Members of the 118th Congress leave the House of Representatives chamber on January 3, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images) If last month’s Democratic National Convention was any indication, climate action has all but vanished from the Democratic Party platform. Presidential nominee Kamala Harris only glancingly referenced climate change, and out of the twenty-one hours of content across the four nights, only about fifteen minutes expressly focused on the climate. The central message of that quarter of an hour? Democrats are ready to “invest” in climate action. A great, if vague, start: tackling climate change will take massive expenditures to overhaul our inefficient, fossil fuel–dependent system. In the past two years, Democrats have started to put their money where their mouths are. The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (often referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law ) represent much-needed cash infusions for projects like investment in clean energy and the highway removal pilot program. But they neither provide the scale of investment required for a green transition nor proscribe harmful behavior. Spending alone, especially at this rate, will not be enough to address the existential threat of climate change. We should be thinking bigger — pursuing major regulatory legislation, laws that set emissions caps and create consequences for polluters. The problem is that Congress has more or less ceased legislating on environmental and climate issues — passing laws that do anything other than dispense funds toward climate goals. Yet this vacuum of meaningful regulation is relatively recent. Congress has tackled huge environmental changes before, and it can do so again. The Glory Days of Environmental Regulation Rightfully chagrined commentators often talk about the issue of Congress not legislating as if it reflected the eternal state of our government. But Congress wasn’t […]