climate advocacy then talking about 350 ppm in a vague way.

PS That's not to say 350.org, Bill McKibben, and Dr. Hansen should stop talking about 350. They're doing a tremendous job of getting the word out about what dire straits we're in and describing the huge gap between our miniscule efforts on global warming and the gravity of the problem. I just think bringing 350 into the discussion around the specifics of climate legislation isn't very effective.