It’s the summer of cascading disasters in the United States: Downpours have made rivers of major metropoles’ transit lines, a coastal condo collapsed, flames have engulfed vast swaths of land, and triple-digit heat has roasted typically temperate regions. The catastrophes have brought a mounting death toll and incalculable trauma.

But, for the first time in over a decade, the U.S. government may actually do something about the emissions destabilizing the climate.

Last week, the Biden administration and its allies in Congress announced plans to pack the federal budget with resources and rules that could jolt a country long paralyzed by corporate obstruction and science denial into finally confronting an unprecedented crisis.

Democrats plan to use their slim majorities in Congress to pass a $3.5 trillion spending package that includes mandates to cut 80 percent of planet-heating pollution from the electricity sector by 2030, fund a new green jobs corps, and make it easier for drivers to swap gas guzzlers for electric vehicles.

Whether enough funding will make it into the final budget to make the programs significant remains unclear. By tacking the proposals to the budget process, which requires only 51 votes to become law, Democrats can circumvent the 60-vote threshold for passing traditional legislation that grants Republicans filibuster power.

But doing so gives Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, widely considered the most conservative Democrat in the caucus, kingmaker status, and already he’s signaled his opposition to anything that disadvantages fossil fuels.

There’s pull on the other end of Democrats’ ideological spectrum, too, as 16 senators, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, have vowed to vote against any budget that excludes climate provisions. But, as Mother Jones reported, those in the “No Climate, No Deal” contingent have yet to settle on any uniform demands about what kinds of policy they want to see in the budget.

“We cannot address a small sliver of our carbon pollution and call it a victory. We have to tackle this problem at scale,” Leah Stokes, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of ”Short Circuiting Policy,” wrote in The Atlantic last week. “The last chance we had for a federal climate bill was 12 years ago. I’m afraid that Congress will again fail to pass climate legislation that invests at the necessary level. I’m worried that we’ll keep burning time we no longer have.”

Read the full article about climate policy by Alexander C. Kaufman at Grist.