Explore how to Sustain Democracy and Climate Action Amid Trump Attacks with Illinois Rep. Sean Casten

Post-show updates - U.S. Representative Sean Casten, a climate-focused Democrat representing Illinois’s Sixth District since 2019, has been a guest on my Sustain What webcast twice - but both times in 2022, during the fight over how to drive clean-energy policy under Democratic President Joe Biden. (See below.)

With Republicans in perpetual retreat on the issue, the debate mainly was over how to get progressive, centrist and conservative Democrats (i.e., Joe Manchin) to find common ground on issues like untangling regulatory impediments to speed the spread of climate-safe energy infrastructure. My how things have changed…

Now with Donald Trump back in the White House and obsequious Republicans holding the Senate and House majorities, the question is not only how to sustain climate progress, both on the clean-energy and resilience ends, but also how to sustain Constitutional governance.

I caught up with Casten Friday. This point on standing up to bullies was particularly powerful but there’s much more:

I think a lot of institutions and elites in our society have … empowered the bully to go farther.

And bullies do not back down when you give them your lunch money. They come back for more the next day. And so I think, yes, we could talk about how we might retreat to our corners and protect our little corner of turf and live to fight another day.

Or we could recognize that we're all in this together. And our job right now is to leave our grandchildren, not only leave our grandchildren a better world than the one that our grandparents left us, but leave our grandchildren a world where they can say, you know, but for grandpa, we wouldn't have this world.

And that's the challenge that's before all of us right now.

You can also watch and share our Sustain What chat on Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube or my X/Twitter account.

It was a pleasure to get good questions and insights from Curt Newton, who runs the Open Courseware work at MIT and is also a key part of the team running the Climate Action Simulation game and En-ROADS climate-scenario workshops.

Casten also gave a strong pitch for a new approach to cap-and-trade climate policies. Learn more in the conversation or here.

For a time trip to those Biden years, click back to my posts here from August and April 2022: