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Democracy is under attack everywhere, and today I want us all to remember that while we’re calmly peeling back the layers of the January 6 conspiracy, people are dying for their right to be free in Ukraine.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The U.S. leaves parents on their own for a reason. This rifle has ruined America. Long COVID could be a “mass deterioration event.” No Letup

The January 6 committee will be back in session tomorrow, when I’ll return to what we’re learning about the fight for democracy in America. (Personally, I’m already enjoying the clip of the White House lawyer Eric Herschmann telling the coup whisperer John Eastman, in effect, to go home and get his shine box.)

In Ukraine, however, another battle for democracy is being fought not with papers and emails and texts, but in blood and ash and fire. All of this is happening because a dictator in the Kremlin has told the Ukrainians to bow in obedience, relinquish their freedom, and become his subjects, and they have refused, some at the cost of their lives.

The Ukrainians are, so far, surviving. The Russians, defeated in the battle for Kyiv, are now fighting a savage war of attrition on Ukraine’s eastern front. Vladimir Putin’s dream of capturing the country is gone, but the short-term operational goal now seems to be to grind down the Ukrainians, soldier by soldier, and capture territory, meter by meter, in the Donbas.

This is why Western strategists are watching the battle for Severodonetsk so closely. The city is wedged in between two major Russian-controlled areas, and capturing it would solve a lot of Moscow’s problems. The city, now “split in half,” is likely to fall. This matters because afterward, it may look like the Russians are pausing or letting up, when they will more likely be consolidating a significant gain across the Ukrainian eastern front that will allow them to launch a major offensive later in the year.

So far, the West is doing the right things—or, most of the free West is, anyway. Still, we need to do everything faster and bigger. In The New York Times yesterday, Bret Stephens referred to a Richard Nixon quote I’d never heard; when told what assistance the Israelis needed to defend themselves during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Nixon ordered his staff to “double it” and then to “get the hell out of here and get the job done.”

This is good advice for the Biden administration, which this afternoon pledged another $1 billion of aid. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Brussels today, heading a “contact group” of nearly 50 nations to help get even more assistance for Ukraine and to transition Ukraine from Soviet-era weapons to modern NATO arms.

I want to add a word here about Secretary Austin. When he was nominated, I was uncomfortable. I worked for the Defense Department for a quarter century, and I am rather old-school in my hesitance to appoint senior military officers to Cabinet positions (unless your name is George Marshall). I prefer civilians, who have not acquired the ingrained habit of military obedience to the president, which is why I cautioned about Donald Trump’s fascination with hiring generals into the White House.

And yet, Austin’s appointment turned out to be a lucky break.

In a less dangerous period, it would be great to have a defense intellectual in the Pentagon who can work with the president on a vision for a better and more modern Department of Defense. When Russia launched the largest war in Europe since the Nazis marched east, however, what the United States and NATO needed was a military leader who understands operations on the ground and the kinds of weapons systems that are in play. Austin has plenty of that experience, including as commander of Central Command and from his time in Syria. This isn’t the time for a lot of chin-pulling big-think; this is a time for talking to our friends and allies in very detailed terms about weapons systems and how to get them where they need to be. Austin’s the right man for that.

Moscow’s grab for Ukraine has been defeated. But the war is not over, and we need to shake off romantic notions that the Ukrainians are going to march onward and recapture all the occupied Ukrainian territories. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has often compared his country’s struggle against Russia to World War II, a fight between a free people and a barbaric invader. He’s right, and it won’t be over soon. We need to stay firm in our support.

Further reading:

In Ukraine, youth has ended The war in Ukraine has exposed a critical American vulnerability

Read all of our coverage of the war on Ukraine.

Today’s News The Justice Department charged the Buffalo-supermarket shooting suspect with 26 counts of hate crimes and weapons violations. The  Federal Reserve announced the largest interest-rate increase since 1994, as it attempts to combat rising inflation. The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal from several Republican-led states to defend a Trump-administration immigration policy. Dispatches Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg asked an artificial-intelligence tool to draw a “Hanukkah Monster.” It delivered. Wait, What?: Trump’s failspawns took a turn at the January 6 hearings, and it was embarrassing, Molly Jong-Fast writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf highlights a blunt-force proposal for fixing inflation. Evening Read (Illustration by Oliver Munday. Sources: Gallo Images / Getty; Ed Habershon / BBC)

They Bent to Their Knees and Kissed the Sand

Story by Cullen Murphy

When Olivier Bancoult boarded the ship that was to take him 1,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to the Chagos Archipelago—his childhood home, from which he and his fellow islanders had been expelled 50 years earlier—he carried five wrought-iron crosses.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How TikTok killed the video star A rabbi explains why her religion makes her pro-abortion. Brexit promised Britons freedom. “Instead, we got little stamps on beer glasses.” Culture Break (Getty)

Read. Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez, is a philosophical novel that also happens to be a page-turner.

Or try another pick from our reading list of books you might’ve missed when the world shut down in 2020.

Watch. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, released 20 years ago, offers a warning about technology the world is only beginning to heed.

Play our daily crossword.

Speaking of Spielberg (and World War II), every year on Memorial Day, there’s a lot of rewatching of Band of Brothers, the amazing HBO miniseries about a company of U.S. soldiers in Europe. But don’t neglect Michael Kamen’s majestic score the rest of the year, including stirring suites that you didn’t hear in the series.

— Tom

P.S. Our podcast team wants to hear your questions about Dobbs v. Jackson and the future of abortion rights. Please send a voicemail of about a minute or shorter to radioatlantic@theatlantic.com to tell us what’s on your mind about the legal, practical, and other implications of the SCOTUS decision.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Pick your poison: high inflation or a recession. Which would you prefer and why?

Send responses to conor@theatlantic.com or reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

What if the Fed raised interest rates by 2 percentage points immediately? That’s what Noah Smith proposes to fight inflation, the force that’s been ravaging wallets and bank accounts coast to coast. Smith’s critics say a rate hike that sharp, done all at once, would put millions out of work.

Smith’s reply:

The fear of an economic downturn is certainly legitimate. The Great Depression was the greatest economic calamity in our history so far, and the Great Recession that began in 2008 was enormously damaging as well. The Volcker recessions of the early 1980s that ended the 70s inflation … probably left permanent scars on the Rust Belt. The harms of unemployment are concentrated on society’s most vulnerable. But at the same time, recession isn’t the only economic danger to worry about. Moderate inflation might be tolerable, but high and accelerating inflation is itself a huge danger to the economy.

In the extreme case, it can cause total economic collapse. Even if things never progress to hyperinflation, sustained rapid price rises can hollow out the middle class … Inflation is at its highest in 40 years, and much of this appears to be due to excessive aggregate demand. Recessions are bad, but a mild recession now is far preferable to the severe, Volcker-like recession that will be necessary to quell inflation if expectations become entrenched.

The January 6 Hearings

Bill Kristol argues that it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture, which he describes as follows:

The committee will show how Trump propagated the lie that he hadn’t lost; how Trump pressured state legislators to overturn their states’ results based on lies; how Trump pressured senior officials at the Department of Justice to support this effort; how Trump pressured his vice president to join the conspiracy to overturn the results; and how Trump summoned the mob to Washington and encouraged them to storm the Capitol in a last ditch effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. So the heart of the matter is that Donald Trump was the head of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

Neal Katyal argues that the hearings may lay the foundations for criminal charges against Donald Trump:

Public hearings serve a subtle function. They permit the minds of the American people to acculturate to the facts and evidence. By laying out the facts that explain what Trump did, the Jan. 6 hearings can in advance help acclimate the public to why the Justice Department has to take criminal action against the former president. The hearings may afford the department a deeper and public explanation of its reasoning than an indictment out of the blue would offer. Public sentiment of this kind could help insulate the department against a claim that it is politically motivated. These hearings may prove to be a bridge between the Justice Department and the public.

But David Brooks wishes that the committee was more focused on the threat to future presidential elections:

We don’t need a committee to simply regurgitate what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We need a committee that will preserve democracy on Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2029. We need a committee to locate the weaknesses in our democratic system and society and find ways to address them. The core problem here is not the minutiae of who texted what to chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6 last year. The core problem is that there are millions of Americans who have three convictions: that the election was stolen, that violence is justified in order to rectify it and that the rules and norms that hold our society together don’t matter. Those millions of Americans are out there right now. I care more about their present and future activities than about their past. Many of them are running for local office to be in a position to disrupt future elections. I’d like the committee to describe who they are, what motivates them and how much power they already have.

[Read: 10 reader views on crime in their neighborhoods]

A Progressive Critique of Wokeness

Sam Adler-Bell is the author of this much-discussed article. Its thesis:

The critique of “wokeness” may point to a real problem for socialists, feminists, and other radicals, one obscured by our disdain for its messengers and their motivations … To elucidate it further, I’m going to offer … another definition of “wokeness,” one which bears at least some resemblance to the way it is deployed in our jaundiced contemporary discourses. Here it is: Wokeness refers to the invocation of unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas in a manner which suggests they are self-evident.

This idiom—or perhaps communicative register—replaces the obligation of persuading others to adopt our values with the satisfaction of signaling our allegiance and literacy to those who already agree. In some cases, this means we speak in an insular language that alienates those who haven’t stewed in the same activist cultural milieu. At other times, it means we express fealty to a novel or unintuitive norm, while suggesting that anyone who doesn’t already agree with it is a bad person.

If you think this phenomenon should not be called “wokeness,” that’s fine; use a different term in your head as you read on. But if you’ve spent any time in progressive or left-wing political spaces in the past decade (campus activism, nonprofits, progressive campaigns, Twitter dot com), I suspect you know exactly what I’m talking about.

“Purity, Sorcery, and Cancel Culture”

Virginia Postrel draws on the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas to understand purity conflicts, and argues in one passage that purity purges pose a particular threat to the constitution of knowledge:

Terrifying for the relatively few individuals targeted, purity purges strike fear more broadly because they lack a stopping point. Zealous or ambitious people can keep shifting and tightening the definition of impurities. Even if the numbers are small, at least for the present, institutional structures have shifted in ways that portend amplifying conflict. And while the consequences for individuals may be severe, the social results could be devastating. Knitters may get along fine after a few purges and schisms, but how can knowledge-seeking organizations like universities and publications do their jobs if their members are afraid to be difficult or different? If they manage to function, will they remain credible?

Dysfunction in Progressive Institutions

In The Intercept, Ryan Grim reports that numerous progressive advocacy organizations are in tumult and unable to carry out their missions because of frequent or ongoing staff meltdowns, characterized by what critics describe as callout culture, cancel culture, or trashing.

Grim writes:

This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election, and then Joe Biden’s, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions …

In the long term, the organizations may become better versions of themselves while finally living the values they’ve long fought for. In the short term, the battles between staff and organizational leadership have effectively sidelined major progressive institutions at a critical moment in history. “We used to want to make the world a better place,” said one leader of a progressive organization. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.”

Elsewhere Grim quotes a 1976 essay by Jo Freeman that is arguably more apt today than it was back then:

What is “trashing,” this colloquial term that expresses so much, yet explains so little? It is not disagreement; it is not conflict; it is not opposition. These are perfectly ordinary phenomena which, when engaged in mutually, honestly, and not excessively, are necessary to keep an organism or organization healthy and active. Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy ...

Whatever methods are used, trashing involves a violation of one’s integrity, a declaration of one’s worthlessness, and an impugning of one’s motives. In effect, what is attacked is not one’s actions, or one’s ideas, but one’s self. This attack is accomplished by making you feel that your very existence is inimical to the Movement and that nothing can change this short of ceasing to exist. These feelings are reinforced when you are isolated from your friends as they become convinced that their association with-you is similarly inimical to the Movement and to themselves. Any support of you will taint them. Eventually all your colleagues join in a chorus of condemnation which cannot be silenced, and you are reduced to a mere parody of your previous self.

Freddie deBoer articulates a different ethic:

An ethic of forgiveness and sympathy for those who have screwed up is of course not limitless. I’m not sitting around waiting for Harvey Weinstein to get another chance. But if we’re truly opposed to the endless hunt for heretics that has gripped our popular culture, we should have a generous definition of who we should consider forgiving. With the exception of those who have committed serious crimes or otherwise deliberately hurt others in a malicious way, I think we should err on the side of equanimity and a refusal to judge … I want a more forgiving and compassionate social culture because I know I’m a sinner who needs forgiveness personally. But I also know that all of us are, that the only people who haven’t yet been taken to task for their crimes are those whose crimes are yet undiscovered. I also know that every major religion and moral philosophy you can name contains an injunction against self-righteousness and sitting in judgment of others; none of us have the credibility needed to make those judgments. Vengeance is the lord’s alone for a reason, and we all have it coming.

[Read: Do voters see a difference between crime and homelessness?]

Provocation of the Week

Writing in Palladium, Ginevra Davis describes how Stanford administrators systematically destroyed the traditions of residential life in the name of safety and equity.

Here’s one passage:

Stanford took the little neighborhood with the most beautiful homes on campus and turned it into office buildings. It sounds so good: “community center.” How could you be lonely on a campus with so many community centers? At Stanford, we have an office for every problem.

Mental health is a Big Problem in our generation. About 71 percent of college students say that they are “very sad.” I wonder how many sad kids are just lonely. Our former fraternity houses have been filled with offices to help us feel better, and we are sadder and sicker than any generation before. If you are sad, Stanford has an office building with a number you can call and a series of “community conversations” about neurodiversity. But what if you are just unhappy spending your days alone, in your lettered house and numbered room? Stanford students live in brand new buildings with white walls. We have a $20 million dollar meditation center that nobody uses. But students didn’t ask for any of that.

We just wanted a dirty house with friends.

The entire essay is usefully read in conversation with this John Seery article from 2017 on administrative bloat and diminishing human connections at Pomona College.

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The video was the very definition of cringe. One day after Donald Trump endorsed her Republican primary opponent, freshman Representative Nancy Mace filmed a two-minute clip of herself outside the shiny black facade of Trump Tower in Manhattan—approximately 800 miles from her South Carolina district—to remind her followers that she was still loyal to the former president. “America was stronger all around the world, and quite frankly freedom and democracy was stronger all around the world” when Trump was in office, she told them.

The move looked desperate because it was. Mace had been extremely critical of Trump after the Capitol attack on January 6, but blowback from the MAGA right, and her fellow Republican lawmakers, had reminded her to tread more carefully. This week, Mace’s caution paid off: She defeated Katie Arrington, her Trump-backed challenger, by eight points in yesterday’s South Carolina Republican primary. For some in her party, Mace’s victory is evidence that GOP lawmakers must be loyal to Trump, but maybe not unfailingly so. It “shows you don’t have to kiss the ring,” Chip Felkel, a state Republican strategist, told me. “She polished the ring—she didn’t kiss it.” That’s likely true. But other factors worked in Mace’s favor too.

Since her election in 2020, Mace has offered a study in Trump-era political shape-shifting. During her campaign, Mace, 44, did not shy away from her devotion to Trump. She had worked on his campaign in 2016, and she promised to be his ally in Congress. Which is why it was so surprising when she emerged as one of the most vocal GOP lawmakers condemning him for his misleading rhetoric ahead of the January 6 insurrection. Here was a Republican with a different kind of story: a divorced mother of two and the first female graduate of the Citadel, South Carolina’s revered military college, who seemed eager to lead the GOP in a new direction. She was on cable news almost constantly in the days after the Capitol siege. Trump’s “entire legacy was wiped out yesterday,” she told CNN. When the Fox News host Neil Cavuto asked her whether she still believed that Trump had a future in the GOP, Mace replied: “I do not.”

Just as quickly, though, Mace seemed to realize the folly of her commentary, at least by the standards of today’s Republican Party. When the House moved to impeach Trump for his role on January 6, she voted merely to censure him. Soon, she started sounding more like the other Trump-fearing Republicans in her party. I documented Mace’s evolution in a profile last summer—how she started appearing on Fox News weekly to riff on culture-war talking points; began picking Twitter fights with progressive lamwakers; and voted to oust fellow GOP Representative Liz Cheney for continuing to criticize Trump. “To observe Mace these past several months has been to watch in real time as a freshman Republican absorbs a few fundamental truths,” I wrote at the time. “The base loves Trump as much as ever, and his allies are working to unseat anyone who fails to show fealty. There is no post-Trump GOP, not yet.”

[Read: How a rising Trump critic lost her nerve]

That Mace won reelection seems, at least in part, a testament to the course correction she made. (Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.) Trump fans in her district might have been able to forgive Mace for her early infraction, even if Trump hasn’t. At a rally in March, the former president called her a “terrible person” and a “grandstanding loser.” Last night, he successfully took out his ire on another disloyal South Carolina Republican. Representative Tom Rice, who voted for impeachment after January 6, was walloped by the Trump-endorsed State Representative Russell Fry. Rice had taken a very different approach from Mace: Instead of backing down, he doubled down, calling January 6 Trump’s “inexcusable failure” and voicing his hope that Trump never runs again. For that, Rice paid the ultimate political price.

But Mace’s tightrope walk on Trump isn’t the only reason she was able to hang on to her seat. The first congressional district of South Carolina, which contains Charleston, is relatively moderate—more so than Rice’s district; Charleston County was one of the only two counties in the state that didn’t back Trump in the 2016 primary, and the Democrat Joe Cunningham won the district in 2018. Mace, as the incumbent, also had name-ID and institutional advantages. An even more significant factor, local strategists argue, is that Arrington, a former member of the South Carolina State House, was a weak candidate. Voters had already seen her lose a general election to Cunningham in 2018, and Mace’s campaign had twice as much cash on hand. Had Trump actually invested money in the race, Arrington potentially could have pulled it out, Tyler Jones, a Democratic strategist and an adviser for Cunningham, told me. “If he’d have spent $500,000 on a straight-to-camera ad and said, ‘Look, Katie’s a better candidate. Nancy Mace has let you down,’ that would have been really effective,” Jones said.

So far in the midterm primaries, the former president has failed to punish as many disloyal members of his party as he’d like. Last month, a string of seven Trump-endorsed candidates were defeated in their primaries, according to an Axios analysis, including one who ran against Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who flouted Trump’s request to “find” more votes for him. Governor Brian Kemp, who had angered Trump too, beat his own Trump-backed rival in every single county in Georgia.

While other candidates under threat from Trump have been more consistent in their criticism than Mace, those who have won their primaries have had to strike a careful balance to avoid alienating Trump voters. Last night’s results in South Carolina could be instructive for other Republican incumbents in the months ahead: Emphasizing disdain for Trump won’t help them win their primaries. A careful—if cringe-y—middle ground might.

For the past 18 months, Senate Democrats have been trying to find a climate deal acceptable to all 50 of their members. The main obstacles, so far, have been Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the owner of a coal-trading company, who wants any deal to reduce the federal budget deficit, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who refuses to increase tax rates, the easiest way to satisfy Manchin’s deficit-reduction goal. Senators are now back at the negotiating table, trying to work within the rules Manchin has insisted on.

But their timeline is dwindling. Last month, an environmental lobbyist told me that if the talks did not produce a framework deal by Memorial Day, then he didn’t think they would succeed at all. No such deal came together. Now only about 17 working days remain before Congress’s August recess. Reconciliation, the parliamentary procedure that senators use to pass legislation with 51 votes, gobbles up floor time, so even if Manchin does agree to a deal, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer may not be able to get it to a final vote before the clock runs out.

So it seems possible, even probable, that sometime in the next three or four weeks, Schrodinger’s climate deal will turn out to have been dead all along. Democrats may not admit defeat until the last day of September, when this year’s reconciliation resolution expires.

At that point, the record will be clear. Even though President Joe Biden described climate change as one of the country’s “four historic crises” during the campaign, his administration—like the Obama administration before it—will have failed to pass a climate bill. Come November, Democrats will likely lose one or both houses of Congress. And the United States will stumble into a fourth decade without significant legislative climate policy—or even a coherent energy policy.

So for the sake of mental preparation, if nothing else, it’s worth asking: What will happen then? Over the past few days, I’ve asked this question of energy analysts and climate scholars.

Some of them have found it too depressing to contemplate. Others have shrugged. Even setting the legislative uncertainty aside, this year has been one of the most destabilizing moments for energy markets this century. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has inaugurated a new price regime for fossil fuels: Oil is now trading at all-time highs in most major currencies, and America’s liquid-natural-gas exports are helping create a single, global price for the commodity. Even coal prices are soaring. “Who the hell knows,” Danny Cullenward, the policy director at the think tank CarbonPlan, told me. “My crystal ball is cloudier than it’s been in a long time.”  

But we can make some safe bets. If Congress fails to pass climate legislation, the effects won’t be felt immediately outside of a few areas. (They may include fossil-fuel prices, which could stay elevated for longer.) But over the coming decade, the world will wind up a hotter, poorer place. Carbon emissions will remain high, and the basic framework of the Paris Agreement on climate change may start to crumble.

[Read: The Democrats really are that dense about climate change]

The United States, in particular, would be left measurably worse. Although the country has never been a responsible actor on climate change, its peculiar inability to pass any significant legislative climate policy would set back its self-conception, international reputation, and economic mojo. At this point, not having a national energy and climate policy is like not having an internet policy in the 1990s—so strange that it makes the entire system look diseased and antique. While fossil fuels remain essential to today’s economy, the next stage of economic development is unmistakably decarbonized and electrified. Without the kind of robust policy support on offer in Europe or China, America’s climate-friendly companies will not be able to keep up. And so the country will fall behind.

Don’t get me wrong: Even then, the United States will remain rich, well educated, and integrated into the global economy, although intensifying wildfires and other climate disasters will eat away at its housing stock, industrial base, and treasured Pax Americana. But the country will be worse off—less wealthy, less at ease, less free—than it could have been. Oil and gas prices will still dictate the shape of American budgets; climate-driven inflation will intensify. And the American public’s understanding of the future will remain clouded—by a public-policy problem first recognized more than 30 years ago by President George H. W. Bush.

The country, in short, will stagnate. And stagnation is a choice.

The most immediate consequence is straightforward. The country will build less zero-carbon infrastructure than if the climate package had passed. Utilities will erect fewer wind and solar farms, and consumers will buy fewer electric vehicles. Fewer Americans, too, will switch to efficient induction stoves or heat pumps. The bill’s delay has already put hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in clean energy on hold. If the bill fails, some of that spending will be canceled.

That cancellation won’t dent only the growth of hippie-dippie renewables. The reconciliation bill’s tax credits had an innovative design, subsidizing all sources of zero-carbon electricity production, not just wind and solar. This design was a large part of why economists at the University of Chicago and the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, projected that the tax credits could produce as much as $1.5 trillion of economic surplus by 2050. In their absence, all zero-carbon power would suffer: Existing nuclear-power plants may shut down earlier than they otherwise would, and some new nuclear and geothermal power plants will never get built.

That lack of capital turnover will ripple across the economy. Because fewer Americans will switch to zero-carbon technologies, they will need more fossil fuels, keeping energy prices elevated for longer. Every electric-vehicle driver, after all, is one less buyer of gasoline; every heat-pump owner is one less buyer of natural gas.

That means that the United States will release more carbon pollution than it would otherwise, accelerating global warming and ocean acidification. Don’t get me wrong: The country will not immediately become a cartoonish, smoggy wasteland like in The Lorax, with smokestacks coughing untold amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. (At least, it won’t soon become any more of a climate villain than it is today.) But as its chronic carbon addiction runs its course, its environment and economic fundamentals will get worse.

[Read: There’s no scenario in which 2050 is “normal”]

It’s worth diving into the numbers to get a sense of what that could mean. Last year, America dumped 5.4 billion tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, about 17 percent below 2005’s all-time high. With no further policy, the country’s emissions are projected to flatline or modestly fall from that level. The U.S. could still make its first Paris Agreement goal of cutting climate pollution 26 percent below the all-time high by 2025, almost entirely as a consequence of the effects of inflation and the Ukraine war. “Because of high fossil-fuel prices, the 2025 target is within the range of uncertainty,” John Larsen, the lead U.S. climate analyst at the Rhodium Group, told me.

But to avert the worst impacts of climate change—that is, to avoid more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming by the end of the century—the country would have to slash its carbon pollution to half of its all-time high level by 2030. That’s what the Biden administration pledged on Earth Day last year, and it will prove much harder than the 2025 goal. Leah Stokes, a political-science professor at UC Santa Barbara, told me that she did not think the country could reach the target without a reconciliation deal. “Most of the models say you need these investments to really hit these ambitious targets that President Biden put forward,” she said.

Even beyond the climatic consequences, the failure to pass a climate bill will make people sicker and hurt the local environment. Because fossil-fuel-burning cars, factories, and power plants also produce conventionally toxic forms of pollution, America’s air will carry more particulate matter, tiny shards of ash that can poison the heart, lungs, and brain. By 2030, some 25,000 more Americans will die than if the bill had passed, according to Princeton’s energy-policy analysis project.

Those are the direct and most straightforward consequences of the climate deal’s failure, the ones that suggest themselves just by extending current trends into the future. But as the disease of stagnation progresses, other, more dire symptoms will begin to appear. In the coming days, the Supreme Court will rule on a landmark case that could gut the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse-gas pollution under the Clean Air Act. Without a reconciliation deal, the Court’s ruling will determine whether there’s any hope of making the 2030 goal. If the Court preserves most, or even part, of the agency’s power, then the Biden administration can still attempt ambitious climate regulation over the next two years, requiring utilities, carmakers, and perhaps even industrial facilities to cut their climate pollution. And because fossil fuels are so expensive right now, and renewables are so cheap, the agency could justify deep cuts to carbon pollution when conducting a cost-benefit analysis.

Would that be enough to meet the 2030 targets? Gina McCarthy, the White House’s climate czar, has claimed that even with no additional legislation, the government can still hit them. But energy experts are skeptical. “It’s just hard to see all of that happening,” Larsen, the Rhodium Group analyst, told me. “I agree with Gina McCarthy when she says that the federal government has all the tools it needs. But without hundreds of billions of [federal] investment, it makes it 10 times harder to use all the tools in a way that makes it likely the targets would be reached by 2030.” State governments would also have to step up, he said, passing far more sweeping clean-energy rules than even California or New York have on the books today.

[Read: The 1.5 degree goal is all but dead]

And that’s the good outcome. If the Court’s entrenched conservative majority kneecaps the EPA, then the White House will be out of options, and American climate activism will likely take a grim turn. Progressives will have watched the collapse of their legislative and regulatory routes to cut carbon pollution, and the ongoing Republican backlash to corporate activism will foreclose their ability to green even their workplaces. Just as President Donald Trump’s win electrified campus activists, a resounding defeat for climate action could empower those climate campaigners who are already eager to blow up pipelines.

What happens if the United States misses that 2030 goal—or even if it appears likely to miss that goal for much of the 2020s? The effects could ripple across geopolitics. The world has moved on from the bromides of the mid-aughts: Every major polluter has now committed on paper to zeroing out its emissions between 2050 and 2070. America’s failure to hit its pledge under the Paris Agreement—an international treaty shaped to satisfy the peculiar requirements of the U.S. government—could destroy that consensus. Other countries could back out of their own Paris pledges, locking the world into warming by more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, a level that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said could produce famines, droughts, and more deadly heat waves within a decade or two.

Or the world could simply leave the United States and its kludgy economy behind. Gregory Nemet, a public-affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of How Solar Energy Became Cheap, argues that the world is now on track to transition no matter what the United States does. “There’s so much momentum right now in this clean-energy transition. It will still happen, but it will happen more slowly” if no bill passes, he told me.

[Read: Biden’s climate goals rest on a 71-year-old defense law]

Another probable outcome is that the next generation of clean-energy technologies won’t get scaled up in the United States; the expertise to produce them will be created elsewhere in the world. I’ve written before about how American labs and companies invented solar photovoltaic technology in the 1950s, only to squander their competitive advantage and allow other countries to reap the benefits of mass production. Without a climate bill, that could happen again for the next round of decarbonization technology, such as hydrogen produced by renewables, direct air carbon capture, and sustainable-aviation-fuel production. China, meanwhile, has thrown its weight behind renewables manufacturing, encouraging companies to scale up domestically and investors to support them.

By contrast, if the tax credits pass, “you start to see a world where with some of these emerging technologies, like [direct air capture] or hydrogen, the U.S. has a competitive head start and has the potential to get into a dominant position,” Larsen said.

The most likely outcome might be a mix of these scenarios. Some new climate-tech start-ups may build their first facility here, because last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law authorized more than $11.5 billion for demonstration direct-air-capture and hydrogen projects. But that money can’t necessarily help build a company’s third, fourth, or fifth facility, and when it comes time to scale up, those same firms may go abroad. “Nobody’s going to build a scale-up business on a fingers-crossed hope that there’s a tax credit at the end of the decade,” Larsen said.

“We’re talking about $1 [trillion] to $4 trillion a year in investments due to energy transition,” Nemet added. “If that spending happens elsewhere, or U.S. firms don’t do that hiring, that’s a lost opportunity.” It could also be a national-security blunder. Look at the role that batteries and other climate tech have played in the war in Ukraine, where soldiers have used small drones to drop grenades on Russian trenches and fired anti-tank rockets from e-bikes. In a future conflict, having the industrial capacity and engineering know-how to mass-manufacture such gadgets could prove decisive.  

Even if the U.S. forgoes that investment, Nemet’s largest fear is that the transition will happen too slowly. Even the most conservative assessments say that the world will need to use technology to remove one to three gigatons of carbon every year by the middle of the century. That implies an almost unimaginable level of technological growth given what exists today. “For direct air capture to reach one gigaton a year in 2050, it would have to grow at 40 percent a year, every year, from now to 2050,” he said. Solar deployment, by contrast, has grown 30 percent a year for 40 years, according to Nemet’s research. “And solar’s been kind of miraculous that way, so we’d have to go a little faster,” he said. Even cellphones grew only 15 percent per year at their peak. “If we’re talking about taking our foot off the gas a little bit in the U.S., that’s gonna make it harder” to meet those targets, Nemet told me.

Democrats might get another few chances to pass some climate policy in the coming decade, even if this effort fails. Historically, the party has found more success by tacking energy policy onto other legislative vehicles—such as a must-pass defense or budget bill—rather than separating it out. That could prove true again now. The first opportunity might come after the midterm elections this year, when a lame-duck Congress could pass a bipartisan “tax extenders” package that pushes each party’s cherished tax policies forward. Even if that passes, though, it will likely cover only another year or two, and it won’t restore the tax credits to their highest historical levels, as a reconciliation deal could. It also won’t make the existing set of tax credits, which favor wind or solar specifically, more technology-neutral.

Two milestones stand out after that. The first will arrive next year, when Congress will review agricultural policy and pass a new version of the Farm Bill. The last draft of the Build Back Better proposal included $27 billion to encourage soil-based carbon-capture techniques; that money could be slotted into the Farm Bill. After that, the next opportunity won’t arise until 2025, when most of the major provisions in the Trump tax credits will expire and Congress will debate whether to renew them. Democrats could propose to extend certain Trump-era reforms in exchange for some clean-energy tax credits. But taking advantage of that moment will require Democrats to hold on to some shred of power at the federal level.

And even then, climate policy will matter less than it does now. Companies are deciding where to locate their manufacturing plants now, not in 2025. One of Manchin’s favored policies in the package, a tax credit that encourages firms to build new factories, could shift their decision about where to locate their facilities, but it has to come in the next few years, before those decisions are locked in.

Perhaps one of the biggest risks is that the country’s energy system remains stuck for years to come. Public markets are trapped in a moment of Hamlet-like indecision about energy: Investors can forecast the end of global oil-demand growth, which makes them unwilling to fund efforts to increase oil supply, but they also can’t fund the rapid scale-up of renewables and other clean-energy technology without public support. (High interest rates will make such a build-out even harder.) Consumers are stuck in the resulting gap, facing higher energy prices across the board as money dawdles between fossil fuels and clean energy. Without clear, muscular policy that makes a zero-carbon energy system all but inevitable, industrial firms could just sit around for years, waiting for a better investment signal.  

More widely, the failure will speak to the sclerosis of American governance. If Congress cannot bring itself to pass a climate bill, this will be the second time in a row that Democrats have controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress and failed to get a climate deal done: In 2010, President Barack Obama could not coax a bipartisan climate bill through the Senate. Arguably, this is the third time that the Senate will have killed climate legislation: Bill Clinton’s Btu tax, which died in 1993, would have amounted to a kind of approximate carbon tax. But this will not just be a Democratic problem: Barring the intercession of the courts, neither party has been able to accomplish many of its governance objectives lately.

Of course, this history is not yet written: Senate Democrats could still hustle a deal together in the next week or two. But the outlook is not good. In retrospect, what might amaze our descendants is that there were so many ways to tackle climate change through policy. The problem was amenable to progressive and conservative values; whether you believed in conquering nature or mothering it, you could find a plausible remedy to the carbon problem. But our politicians chose none of them. They opted for perhaps the worst possible path of all—they bickered while the world burned.

Less than 20 years ago, when I was a rising executive at an up-and-coming gun company, most people in the firearms industry regarded the AR-15 rifle as distasteful and dangerous, and they chose not to promote it at events. Trade shows did not allow the display or advertisement of tactical gear like that worn by the Uvalde and Buffalo shooters, who both used AR-15-type rifles to carry out those atrocities.

Up until about 2006, only a handful of companies were making AR-15s. They were outliers, producing rifles mainly for law enforcement and the military, and in the domestic commercial market AR-15s accounted for just a fraction of total gun sales, which averaged from 6 million to 8 million guns a year. The social norms that governed gun ownership and the firearms industry were clear: Assault rifles and tactical gear were a creepy, fringe interest that had no place in a complex democratic society.

The unwritten rules of decency were enforced by firearm-industry leaders—the executives, publishers, and journalists who functioned like risk managers, warding off threats to the reputation of the whole enterprise. I witnessed how this worked many times, including one occasion when a young writer brought his own AR-15 to a hunting event I was hosting in 2004. The senior figures there responded immediately. “That’s not the kind of thing we want to be promoting,” they said. The newcomer was shamed into locking the gun up for the rest of the event.

The industry’s restraint came from a sense of responsibility and was voluntary. Contrary to common belief, AR-15s have never been completely outlawed. This was true even during the 10-year assault-weapons ban that a Republican-controlled Congress under President Bush allowed to sunset in 2004. Many AR-15s were not covered by that law unless they were fitted with particular features, such as high-capacity magazines, flash suppressors, or folding stocks that pushed them into the “assault weapon” category. Millions of AR-15s might have been sold perfectly legally during the ban, but industry conduct and social stigma inhibited that. The ban both reinforced and reflected this voluntary code.

The few AR-15s manufactured between 1994 and 2004 became known in the industry as “post-ban” rifles. The shooter who killed 10 people in Buffalo used one of those guns, a Bushmaster XM-15 made during that period; all the teenager who bought it had to do to turn it into an even deadlier weapon of war was outfit it with a modern high-capacity magazine.

[Read: How bipartisan gun-control talks actually succeeded]

For much of my career I fought to hold the industry to its own rules of responsibility. When other manufacturers condemned Dick’s Sporting Goods for refusing to sell AR-15s, I insisted that my company maintain a relationship with the national retailer despite pressures to join a boycott. I tried to counter the movement to embrace everything tactical, no matter how dangerous the equipment concerned. But I lost that battle. Today, I am a critic fighting from the outside. The industry now comprises as many as 500 companies making AR-15 variants, along with hundreds of tactical-gear makers. Gone are the old norms; the “tactical lifestyle” now dominates trade shows. We see campaigns for guns like the Urban Super Sniper, and potential buyers can consider their “man card reissued” if they pick a particular AR-15.

At least 20 million guns are sold every year in the U.S., about 4 million of which are AR-15 rifles. By all accounts, at least 20 million AR-15s are now out there, among the more than 400 million guns in circulation. The gun industry is arming civilians with weapons of war in that same complex democracy it once knew to protect. Some companies even market to children, such as Wee1 Tactical, a rifle maker that advertises its miniaturized AR-15s with pink and green cartoon characters. This “JR-15” is not a toy; it’s a real semiautomatic rifle, sized for a kid to use.

The astounding transition from an era of self-restraint to where we are now began in 1999, after the murders at Columbine High School. The National Rifle Association’s convention was scheduled to take place just a few days after that school mass shooting, and only a few miles away, in Denver. Although much of the convention was canceled, the NRA leadership held closed-door business meetings in which they discussed strategy options, as we know from secret recordings of those meetings recently uncovered by National Public Radio. The choice before the NRA, as leaders saw it, was either conciliation and engagement with lawmakers to help draft improved policies or aggressive resistance with the aim of frightening its members into believing lawmakers would come after their guns. The NRA chose to enter the culture-war business, and so did the gun industry.

The Bush administration helped that along by allowing the assault-weapons ban to end in 2004, and, more important, by signing in 2005 the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shielded the gun industry from liability no matter what kind of irresponsible marketing it used to promote firearms. The new law removed any incentive for the gun industry to hold on to its former self-imposed restraint.

Perhaps Bush’s biggest gifts to AR-15 makers, though, were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing normalized the “black rifle” like the evening-news segments featuring U.S. soldiers on combat missions. Later, as returning veterans, they would go on to form a ready-made customer base for civilian versions of the rifle. For many of those ex-service members, owning and shooting the rifle became a way to stay connected to the people they had served with in “the sandbox.”

I watched all of these ingredients—the NRA’s fear, the Bush-era laws, the returning soldiers, and the glorification of war—coalesce into a frightening, self-perpetuating vortex. A handful of others in the industry also quit or lost their jobs for speaking out, but we were too few, too late.  

Barack Obama’s win in the 2008 presidential election provided the firearms industry with a culture-war boost, as the NRA took to promoting conspiracy-theory-minded fears. Before Obama took office, U.S. gun consumers had never purchased more than 10 million guns in a single year; by the time he left, they would be buying more than 16 million a year, and at least 2 million of those were AR-15s. The industry came to call Obama “The Greatest Gun Salesman in America.”

Following its post-Columbine strategy, the NRA also learned how to harness the predictable calls for legislation after mass shootings to drive gun buyers into a fearful frenzy. The gun group made maximum use of events like Sandy Hook and the shooting of Gabby Giffords in Tucson. Sales boomed after every shooting, especially sales of AR-15s.

[Read: Why the AR-15 is so lethal]

After his 2016 election win, President Donald Trump’s dog-whistling dalliance with racism and conspiracy theory—components of the NRA playbook that I had witnessed for years—accelerated the feedback loop of profit and fear even more, eventually producing sales of nearly 23 million guns in 2020, a 44 percent increase over even the highest totals of the Obama years. The rifle of war, once relegated to the back halls of the shooting industry, was now its star performer.

The NRA helped convert the black rifle into a political symbol, too. Bumper stickers and ball caps bearing its distinctive outline became emblematic of a new brand of identity politics. By 2015, devotion to the gun and what it stood for had become central to extremist groups like the Oath Keepers. Sadly, it came as no surprise for me to see Black Rifle Coffee gear and Come and Take It AR-15 flags everywhere among the January 6 insurrectionists. As the rioters were breaking into the Capitol and threatening lawmakers that day in 2021, I took a call from an old friend, another former gun-industry executive, who remarked, “Well, at least now everyone knows what it’s like to be at an NRA convention.”

So here we are, at the apex of the NRA’s high-pressure culture war, with more than 20 million AR-15s in circulation and a deeply polarized political culture. What are we to do with this mess?  

One place to start would be an effort to reestablish the same social norms the industry itself once insisted on. The measures outlined in the policy framework that a bipartisan group of senators is now negotiating would offer some of the marginal improvements that can help with that goal, including funding to support states’ red-flag laws.

But to denormalize AR-15s, we need to go further—by decoupling their regulation from that applied to other, less dangerous firearms. No one under the age of 21 should be able to buy these rifles. This will not be easy to achieve with politicians still at the behest of a gun industry that wants to pretend AR-15s are just like target shotguns or hunting rifles, firearms long ruled appropriate for a minimum purchase age of 18 years (unlike handguns, for which a buyer must be 21). Senate Republicans have refused to consider any move to introduce a higher age limit for purchasing and owning an AR-15. But the GOP and the industry are wrong: These guns are different from most others. If they were not so uniquely deadly, why would they almost invariably be mass shooters’ weapon of choice?

[Read: What I saw treating the victims from Parkland should change the debate on guns]

Lastly, we must consider national legislation to rein in the gun industry’s deeply irresponsible marketing of the AR-15-led “tactical lifestyle.” Not so long ago, the U.S. restricted the tobacco industry’s use of misleading advertising to glamorize smoking. We did not ban the freedom to smoke cigarettes, but we did make the situation better, saved some lives, and began to cut the costs of smoking-related disease. Smoking still kills too many Americans, but thanks to action, a century-long growth in the death toll is slowly being reversed. We can make the same improvements for guns without impinging on people’s personal choice and civil liberties.

The legislative proposals now emerging on gun reform may seem tentative, too weak to repair what is broken, but even modest changes in the law can be an important social signal. The first moves to restrict tobacco products started that way: Back in 1987, Congress banned smoking on domestic flights, though only those of less than two hours’ duration; it took decades more for most states to pass comprehensive smoke-free laws. But this is our path to reversing the erosion of norms and restoring the sense of responsibility and decency on which our democracy depends.

No law under consideration will solve everything, but we can work to restore a safer culture of responsible gun ownership. Even the gun industry once believed in that value. I know because I was there.

Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the Capitol riot, has lost his re-election bid in South Carolina.