Smoke from raging, climate-fueled wildfires out West blanketed East Coast skies this week. Siberia is burning, too. And flooding in China has displaced some 1.2 million people. In Jacobabad, Pakistan, conditions are too hot and humid for the human body to withstand, leading to a rash of heat-related illnesses and death. One might think this drumbeat of extreme weather would have some bearing on the week’s political events in D.C. It hasn’t. Republicans are still dragging the process along on the White House–supported infrastructure bill so as to obstruct it for as long as possible, and Joes Manchin and Biden are still holding out hope for bipartisan agreement from a party that can’t agree that Donald Trump lost the presidential election.
A few days before the smoky haze made it risky for New Yorkers to take their morning jog, the members of the New York Times editorial board chided Biden’s “chattering critics on the left wing of his party” for not giving him enough credit for a series of environmental pledges, a handful of executive actions, and a bipartisan infrastructure bill whose text has not been released. “This was less than Mr. Biden wanted,” the editorial board wrote of the yet-to-be-passed package, “but his critics reacted as if there were nothing there at all, sending protesters to the White House and Capitol Hill.” The climate left, the Times editorial board and others have recently suggested, is too tough on the president, with counterproductive results.
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