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The measure expands job training and other efforts aimed at reducing recidivism, expands early-release programs and modifies sentencing laws.

The law gave the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons leeway in interpreting some aspects of its implementation, including whether credits for good behavior and job training accrued before the law was passed could be used to apply for early release.

Critics argued that the proposed rule did not accurately reflect the intent of the lawmakers who had drafted the bill, and that it kept thousands of people behind bars who should be immediately released.

Last May, Senators Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the panel’s top Republican, pressed the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons to revise the proposed rule.

They said that it included limitations that were not part of the act, and penalties that were unduly harsh.

In the guidelines announced Thursday, the Justice Department said inmates could apply credits that had been earned as far back as Dec. 21, 2018, when the First Step Act was enacted, subject to the Bureau of Prisons determining eligibility.

Justice Action Network, a bipartisan criminal justice reform group, said that the new guidelines could result in the release of as many people as were freed immediately after passage of First Step Act, which was more than 3,100. The home confinement decision had already affected about 2,800 inmates. There are 157,596 federal inmates, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,”

On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.

In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.

In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.

In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.

After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work.

The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.

The panel said Facebook and other Meta platforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”

“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.

The panel said it was focused on Reddit because the platform hosted the r/The_Donald subreddit community that grew significantly before migrating in 2020 to the website TheDonald.win, which ultimately hosted significant discussion and planning related to the Jan. 6 attack.

“Unfortunately, the select committee believes Twitter has failed to disclose critical information,” the panel stated.

In recent years, Big Tech and Washington have had a history of butting heads. Some Republicans have accused sites including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter of silencing conservative voices.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether a number of tech companies have grown too big, and in the process abused their market power to stifle competition. And a bipartisan group of senators and representatives continues to say sites like Facebook and YouTube are not doing enough to curb the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Meta said that it had “produced documents to the committee on a schedule committee staff requested — and we will continue to do so.”

The panel has interviewed more than 340 witnesses and issued dozens of subpoenas, including for bank and phone records.

Earlier on Friday, the North’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement denouncing a proposal by the United States that the U.N. Security Council place fresh sanctions on North Korea following several ballistic and other missile tests since September 2021.

Separately on Wednesday, the Biden administration blacklisted five North Korean officials active in Russia and China who Washington said were responsible for procuring goods for North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile-related programs.

North Korea resumed ​testing missiles in September​ after a six-month hiatus. It has since conducted at least seven missile tests, including the one on Friday. The tests involved a long-range strategic cruise missile, ballistic missiles rolled out of mountain tunnels and a mini submarine-launched ballistic missile.

All the tests violated U.N. Security Council resolutions that banned North Korea from developing or testing ballistic missile technologies or technologies used to make and deliver nuclear weapons. But the North’s Foreign Ministry insisted on Friday that it was exercising “its right to self-defense” and that the missile tests were “part of its efforts for modernizing its national defense capability.”

“The U.S. is intentionally escalating the situation even with the activation of independent sanctions, not content with referring the D.P.R.K.’s just activity to the U.N. Security Council,”

If the U.S. adopts such a confrontational stance, the D.P.R.K. will be forced to take stronger and certain reaction to it.”

But ​the country has resumed missile tests since meetings between its leader, Kim Jong-un, and Donald J. Trump, then president, ended without an agreement on how to roll back the North’s nuclear weapons program or when to lift sanctions.

Those tests indicated that the North was developing more sophisticated ways of delivering nuclear and other warheads to South Korea, Japan and American bases there on its shorter-range missiles, according to defense analysts.

Some of the missiles it has tested since 2019 have used solid fuel and have made midair maneuvers, making them harder to intercept, the analysts said.

But since the Kim-Trump diplomacy collapsed, North Korea has warned that it no longer felt bound by its self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests. It has since unveiled its largest-ever, still-untested ICBM during ​a ​military parade and exhibition.

On Friday, North Korea reiterated that its missile tests “did not target any specific country or force and it did not do any harm to the security of neighboring countries.”

But in the test on Tuesday, the North’s hypersonic missile traversed the country from west to east and then veered to the northeast, flying over the waters between the Russian Far East and Japan toward the Pacific,

The missile hit a target 621 miles away, the North said. ​And as the missile hurtled out of North Korea at up to 10 times the speed of sound, aviation regulators briefly halted flights out of some airports on the U.S. West Coast as a precaution.

Washington has repeatedly urged North Korea to return to talks, but the country has said it would not until it was convinced that the United States would remove its “hostile” policy, including sanctions.

“Willful sanctions do not help resolve the Korean Peninsula issue, but only worsen the confrontational mood,

Efforts to impose sanctions on the Nord Stream 2, an undersea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that would give Moscow enormous leverage over Europe, have long drawn bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have enthusiastically sought to bolster Ukraine against Russian aggression.

the timing of the vote — amid continuing diplomatic talks between Russia and the United States in the hopes of averting war — as well as the Biden administration’s vocal opposition ultimately helped fuel the measure’s defeat.

Six Democrats — some of them facing difficult re-elections in 2022 — defected from their party’s position and voted in favor of the measure,

The Biden administration and its allies in Congress argued the legislation, led by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, would do little to counter Russian influence because the pipeline’s construction is nearly completed.

Instead, they said, the sanctions would drive a wedge between the United States and Germany, which has championed the pipeline as vital to its industrial success, and give up a key point of leverage during diplomatic negotiations.

“If this bill passes, it won’t make the Nord Stream pipeline any less likely,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “It won’t stop Russia from invading Ukraine. In fact, it will do the exact opposite.

Republicans accused Democrats of allowing Russian aggression to go unchecked, painting their reluctance to impose sanctions as politically motivated.

“I would suggest if Joe Biden were not president, if Donald Trump were sitting in the Oval Office today, every single Democrat in this chamber would vote for these sanctions.”

“The pipeline itself is the wedge,” Mr. McConnell said. “That’s the whole point. That’s been Putin’s goal: decoupling Ukraine from Europe and making Europe even more reliant on Russian gas.”

On a Christmas Eve video call with a bipartisan group of more than 20 lawmakers, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine cast Nord Stream 2 as an existential threat to his country, arguing that the pipeline posed as much risk to Ukraine as the Russian troops amassing on its border,

An email sent on Monday to Senate offices by the lobbyist, which was forwarded to The New York Times, included a screenshot of Mr. Zelensky’s tweet, and added the message, “Ukraine Pres. Zelensky calls on all senators to vote in favor of Nord Stream 2 sanctions.”

The next day, the issue came up again as senators met with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in a closed-door meeting to discuss an upcoming delegation trip to Ukraine.

Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, unveiled on Wednesday a Democratic alternative to Mr. Cruz’s bill that would impose sanctions on top Russian government officials, including Mr. Putin, if Russia engages in or supports “a significant escalation in hostilities or hostile action in or against Ukraine.”

It likely did not help Mr. Cruz’s cause that many Democrats are furious with him for depriving President Biden of a slew of national security officials who are still awaiting Senate confirmation.

Last month, he agreed to stop blocking the confirmation of 32 of Mr. Biden’s State Department and Treasury Department nominees in exchange for Thursday’s vote.

Mr. Hochstein had also served on a supervisory board of Naftogaz until he resigned in late 2020, citing concerns about the Ukrainian government’s willingness to combat corruption.

Voters in some major cities, in addition to choosing their next mayor, will also have the opportunity to weigh in on an important issue that has been heavily debated in their communities.

Proposition 6 would codify the right for long-term care residents to designate an essential caregiver for in-person visitation.

Texas -- Proposition 3 Read MoreWritten in response to Covid-19 restrictions, Texans will consider a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the state or a political subdivision, such as an elected official, from "prohibiting or limiting religious services of religious organizations."

Like Proposition 3, Proposition 6 was also influenced by the Covid-19 restrictions enforced during the height of the pandemic.

Texas -- Proposition 3 Read MoreWritten in response to Covid-19 restrictions, Texans will consider a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the state or a political subdivision, such as an elected official, from "prohibiting or limiting religious services of religious organizations." Enter your email or view the Vault By CNN webpage to own a piece of CNN History with blockchain technology.close dialogExplore Vault by CNN . Presidential elections, space discoveries, CNN exclusives and more.Explore NowGet UpdatesBe the first to know about upcoming releases from our Vault, with updates delivered right to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign Me UpBy subscribing, you agree to our privacy policy.Success!See you in your inbox.close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1426699 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1426699 *//* custom css from creative 60682 *//* V Text Alignment Fix */ .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1426699 .bx-row-input + .bx-row-submit { vertical-align: top;}/* custom css from creative 60872 *//************************************ CREATIVE STRUCTURE Do not remove or edit unless non applicable to creative set.************************************//* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1426699 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1426699.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 185px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1426699.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {bo

Question 2 would replace Minneapolis Police Department with a new "Department of Public Safety" overseen by the mayor and city council.

Cleveland -- Issue 24 Ballot initiative Issue 24 would establish a new civilian commission, called the Community Police Commission, whose members will have final authority over the police department's policy and procedures, hiring and training, and disciplinary action.

Proposal 7, also known as Local Law J, asks city residents whether to expand a civilian police review board's authority to conduct investigations and "to exercise oversight, review, and resolution of community complaints alleging abuse of police authority."

Austin, Texas -- Proposition A Voters in Austin, Texas are being asked whether to bulk up the city's police department with Proposition A, as its supporters argue that the city is in the midst of a "crime wave" and a shortage of police officers.Proposition A would require that the Austin police department employs at least two police officers for every 1,000 residents.

Detroit -- Proposal R A "yes" vote on Proposal R would be in favor of the Detroit City Council establishing a task force that would recommend housing and economic programs that "address historical discrimination against the Black community in Detroit."

New Jersey -- Question No. 1 Question No. 1 asks New Jersey voters whether to allow betting on college sports. Currently, sports betting on college events in the state and on college events in which New Jersey teams participate is prohibited.

Richmond, Virginia -- Local ReferendumResidents of Virginia's capital city will decide whether to approve the construction of a new casino and 250-room luxury hotel in south Richmond along the I-95 highway.

New York -- Ballot Proposal 1New Yorkers are being reminded to flip over their ballots to answer five statewide ballot proposals.

New York -- Ballot Proposal 3New York currently requires that its residents register to vote at least 10 days before an election. Ballot Proposal 3 would remove that requirement, clearing the way for state lawmakers to enact new laws that would allow a resident to register to vote in less than 10 days -- such as same-day voter registration.

New York -- Ballot Proposal 4As it stands now, New York voters may vote by absentee ballot if they are unable to appear at their polling place due to illness or physical disability or expect to be absent from their county of residence, or New York City if they're residents, on Election Day.Ballot Proposal 4 asks whether to eliminate the requirement that a voter provide a reason if they wish to vote by absentee ballot.

Philadelphia -- Question #1: Asks whether to amend the city charter so it urges the Pennsylvania legislature and governor to legalize cannabis for recreational use in the state.

Mr. Biden ordered a review of the elimination of protections for the monuments to “determine whether restoration of the monument boundaries and conditions would be appropriate.”

Conservation groups welcomed the news. “Thank you, President Biden — you have listened to Indigenous tribes and the American people and ensured these landscapes will be protected for generations to come,”

President Biden fanned the flames of controversy and ignored input from the communities closest to these monuments,

The new boundaries will restore the original Obama-era boundary and will include the additional 11,200 Trump-era acres.

Yet three increasingly authoritarian NATO nations — Poland, Hungary and Turkey — play key roles in the coalition aiding Kyiv. And the United States is grappling with internal assaults to its own democracy.

The war lends urgency to Mr. Biden’s climate change agenda, reinforcing the need for more reliance on renewable clean energy over the fossil fuels that fill Russian coffers.

Yet it has already generated new pressure to increase the short-term supply of oil from the likes of Venezuela’s isolated dictatorship and Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian monarchy.

While some experts warn that a renewed focus on Europe will inevitably divert attention from Asia, several top White House officials say the United States can capitalize on how the war has convinced some Asian governments that they need to work more closely with the West to build up a global ideological front to defend democracy.

“What we are seeing now is an unprecedented level of Asian interest and focus,”

“And I believe one of the outcomes of this tragedy will be a kind of new thinking around how to solidify institutional connections beyond what we’ve already seen between Europe and the Pacific,”

Mr. Biden sought to rebuild American alliances, but did so largely in the name of confronting China.

The Russian invasion has expanded his mission dramatically and urgently, setting the stage for a seismic geopolitical shift that would pit the United States and its allies against China and Russia at once if they form an entrenched anti-Western bloc

“We’ve been trying to get to a new era for a long time,” he said. “And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”

Saudi Arabia has declined so far to increase oil production, while the United Arab Emirates waited until Wednesday to ask the OPEC nations to do so. American officials were also furious with the U.A.E. for declining to vote on a United Nations Security Council resolution to condemn Russia, though it did support a similar resolution later in the U.N. General Assembly.

The unreliability of the two nations and Russia’s place in the oil economy have increased momentum within the Biden administration to enact policies that would help the United States more quickly wean itself off fossil fuels and confront the climate crisis.

“We may see more fundamental questioning about the value of these partnerships,” Ms. Kaye said. “These states already believe the U.S. has checked out of the region, but their stance on Russia may only strengthen voices calling for a further reduction of U.S. forces in the region.”

“In times of crisis, there is sometimes a tension between our values and our interests,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “In the short term, we’re going to have to prioritize pushing back against Russia, at the risk of taking our foot off the gas on the democracy and human rights concerns that had been at the front and center of the Biden administration’s agenda.”

Ms. Thomas has previously pushed back against an ongoing congressional investigation into what took place that day. In December, she co-signed a letter calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois from their conference for joining the congressional committee investigating the attacks.

Ms. Thomas did not answer detailed questions from The Times about its findings. Her comments to The Free Beacon were her first about her participation in the rally. She said she had attended the rally in the morning but left before President Donald J. Trump addressed the crowd.

“As a member of their 501(c)(4) board, candidly, I must admit that I do not attend many of those separate meetings, nor do I attend many of their phone calls they have,” she said. “At CNP, I have moderated a session here and there. I delivered some remarks there once too.”

Dustin Stockton, one of the organizers involved in the Jan. 6 rally, told The Times that Ms. Thomas had played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division.” Ms. Thomas disputed that, saying there were “stories saying I mediated feuding factions of leaders for that day. I did not.”

She also said she “played no role with those who were planning and leading the Jan. 6 events.”

He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”

The provision in question is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.

“There are many ways that this could become a lawsuit presenting a vital constitutional issue that potentially the Supreme Court would want to hear and decide,” Professor Paulsen said.

“It is unquestionably fair to say that Trump ‘engaged in’ the Jan. 6 insurrection through both his actions and his inaction,” the article said.

There is, the article said, “abundant evidence” that Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, trying to alter vote counts by fraud and intimidation, encouraging bogus slates of competing electors, pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution, calling for the march on the Capitol and remaining silent for hours during the attack itself.

The new article examined the historical evidence illuminating the meaning of the provision at great length, using the methods of originalism. It drew on, among other things, contemporaneous dictionary definitions, other provisions of the Constitution using similar language, “the especially strong evidence from 1860s Civil War era political and legal usage of nearly the precise same terms” and the early enforcement of the provision

The article concluded that essentially all of that evidence pointed in the same direction: “toward a broad understanding of what constitutes insurrection and rebellion and a remarkably, almost extraordinarily, broad understanding of what types of conduct constitute engaging in, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to such movements.”

many writers noticed that this ethos often turned people into fragile narcissists. It cut them off from moral traditions and the normal sources of meaning and identity. It pushed them in on themselves, made them self-absorbed, craving public affirmation so they could feel good about themselves

As Lasch wrote in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism,” such people are plagued by an insecurity that can be “overcome only by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.”

“Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.”

Fast forward a few decades, and the sense of lostness and insecurity, which Lasch and many others had seen in nascent form, had transmogrified into a roaring epidemic of psychic pain. By, say, 2010, it began to be clear that we were in the middle of a mental health crisis, with rising depression and suicide rates, an epidemic of hopelessness and despair among the young.

Social media became a place where people went begging for attention, validation and affirmation — even if they often found rejection instead.

Before long, safetyism was on the march. This is the assumption that people are so fragile they need to be protected from social harm. Slate magazine proclaimed 2013 “the year of the trigger warning.” Concepts like “microaggression” and “safe spaces” couldn’t have lagged far behind.

the elephantiasis of trauma

Once, the word “trauma” referred to brutal physical wounding one might endure in war or through abuse. But usage of the word spread so that it was applied across a range of upsetting experiences.

A mega-best-selling book about trauma, “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Bessel van der Kolk, became the defining cultural artifact of the era. Parul Sehgal wrote a perceptive piece in The New Yorker called “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” noting how many characters in novels, memoirs and TV shows are trying to recover from psychological trauma — from Ted Lasso on down. In January 2022, Vox declared that “trauma” had become “the word of the decade,” noting that there were over 5,500 podcasts with the word in the title.

For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt.

a culture war, and that’s what happened to the psychological crisis. In one camp, there were the coddlers.

They sought to alter behavior and reform institutions so that no one would feel emotionally unsafe

the coddling approach turned out to be counterproductive. It was based on a series of false ideas that ended up hurting the people it was trying to help.

the first bad idea in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It was the notion that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” inducing people to look at the wounds in their past and feel debilitated, not stronger.

The second false idea was, “I am a thing to whom things happen.” The traumatized person is cast as a passive victim unable to control his own life. He is defined by suffering and

The third bad idea is, “If I keep you safe, you will be strong.”

But overprotective parenting and overprotective school administration don’t produce more resilient children; they produce less resilient ones.

The counterreaction to the coddlers came from what you might call the anti-fragile coalition. This was led by Jordan Peterson and thousands of his lesser imitators

they merely represented the flip side of the fragile victim mind-set.

The right-wing victimologists feel beset by hidden forces trying to oppress them, by a culture that conspires to unman them, dark shadowy conspiracies all around

recent right-wing narratives, even J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” often follow the trauma formula: “Take the lamentations about atrophying manhood and falling sperm counts. Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma. Once, we were whole, but now we’re not; now we suffer from a sickness we struggle to grasp or name.”

The instability of the self has created an immature public culture — impulsive, dramatic, erratic and cruel. In institution after institution, from churches to schools to nonprofits, the least mature voices dominate and hurl accusations, while the most mature lie low, trying to get through the day.

They are considerate to and gracious toward others because they can see situations from multiple perspectives

The founders of the therapeutic ethos thought they were creating autonomous individualists who would feel good about themselves. But, as Lasch forecast: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”

Maturity, now as ever, is understanding that you’re not the center of the universe. The world isn’t a giant story about me.

In a nontherapeutic ethos, people don’t build secure identities on their own. They weave their stable selves out of their commitments to and attachments with others. Their identities are forged as they fulfill their responsibilities as friends, family members, employees, neighbors and citizens. The process is social and other-absorbed; not therapeutic.

Maturity in this alternative ethos is achieved by getting out of your own selfish point of view and developing the ability to absorb, understand and inhabit the views of others.

Mature people are calm amid the storm because their perception lets them see the present challenges from a long-term vantage.

People on all sides genuinely come to believe they are powerless, unwilling to assume any responsibility for their plight — another classic symptom of immaturity.

They can withstand the setbacks because they have pointed their life toward some concrete moral goal.

“one of the greatest indicators of our own spiritual maturity is revealed in how we respond to the weaknesses, the inexperience and the potentially offensive actions of others.”

a sign of maturity is the ability to respond with understanding when other people have done something stupid and given you the opportunity to feel superior.

One of the book’s authors, Neil Howe, 71, has become a frequent podcast guest. A follow-up, “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” comes out this month.

The book’s outlook on the near future has made it appealing to macro traders and crypto enthusiasts, and it is frequently cited on the podcasts “Macro Voices,” “Wealthion” and “On the Margin.”

He described it as “this almost fun theory about history,” but added: “And yet there’s something deeply menacing about it.”

Mr. Arbery, who said he does not subscribe to the theory, sees parallels between the fourth turning and other nonscientific beliefs. “I modeled the way that Teresa talks about the fourth turning on the way that young liberals talk about astrology,” he said.

The play’s author, Will Arbery, 33, said he heard about “The Fourth Turning” while researching Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing firebrand and former adviser to President Donald J. Trump, who is a longtime fan of the book and directed a 2010 documentary based on its ideas.

“I’ve read ‘The Fourth Turning,’ and indeed found it useful from a macroeconomic investing perspective,” Lyn Alden, 35, an investment analyst, wrote in an email. “History doesn’t repeat, but it kind of gives us a loose framework to work with.”

“The Fourth Turning” captured a mood of decline in recent American life. “I remember feeling safe in the ’90s, and then as soon as 9/11 hit, the world went topsy-turvy,” he said. “Every time my cohort got to the point where we were optimistic, another crisis happened. When I read the book, I was like, ‘That makes sense.’”

“The Fourth Turning” was conceived during a period of relative calm. In the late 1980s, Mr. Howe, a Washington, D.C., policy analyst, teamed with William Strauss, a founder of the political satire troupe the Capitol Steps.

Their first book, “Generations,” told a story of American history through generational profiles going back to the 1600s. The book was said to have influenced Bill Clinton to choose a fellow baby boomer, Al Gore, as his running mate

when the 2008 financial crisis hit at almost exactly the point when the start of the fourth turning was predicted, it seemed to many that the authors might have been onto something. Recent events — the pandemic, the storming of the Capitol — have seemingly provided more evidence for the book’s fans.

Historically, a fourth turning crisis has always translated into a civil war, a war of great nations, or both, according to the book. Either is possible over the next decade, Mr. Howe said. But he is a doomsayer with an optimistic streak: Each fourth turning, in his telling, kicks off a renaissance in civic life.

In the new book, he describes what a coming civil war or geopolitical conflict might look like — though he shies away from casting himself as a modern-day Nostradamus.

“This big tidal shift is arriving,” Mr. Howe said. “But if you’re asking me which wave is going to knock down the lighthouse, I can’t do that. I can just tell you that this is the time period. It gives you a good idea of what to watch for.”

that’s particularly true on the I.R.A., which has to build all these things in the real world.

we’re trying to do industrial physical transformation at a speed and scale unheralded in American history. This is bigger than anything we have done at this speed ever.

The money is beginning to move out the door now, but we’re on a clock. Climate change is not like some other issues where if you don’t solve it this year, it is exactly the same to solve it next year. This is an issue where every year you don’t solve it, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere builds, warming builds, the effects compound

Solve, frankly, isn’t the right word there because all we can do is abate, a lot of the problems now baked in. So how is it going, and who can actually walk us through that?

Robinson Meyer is the founding executive editor of heatmap.news

why do all these numbers differ so much? How big is this thing?

in electric vehicles and in the effort, kind of this dual effort in the law, to both encourage Americans to buy and use electric vehicles and then also to build a domestic manufacturing base for electric vehicles.

on both counts, the data’s really good on electric vehicles. And that’s where we’re getting the fastest response from industry and the clearest response from industry to the law.

ROBINSON MEYER: Factories are getting planned. Steel’s going in the ground. The financing for those factories is locked down. It seems like they’re definitely going to happen. They’re permitted. Companies are excited about them. Large Fortune 500 automakers are confidently and with certainty planning for an electric vehicle future, and they’re building the factories to do that in the United States. They’re also building the factories to do that not just in blue states. And so to some degree, we can see the political certainty for electric vehicles going forward.

in other parts of the law, partially due to just vagaries of how the law is being implemented, tax credits where the fine print hasn’t worked out yet, it’s too early to say whether the law is working and how it’s going and whether it’s going to accomplish its goal

EZRA KLEIN: I always find this very funny in a way. The Congressional Budget Office scored it. They thought it would make about $380 billion in climate investments over a decade. So then you have all these other analyses coming out.

But there’s actually this huge range of outcomes in between where the thing passes, and maybe what you wanted to have happen happens. Maybe it doesn’t. Implementation is where all this rubber meets the road

the Rhodium Group, which is a consulting firm, they think it could be as high as $522 billion, which is a big difference. Then there’s this Goldman Sachs estimate, which the administration loves, where they say they’re projecting $1.2 trillion in incentives —

ROBINSON MEYER: All the numbers differ because most of the important incentives, most of the important tax credits and subsidies in the I.R.A., are uncapped. There’s no limit to how much the government might spend on them. All that matters is that some private citizen or firm or organization come to the government and is like, hey, we did this. You said you’d give us money for it. Give us the money.

because of that, different banks have their own energy system models, their own models of the economy. Different research groups have their own models.

we know it’s going to be wrong because the Congressional Budget Office is actually quite constrained in how it can predict how these tax credits are taken up. And it’s constrained by the technology that’s out there in the country right now.

The C.B.O. can only look at the number of electrolyzers, kind of the existing hydrogen infrastructure in the country, and be like, well, they’re probably all going to use these tax credits. And so I think they said that there would be about $5 billion of take up for the hydrogen tax credits.

But sometimes money gets allocated, and then costs overrun, and there delays, and you can’t get the permits, and so on, and the thing never gets built

the fact that the estimates are going up is to them early evidence that this is going well. There is a lot of applications. People want the tax credits. They want to build these new factories, et cetera.

a huge fallacy that we make in policy all the time is assuming that once money is allocated for something, you get the thing you’re allocating the money for. Noah Smith, the economics writer, likes to call this checkism, that money equals stuff.

EZRA KLEIN: They do not want that, and not wanting that and putting every application through a level of scrutiny high enough to try and make sure you don’t have another one

I don’t think people think a lot about who is cutting these checks, but a lot of it is happening in this very obscure office of the Department of Energy, the Loan Program Office, which has gone from having $40 billion in lending authority, which is already a big boost over it not existing a couple decades ago, to $400 billion in loan authority,

the Loan Program Office as one of the best places we have data on how this is going right now and one of the offices that’s responded fastest to the I.R.A.

the Loan Program Office is basically the Department of Energy’s in-house bank, and it’s kind of the closest thing we have in the US to what exists in other countries, like Germany, which is a State development bank that funds projects that are eventually going to be profitable.

It has existed for some time. I mean, at first, it kind of was first to play after the Recovery Act of 2009. And in fact, early in its life, it gave a very important loan to Tesla. It gave this almost bridge loan to Tesla that helped Tesla build up manufacturing capacity, and it got Tesla to where it is today.

EZRA KLEIN: It’s because one of the questions I have about that office and that you see in some of the coverage of them is they’re very afraid of having another Solyndra.

Now, depending on other numbers, including the D.O.E., it’s potentially as high as $100 billion, but that’s because the whole thing about the I.R.A. is it’s meant to encourage the build-out of this hydrogen infrastructure.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m never that excited when I see a government loans program turning a profit because I think that tends to mean they’re not making risky enough loans. The point of the government should be to bear quite a bit of risk —

And to some degree, Ford now has to compete, and US automakers are trying to catch up with Chinese EV automakers. And its firms have EV battery technology especially, but just have kind of comprehensive understanding of the EV supply chain that no other countries’ companies have

ROBINSON MEYER: You’re absolutely right that this is the key question. They gave this $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build these EV battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. It’s the largest loan in the office’s history. It actually means that the investment in these factories is going to be entirely covered by the government, which is great for Ford and great for our build-out of EVs

And to some degree, I should say, one of the roles of L.P.O. and one of the roles of any kind of State development bank, right, is to loan to these big factory projects that, yes, may eventually be profitable, may, in fact, assuredly be profitable, but just aren’t there yet or need financing that the private market can’t provide. That being said, they have moved very slowly, I think.

And they feel like they’re moving quickly. They just got out new guidelines that are supposed to streamline a lot of this. Their core programs, they just redefined and streamlined in the name of speeding them up

However, so far, L.P.O. has been quite slow in getting out new loans

I want to say that the pressure they’re under is very real. Solyndra was a disaster for the Department of Energy. Whether that was fair or not fair, there’s a real fear that if you make a couple bad loans that go bad in a big way, you will destroy the political support for this program, and the money will be clawed back, a future Republican administration will wreck the office, whatever it might be. So this is not an easy call.

when you tell me they just made the biggest loan in their history to Ford, I’m not saying you shouldn’t lend any money to Ford, but when I think of what is the kind of company that cannot raise money on the capital markets, the one that comes to mind is not Ford

They have made loans to a number of more risky companies than Ford, but in addition to speed, do you think they are taking bets on the kinds of companies that need bets? It’s a little bit hard for me to believe that it would have been impossible for Ford to figure out how to finance factorie

ROBINSON MEYER: Now, I guess what I would say about that is that Ford is — let’s go back to why Solyndra failed, right? Solyndra failed because Chinese solar deluged the market. Now, why did Chinese solar deluge the market? Because there’s such support of Chinese financing from the state for massive solar factories and massive scale.

EZRA KLEIN: — the private market can’t. So that’s the meta question I’m asking here. In your view, because you’re tracking this much closer than I am, are they too much under the shadow of Solyndra? Are they being too cautious? Are they getting money out fast enough?

ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s right; that basically, if we think the US should stay competitive and stay as close as it can and not even stay competitive, but catch up with Chinese companies, it is going to require large-scale state support of manufacturing.

EZRA KLEIN: OK, that’s fair. I will say, in general, there’s a constant thing you find reporting on government that people in government feel like they are moving very quickly

EZRA KLEIN: — given the procedural work they have to go through. And they often are moving very quickly compared to what has been done in that respect before, compared to what they have to get over. They are working weekends, they are working nights, and they are still not actually moving that quickly compared to what a VC firm can do or an investment bank or someone else who doesn’t have the weight of congressional oversight committees potentially calling you in and government procurement rules and all the rest of it.

ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s a theme across the government’s implementation of the I.R.A. right now, is that generally the government feels like it’s moving as fast as it can. And if you look at the Department of Treasury, they feel like we are publishing — basically, the way that most of the I.R.A. subsidies work is that they will eventually be administered by the I.R.S., but first the Department of the Treasury has to write the guidebook for all these subsidies, right?

the law says there’s a very general kind of “here’s thousands of dollars for EVs under this circumstance.” Someone still has to go in and write all the fine print. The Department of Treasury is doing that right now for each tax credit, and they have to do that before anyone can claim that tax credit to the I.R.S. Treasury feels like it’s moving extremely quickly. It basically feels like it’s completely at capacity with these, and it’s sequenced these so it feels like it’s getting out the most important tax credits first.

Private industry feels like we need certainty. It’s almost a year since the law passed, and you haven’t gotten us the domestic content bonus. You haven’t gotten us the community solar bonus. You haven’t gotten us all these things yet.

a theme across the government right now is that the I.R.A. passed. Agencies have to write the regulations for all these tax credits. They feel like they’re moving very quickly, and yet companies feel like they’re not moving fast enough.

that’s how we get to this point where we’re 311 days out from the I.R.A. passing, and you’re like, well, has it made a big difference? And I’m like, well, frankly, wind and solar developers broadly don’t feel like they have the full understanding of all the subsidies they need yet to begin making the massive investments

I think it’s fair to say maybe the biggest bet on that is green hydrogen, if you’re looking in the bill.

We think it’s going to be an important tool in industry. It may be an important tool for storing energy in the power grid. It may be an important tool for anything that needs combustion.

ROBINSON MEYER: Yeah, absolutely. So green hydrogen — and let’s just actually talk about hydrogen broadly as this potential tool in the decarbonization tool kit.

It’s a molecule. It is a very light element, and you can burn it, but it’s not a fossil fuel. And a lot of the importance of hydrogen kind of comes back to that attribute of it.

So when we look at sectors of the economy that are going to be quite hard to decarbonize — and that’s because there is something about fossil fuels chemically that is essential to how that sector works either because they provide combustion heat and steelmaking or because fossil fuels are actually a chemical feedstock where the molecules in the fossil fuel are going into the product or because fossil fuels are so energy dense that you can carry a lot of energy while actually not carrying that much mass — any of those places, that’s where we look at hydrogen as going.

green hydrogen is something new, and the size of the bet is huge. So can you talk about first just what is green hydrogen? Because my understanding of it is spotty.

The I.R.A. is extremely generous — like extremely, extremely generous — in its hydrogen subsidies

The first is for what’s called blue hydrogen, which is hydrogen made from natural gas, where we then capture the carbon dioxide that was released from that process and pump it back into the ground. That’s one thing that’s subsidized. It’s basically subsidized as part of this broader set of packages targeted at carbon capture

green hydrogen, which is where we take water, use electrolyzers on it, basically zap it apart, take the hydrogen from the water, and then use that as a fue

The I.R.A. subsidies for green hydrogen specifically, which is the one with water and electricity, are so generous that relatively immediately, it’s going to have a negative cost to make green hydrogen. It will cost less than $0 to make green hydrogen. The government’s going to fully cover the cost of producing it.

That is intentional because what needs to happen now is that green hydrogen moves into places where we’re using natural gas, other places in the industrial economy, and it needs to be price competitive with those things, with natural gas, for instance. And so as it kind of is transported, it’s going to cost money

As you make the investment to replace the technology, it’s going to cost money. And so as the hydrogen moves through the system, it’s going to wind up being price competitive with natural gas, but the subsidies in the bill are so generous that hydrogen will cost less than $0 to make a kilogram of it

There seems to be a sense that hydrogen, green hydrogen, is something we sort of know how to make, but we don’t know how to make it cost competitive yet. We don’t know how to infuse it into all the processes that we need to be infused into. And so a place where the I.R.A. is trying to create a reality that does not yet exist is a reality where green hydrogen is widely used, we have to know how to use it, et cetera.

And they just seem to think we don’t. And so you need all these factories. You need all this innovation. Like, they have to create a whole innovation and supply chain almost from scratch. Is that right?

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s exactly right. There’s a great Department of Energy report that I would actually recommend anyone interested in this read called “The Liftoff Report for Clean Hydrogen.” They made it for a few other technologies. It’s a hundred-page book that’s basically how the D.O.E. believes we’re going to build out a clean hydrogen economy.

And, of course, that is policy in its own right because the D.O.E. is saying, here is the years we’re going to invest to have certain infrastructure come online. Here’s what we think we need. That’s kind of a signal to industry that everyone should plan around those years as well.

It’s a great book. It’s like the best piece of industrial policy I’ve actually seen from the government at all. But one of the points it makes is that you’re going to make green hydrogen. You’re then going to need to move it. You’re going to need to move it in a pipeline or maybe a truck or maybe in storage tanks that you then cart around.

Once it gets to a facility that uses green hydrogen, you’re going to need to store some green hydrogen there in storage tanks on site because you basically need kind of a backup supply in case your main supply fails. All of those things are going to add cost to hydrogen. And not only are they going to add cost, we don’t really know how to do them. We have very few pipelines that are hydrogen ready.

All of that investment needs to happen as a result to make the green hydrogen economy come alive. And why it’s so lavishly subsidized is to kind of fund all that downstream investment that’s eventually going to make the economy come true.

But a lot of what has to happen here, including once the money is given out, is that things we do know how to build get built, and they get built really fast, and they get built at this crazy scale.

So I’ve been reading this paper on what they call “The Greens’ Dilemma” by J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman, who also wrote this paper called “Old Green Laws, New Green Deal,” or something like that. And I think they get at the scale problem here really well.

“The largest solar facility currently online in the US is capable of generating 585 megawatts. To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400-megawatt solar power facilities, each taking up at least 2,000 acres of land every week for the next 30 years.”

And that’s just solar. We’re not talking wind there. We’re not talking any of the other stuff we’ve discussed here, transmission lines. Can we do that? Do we have that capacity?

ROBINSON MEYER: No, we do not. We absolutely do not. I think we’re going to build a ton of wind and solar. We do not right now have the system set up to use that much land to build that much new solar and wind by the time that we need to build it. I think it is partially because of permitting laws, and I think it’s also partially because right now there is no master plan

There’s no overarching strategic entity in the government that’s saying, how do we get from all these subsidies in the I.R.A. to net zero? What is our actual plan to get from where we are right now to where we’re emitting zero carbon as an economy? And without that function, no project is essential. No activity that we do absolutely needs to happen, and so therefore everything just kind of proceeds along at a convenient pace.

given the scale of what’s being attempted here, you might think that something the I.R.A. does is to have some entity in the government, as you’re saying, say, OK, we need this many solar farms. This is where we think we should put them. Let’s find some people to build them, or let’s build them ourselves.

what it actually does is there’s an office somewhere waiting for private companies to send in an application for a tax credit for solar that they say they’re going to build, and then we hope they build it

it’s an almost entirely passive process on the part of the government. Entirely would be going too far because I do think they talk to people, and they’re having conversations

the builder applies, not the government plans. Is that accurate?

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s correct. Yes.

ROBINSON MEYER: I think here’s what I would say, and this gets back to what do we want the I.R.A. to do and what are our expectations for the I.R.A

If the I.R.A. exists to build out a ton of green capacity and shift the political economy of the country toward being less dominated by fossil fuels and more dominated by the clean energy industry, frankly, then it is working

If the I.R.A. is meant to get us all the way to net zero, then it is not capable of that.

in 2022, right, we had no way to see how we were going to reduce emissions. We did not know if we were going to get a climate bill at all. Now, we have this really aggressive climate bill, and we’re like, oh, is this going to get us to net zero?

But getting to net zero was not even a possibility in 2022.

The issue is that the I.R.A. requires, ultimately, private actors to come forward and do these things. And as more and more renewables get onto the grid, almost mechanically, there’s going to be less interest in bringing the final pieces of decarbonized electricity infrastructure onto the grid as well.

EZRA KLEIN: Because the first things that get applied for are the ones that are more obviously profitable

The issue is when you talk to solar developers, they don’t see it like, “Am I going to make a ton of money, yes or no?” They see it like they have a capital stack, and they have certain incentives and certain ways to make money based off certain things they can do. And as more and more solar gets on the grid, building solar at all becomes less profitable

also, just generally, there’s less people willing to buy the solar.

as we get closer to a zero-carbon grid, there is this risk that basically less and less gets built because it will become less and less profitable

EZRA KLEIN: Let’s call that the last 20 percent risk

EZRA KLEIN: — or the last 40 percent. I mean, you can probably attach different numbers to that

ROBINSON MEYER: Permitting is the primary thing that is going to hold back any construction basically, especially out West,

right now permitting fights, the process under the National Environmental Policy Act just at the federal level, can take 4.5 years

let’s say every single project we need to do was applied for today, which is not true — those projects have not yet been applied for — they would be approved under the current permitting schedule in 2027.

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s before they get built.

Basically nobody on the left talked about permitting five years ago. I don’t want to say literally nobody, but you weren’t hearing it, including in the climate discussion.

people have moved to saying we do not have the laws, right, the permitting laws, the procurement laws to do this at the speed we’re promising, and we need to fix that. And then what you’re seeing them propose is kind of tweak oriented,

Permitting reform could mean a lot of different things, and Democrats and Republicans have different ideas about what it could mean. Environmental groups, within themselves, have different ideas about what it could mean.

for many environmental groups, the permitting process is their main tool. It is how they do the good that they see themselves doing in the world. They use the permitting process to slow down fossil fuel projects, to slow down projects that they see as harming local communities or the local environment.

ROBINSON MEYER: So we talk about the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. Let’s just start calling it NEPA. We talk about the NEPA process

NEPA requires the government basically study any environmental impact from a project or from a decision or from a big rule that could occur.

Any giant project in the United States goes through this NEPA process. The federal government studies what the environmental impact of the project will be. Then it makes a decision about whether to approve the project. That decision has nothing to do with the study. Now, notionally, the study is supposed to inform the project.

the decision the federal government makes, the actual “can you build this, yes or no,” legally has no connection to the study. But it must conduct the study in order to make that decision.

that permitting reform is so tough for the Democratic coalition specifically is that this process of forcing the government to amend its studies of the environmental impact of various decisions is the main tool that environmental litigation groups like Earthjustice use to slow down fossil fuel projects and use to slow down large-scale chemical or industrial projects that they don’t think should happen.

when we talk about making this program faster, and when we talk about making it more immune to litigation, they see it as we’re going to take away their main tools to fight fossil fuel infrastructure

why there’s this gap between rhetoric and what’s actually being proposed is that the same tool that is slowing down the green build-out is also what’s slowing down the fossil fuel build-out

ROBINSON MEYER: They’re the classic conflict here between the environmental movement classic, let’s call it, which was “think globally, act locally,” which said “we’re going to do everything we can to preserve the local environment,” and what the environmental movement and the climate movement, let’s say, needs to do today, which is think globally, act with an eye to what we need globally as well, which is, in some cases, maybe welcome projects that may slightly reduce local environmental quality or may seem to reduce local environmental quality in the name of a decarbonized world.

Because if we fill the atmosphere with carbon, nobody’s going to get a good environment.

Michael Gerrard, who is professor at Columbia Law School. He’s a founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law there. It’s called “A Time for Triage,” and he has this sort of interesting argument that the environmental movement in general, in his view, is engaged in something he calls trade-off denial.

his view and the view of some people is that, look, the climate crisis is so bad that we just have to make those choices. We have to do things we would not have wanted to do to preserve something like the climate in which not just human civilization, but this sort of animal ecosystem, has emerged. But that’s hard, and who gets to decide which trade-offs to make?

what you’re not really seeing — not really, I would say, from the administration, even though they have some principles now; not really from California, though Gavin Newsom has a set of early things — is “this is what we think we need to make the I.R.A. happen on time, and this is how we’re going to decide what is a kind of project that gets this speedway through,” w

there’s a failure on the part of, let’s say, the environmental coalition writ large to have the courage to have this conversation and to sit down at a table and be like, “OK, we know that certain projects aren’t happening fast enough. We know that we need to build out faster. What could we actually do to the laws to be able to construct things faster and to meet our net-zero targets and to let the I.R.A. kind achieve what it could achieve?”

part of the issue is that we’re in this environment where Democrats control the Senate, Republicans control the House, and it feels very unlikely that you could just get “we are going to accelerate projects, but only those that are good for climate change,” into the law given that Republicans control the House.

part of the progressive fear here is that the right solutions must recognize climate change. Progressives are very skeptical that there are reforms that are neutral on the existence of climate change and whether we need to build faster to meet those demands that can pass through a Republican-controlled House.

one of the implications of that piece was it was maybe a huge mistake for progressives not to have figured out what they wanted here and could accept here, back when the negotiating partner was Joe Manchin.

Manchin’s bill is basically a set of moderate NEPA reforms and transmission reforms. Democrats, progressives refuse to move on it. Now, I do want to be fair here because I think Democrats absolutely should have seized on that opportunity, because it was the only moment when — we could tell already that Democrats — I mean, Democrats actually, by that moment, had lost the House.

I do want to be fair here that Manchin’s own account of what happened with this bill is that Senate Republicans killed it and that once McConnell failed to negotiate on the bill in December, Manchin’s bill was dead.

EZRA KLEIN: It died in both places.ROBINSON MEYER: It died in both places. I think that’s right.

Republicans already knew they were going to get the House, too, so they had less incentive to play along. Probably the time for this was October.

EZRA KLEIN: But it wasn’t like Democrats were trying to get this one done.

EZRA KLEIN: To your point about this was all coming down to the wire, Manchin could have let the I.R.A. pass many months before this, and they would have had more time to negotiate together, right? The fact that it was associated with Manchin in the way it was was also what made it toxic to progressives, who didn’t want to be held up by him anymore.

What becomes clear by the winter of this year, February, March of this year, is that as Democrats and Republicans begin to talk through this debt-ceiling process where, again, permitting was not the main focus. It was the federal budget. It was an entirely separate political process, basically.

EZRA KLEIN: I would say the core weirdness of the debt-ceiling fight was there was no main focus to it.

EZRA KLEIN: It wasn’t like past ones where it was about the debt. Republicans did some stuff to cut spending. They also wanted to cut spending on the I.R.S., which would increase the debt, right? It was a total mishmash of stuff happening in there.

That alchemy goes into the final debt-ceiling negotiations, which are between principals in Congress and the White House, and what we get is a set of basically the NEPA reforms in Joe Manchin’s bill from last year and the Mountain Valley pipeline, the thing that environmentalists were focused on blocking, and effectively no transmission reforms.

the set of NEPA reforms that were just enacted, that are now in the law, include — basically, the word reasonable has been inserted many times into NEPA. [LAUGHS] So the law, instead of saying the government has to study all environmental impacts, now it has to study reasonable environmental impacts.

this is a kind of climate win — has to study the environmental impacts that could result from not doing a project. The kind of average NEPA environmental impact study today is 500 pages and takes 4.5 years to produce. Under the law now, the government is supposed to hit a page limit of 150 to 300 pages.

there’s a study that’s very well cited by progressives from three professors in Utah who basically say, well, when you look at the National Forest Service, and you look at this 40,000 NEPA decisions, what mostly holds up these NEPA decisions is not like, oh, there’s too many requirements or they had to study too many things that don’t matter. It’s just there wasn’t enough staff and that staffing is primarily the big impediment. And so on the one hand, I think that’s probably accurate in that these are, in some cases — the beast has been starved, and these are very poorly staffed departments

The main progressive demand was just “we must staff it better.”

But if it’s taking you this much staffing and that much time to say something doesn’t apply to you, maybe you have a process problem —ROBINSON MEYER: Yes.EZRA KLEIN: — and you shouldn’t just throw endless resources at a broken process, which brings me — because, again, you can fall into this and never get out — I think, to the bigger critique her

these bills are almost symbolic because there’s so much else happening, and it’s really the way all this interlocks and the number of possible choke points, that if you touch one of them or even you streamline one of them, it doesn’t necessarily get you that f

“All told, over 60 federal permitting programs operate in the infrastructure approval regime, and that is just the federal system. State and local approvals and impact assessments could also apply to any project.”

their view is that under this system, it’s simply not possible to build the amount of decarbonization infrastructure we need at the pace we need it; that no amount of streamlining NEPA or streamlining, in California, CEQA will get you there; that we basically have been operating under what they call an environmental grand bargain dating back to the ’70s, where we built all of these processes to slow things down and to clean up the air and clean up the water.

we accepted this trade-off of slower building, quite a bit slower building, for a cleaner environment. And that was a good trade. It was addressing the problems of that era

now we have the problems of this era, which is we need to unbelievably, rapidly build out decarbonization infrastructure to keep the climate from warming more than we can handle and that we just don’t have a legal regime or anything.

You would need to do a whole new grand bargain for this era. And I’ve not seen that many people say that, but it seems true to me

the role that America had played in the global economy in the ’50s and ’60s where we had a ton of manufacturing, where we were kind of the factory to a world rebuilding from World War II, was no longer tenable and that, also, we wanted to focus on more of these kind of high-wage, what we would now call knowledge economy jobs.That was a large economic transition happening in the ’70s and ’80s, and it dovetailed really nicely with the environmental grand bargain.

At some point, the I.R.A. recognizes that that environmental grand bargain is no longer operative, right, because it says, we’re going to build all this big fiscal fixed infrastructure in the United States, we’re going to become a manufacturing giant again, but there has not been a recognition among either party of what exactly that will mean and what will be required to have it take hold.

It must require a form of on-the-ground, inside-the-fenceline, “at the site of the power plant” pollution control technology. The only way to do that, really, is by requiring carbon capture and requiring the large construction of major industrial infrastructure at many, many coal plants and natural gas plants around the country in order to capture carbon so it doesn’t enter the atmosphere, and so we don’t contribute to climate change. That is what the Supreme Court has ruled. Until that body changes, that is going to be the law.

So the E.P.A. has now, last month, proposed a new rule under the Clean Air Act that is going to require coal plants and some natural gas plants to install carbon capture technology to do basically what the Supreme Court has all but kind of required the E.P.A. to do

the E.P.A. has to demonstrate, in order to kind of make this rule the law and in order to make this rule pass muster with the Supreme Court, that this is tenable, that this is the best available and technologically feasible option

that means you actually have to allow carbon capture facilities to get built and you have to create a legal process that will allow carbon capture facilities to get built. And that means you need to be able to tell a power plant operator that if they capture carbon, there’s a way they can inject it back into the ground, the thing that they’re supposed to do with it.

Well, E.P.A. simultaneously has only approved the kind of well that you need to inject carbon that you’ve captured from a coal factory or a natural gas line back into the ground. It’s called a Class 6 well. The E.P.A. has only ever approved two Class 6 wells. It takes years for the E.P.A. to approve a Class 6 well.

And environmental justice groups really, really oppose these Class 6 wells because they see any carbon capture as an effort to extend the life of the fossil fuel infrastructure

The issue here is that it seems like C.C.S., carbon capture, is going to be essential to how the U.S. decarbonizes. Legally, we have no other choice because of the constraints the Supreme Court has placed on the E.P.A.. At the same time, environmental justice groups, and big green groups to some extent, oppose building out any C.C.S.

to be fair to them, right, they would say there are other ways to decarbonize. That may not be the way we’ve chosen because the politics weren’t there for it, but there are a lot of these groups that believe you could have 100 percent renewables, do not use all that much carbon capture, right? They would have liked to see a different decarbonization path taken too. I’m not sure that path is realistic.

what you do see are environmental groups opposing making it possible to build C.C.S. anywhere in the country at all.

EZRA KLEIN: The only point I’m making here is I think this is where you see a compromise a lot of them didn’t want to make —ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly, yeah.EZRA KLEIN: — which is a decarbonization strategy that actually does extend the life cycle of a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure using carbon capture. And because they never bought onto it, they’re still using the pathway they have to try to block it. The problem is that’s part of the path that’s now been chosen. So if you block it, you just don’t decarbonize. It’s not like you get the 100 percent renewable strategy.

ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly. The bargain that will emerge from that set of actions and that set of coalitional trade-offs is we will simply keep running this, and we will not cap it.

What could be possible is that progressives and Democrats and the E.P.A. turns around and says, “Oh, that’s fine. You can do C.C.S. You just have to cap every single stationary source in the country.” Like, “You want to do C.C.S.? We totally agree. Essential. You must put CSS infrastructure on every power plant, on every factory that burns fossil fuels, on everything.”

If progressives were to do that and were to get it into the law — and there’s nothing the Supreme Court has said, by the way, that would limit progressives from doing that — the upshot would be we shut down a ton more stationary sources and a ton more petrochemical refineries and these bad facilities that groups don’t want than we would under the current plan.

what is effectively going to happen is that way more factories and power plants stay open and uncapped than would be otherwise.

EZRA KLEIN: So Republican-controlled states are just on track to get a lot more of it. So the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that red states will get $623 billion in investments by 2030 compared to $354 billion for blue states.

why are red states getting so much more of this money?

ROBINSON MEYER: I think there’s two reasons. I think, first of all, red states have been more enthusiastic about getting the money. They’re the ones giving away the tax credits. They have a business-friendly environment. And ultimately, the way many, many of these red-state governors see it is that these are just businesses.

I think the other thing is that these states, many of them, are right-to-work states. And so they might pay their workers less. They certainly face much less risk financially from a unionization campaign in their state.

regardless of the I.R.A., that’s where manufacturing and industrial investment goes in the first place. And that’s where it’s been going for 20 years because of the set of business-friendly and local subsidies and right-to-work policies.

I think the administration would say, we want this to be a big union-led effort. We want it to go to the Great Lakes states that are our political firewall.

and it would go to red states, because that’s where private industry has been locating since the ’70s and ’80s, and it would go to the Southeast, right, and the Sunbelt, and that that wouldn’t be so bad because then you would get a dynamic where red-state senators, red-state representatives, red-state governors would want to support the transition further and would certainly not support the repeal of the I.R.A. provisions and the repeal of climate provisions, and that you’d get this kind of nice vortex of the investment goes to red states, red states feel less antagonistic toward climate policies, more investment goes to red states. Red-state governors might even begin to support environmental regulation because that basically locks in benefits and advantages to the companies located in their states already.

I think what you see is that Republicans are increasingly warming to EV investment, and it’s actually building out renewables and actually building out clean electricity generation, where you see them fighting harder.

The other way that permitting matters — and this gets into the broader reason why private investment was generally going to red states and generally going to the Sunbelt — is that the Sunbelt states — Georgia, Texas — it’s easier to be there as a company because housing costs are lower and because the cost of living is lower in those states.

it’s also partially because the Sunbelt and the Southeast, it was like the last part of the country to develop, frankly, and there’s just a ton more land around all the cities, and so you can get away with the sprawling suburban growth model in those citie

It’s just cheaper to keep building suburbs there.

EZRA KLEIN: So how are you seeing the fights over these rare-earth metals and the effort to build a safe and, if not domestic, kind of friend-shored supply chain there?

Are we going to be able to source some of these minerals from the U.S.? That process seems to be proceeding but going slowly. There are some minerals we’re not going to be able to get from the United States at all and are going to have to get from our allies and partners across the world.

The kind of open question there is what exactly is the bargain we’re going to strike with countries that have these critical minerals, and will it be fair to those countries?

it isn’t to say that I think the I.R.A. on net is going to be bad for other countries. I just think we haven’t really figured out what deal and even what mechanisms we can use across the government to strike deals with other countries to mine the minerals in those countries while being fair and just and creating the kind of economic arrangement that those countries want.

, let’s say we get the minerals. Let’s say we learn how to refine them. There is many parts of the battery and many parts of EVs and many, many subcomponents in these green systems that there’s not as strong incentive to produce in the U.S.

at the same time, there’s a ton of technology. One answer to that might be to say, OK, well, what the federal government should do is just make it illegal for any of these battery makers or any of these EV companies to work with Chinese companies, so then we’ll definitely establish this parallel supply chain. We’ll learn how to make cathodes and anodes. We’ll figure it out

The issue is that there’s technology on the frontier that only Chinese companies have, and U.S. automakers need to work with those companies in order to be able to compete with them eventually.

EZRA KLEIN: How much easier would it be to achieve the I.R.A.’s goals if America’s relationship with China was more like its relationship with Germany?

ROBINSON MEYER: It would be significantly easier, and I think we’d view this entire challenge very differently, because China, as you said, not only is a leader in renewable energy. It actually made a lot of the important technological gains over the past 15 years to reducing the cost of solar and wind. It really did play a huge role on the supply side of reducing the cost of these technologies.

If we could approach that, if China were like Germany, if China were like Japan, and we could say, “Oh, this is great. China’s just going to make all these things. Our friend, China, is just going to make all these technologies, and we’re going to import them.

So it refines 75 percent of the polysilicon that you need for solar, but the machines that do the refining, 99 percent of them are made in China. I think it would be reckless for the U.S. to kind of rely on a single country and for the world to rely on a single country to produce the technologies that we need for decarbonization and unwise, regardless of our relationship with that country.

We want to geographically diversify the supply chain more, but it would be significantly easier if we did not have to also factor into this the possibility that the US is going to need to have an entirely separate supply chain to make use of for EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries potentially in the near-term future.

, what are three other books they should read?

The first book is called “The End of the World” by Peter Brannen. It’s a book that’s a history of mass extinctions, the Earth’s five mass extinctions, and, actually, why he doesn’t think we’re currently in a mass extinction or why, at least, things would need to go just as bad as they are right now for thousands and thousands of years for us to be in basically the sixth extinction.

The book’s amazing for two reasons. The first is that it is the first that really got me to understand deep time.

he explains how one kind of triggered the next one. It is also an amazing book for understanding the centrality of carbon to Earth’s geological history going as far back as, basically, we can track.

“Climate Shock” by Gernot Wagner and Marty Weitzman. It’s about the economics of climate change

Marty Weitzman, who I think, until recently, was kind of the also-ran important economist of climate change. Nordhaus was the famous economist. He was the one who got all attention. He’s the one who won the Nobel.

He focuses on risk and that climate change is specifically bad because it will damage the environment, because it will make our lives worse, but it’s really specifically bad because we don’t know how bad it will be

it imposes all these huge, high end-tail risks and that blocking those tail risks is actually the main thing we want to do with climate policy.

That is I think, in some ways, what has become the U.S. approach to climate change and, to some degree, to the underlying economic thinking that drives even the I.R.A., where we want to just cut off these high-end mega warming scenarios. And this is a fantastic explanation of that particular way of thinking and of how to apply that way of thinking to climate change and also to geoengineerin

The third book, a little controversial, is called “Shorting the Grid” by Meredith Angwin

her argument is basically that electricity markets are not the right structure to organize our electricity system, and because we have chosen markets as a structured, organized electricity system in many states, we’re giving preferential treatment to natural gas and renewables, two fuels that I think climate activists may feel very different ways about, instead of coal, which she does think we should phase out, and, really, nuclear

By making it easier for renewables and natural gas to kind of accept these side payments, we made them much more profitable and therefore encouraged people to build more of them and therefore underinvested in the forms of generation, such as nuclear, that actually make most of their money by selling electrons to the grid, where they go to people’s homes.

A high vaccination rate was especially important in Florida, which trails only Maine in the share of residents 65 and older. By the end of July, Florida had vaccinated about 60 percent of adults, just shy of the national average

Had it reached a vaccination rate of 74 percent — the average for five New England states at the time — it could have prevented more than 16,000 deaths and more than 61,000 hospitalizations that summer, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.

in Florida, unlike the nation as a whole — and states like New York and California that Mr. DeSantis likes to single out — most people who died from Covid died after vaccines became available to all adults, not before.

Mr. DeSantis and his aides have said that his opposition was to mandates, not to the vaccinations themselves. They say the governor only questioned the efficacy of the shots once it became evident that they did not necessarily prevent infection — which prompted him to criticize experts and the federal government.

The governor had early success in following his instincts. In 2020, the state supplied its nearly 4,000 long-term care homes with Covid tests and isolated Covid patients, avoiding New York’s mistake of releasing Covid patients from hospitals to nursing homes where they infected others. Florida’s death rate in the pandemic’s first year, adjusted for age, was lower than all but 10 other states’.

Florida was also one of only four states to require schools to hold in-person classes in the fall of 2020, a move that Mr. DeSantis has said defied the nation’s public health experts

In fact, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a federal infectious disease expert on former President Donald J. Trump’s task force, said repeatedly that summer and fall that schools could open safely with the right precautions. Nonetheless, facing strong opposition from teachers’ unions, nearly three-fourths of the nation’s 100 largest school districts offered only remote learning that fall.

At the same time, though, the governor was embracing more extreme views, including those of Dr. Scott W. Atla

Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya argued that people who were not at risk of severe consequences should not face Covid restrictions. If they were infected, they would develop natural immunity, which would eventually build up in the population and cause the virus to fade away, they said.

Many public health experts were alarmed by this strategy, which was articulated in a document known as the Great Barrington Declaration. They said it would be impossible to ring-fence the vulnerable, or even to clearly communicate to the public who they were. Besides older Americans, as many as 41 million younger adults were considered to be at high risk of severe disease if infected because of underlying medical conditions like obesity.

Dr. Atlas, however, argued that the virus was not dangerous to an overwhelming majority of Americans. Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya said the Covid death rate for everyone under 70 was very low. Dr. Atlas claimed that children had “virtually zero” risk of death.

As of this summer, more than 345,000 Americans under 70 have died of the virus, and more than 3.5 million have been hospitalized

The disease has killed nearly 2,300 children and adolescents, and nearly 200,000 have been hospitalized.

Mr. DeSantis gave him a platform at a series of public events in Florida at the end of the summer of 2020. He would go on to echo Dr. Atlas’s views, sometimes in modified form, throughout the pandemic.

Mr. DeSantis subsequently promoted the shots in 27 counties. Florida offered the vaccine to everyone 65 and older, an eligibility system simpler than an early one recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and adopted by many states, that prioritized essential workers and those over 75.

But his enthusiasm for shots waned fast, tracking the growing hostility toward them among the party’s conservative activists. In late February, when Mr. DeSantis hosted a gathering of such activists for the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, he boasted that Florida was an “oasis of freedom” in a nation led by misguided health authorities.

By the time all adults became eligible for the vaccines in April of that year, Mr. DeSantis was rarely promoting them.

“Some are choosing not to take it, which is fine,” he said in March, at a 100-minute public event on Covid in which he did not once urge people to get vaccinated. In dozens of appearances on Fox News in the first half of 2021, he was carefully neutral about shots, except for those over 65.

“Younger people are just simply at very little risk for this,”

A few months later, he told Fox News that he had concluded early on that Covid “was something that was risky for elderly people,” but that it posed minimal risks for people “who were in reasonably good health, who were, say, under 50.”

The data-driven governor also turned away from Covid case data.

In May 2021, Florida closed its 27 state-run testing centers. The next month, on orders from the governor’s office, the Health Department halted daily reports on infections and deaths, switching to weekly reports that drew less attention.

Both polls and political events showed that Republicans were not as excited as Democrats about the shots. At an Alabama political rally that August, Mr. Trump recommended the vaccine — and was booed. When a reporter asked Mr. DeSantis later that year if he had gotten a booster shot, he responded that he had gotten “the normal shot.”

After the highly contagious Delta variant began spreading in Florida that summer, Mr. DeSantis insisted that his approach had worked. Younger adults were driving the surge but “they’re not getting really sick from it or anything,” he said, adding: “They will develop immunity as a result of those infections.”

But they were getting sick. And vaccinations, which Mr. DeSantis suddenly began recommending again in late July, took weeks to confer protection

With hospitalizations rising, he began a campaign to offer monoclonal antibody treatments — a triage response to the pandemic’s frightening resurgence.

The drug cost vastly more than shots and required more medical staff to administer. Within about six weeks, the state had administered more than 90,000 treatments and probably kept 5,000 people out of the hospital, Dr. Rivkees said.

Mr. DeSantis accused the media in early August of “lying” about Covid patients’ flooding hospitals. Two weeks later, Mary C. Mayhew, head of the Florida Hospital Association, said: “There can be no question that many Florida hospitals are stretched to their absolute limits.”

“Our patients are younger and sicker,” Mr. Smith wrote. Of 17 patients on ventilators in intensive care on Aug. 13, 2021, more than half were younger than 55. Only one was vaccinated.

“People say that the decision about vaccination is a personal one and it doesn’t affect anyone else,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Tell that to the kids who lost their mom.”

When shots became available last year for children under 5, Florida did not preorder them because, Mr. DeSantis said, he did not consider them “appropriate.” Florida’s vaccination rates are well below the national average for children under 5. The state also trails in booster shots.

After Dr. Ladapo issued misleading claims about the risks of Covid shots for young men, the heads of the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration sent a scathing four-page rebuttal. Such misinformation “puts people at risk of death or serious illness,” they said.

While the pandemic waned, leaving more than 80,000 Floridians and 1.13 million Americans dead, the governor continued to push policies that kept him at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine and anti-mandate conversation. A new state law, signed by Mr. DeSantis in May, bans government agencies, businesses and schools from requiring Covid testing, vaccination or mask wearing.

“Everything involving Covid — I think there needs to be major, major accountability,” he said in Iowa this month. “Because if there’s not, if you don’t have a reckoning, they are going to do it again.”

An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.” This belies the reality that Black people, he said, “fairly sparkle with diversity of outlook.”

He disparaged what he called “the peculiar relationship between Black intellectuals and the white ones who seem loath to criticize us for fear of being branded racists — which is itself a mark of racism of a sort.”

At the same time, Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”