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Trump sends mixed signals on Iran war
The US president threatened to seize a major Iranian oil export hub, but also said he was “pretty sure” a deal was close.
Over $100 Billion Lost to Oil and Gas Price Spikes in First Month of Iran War, 350.org Analysis Shows
One month after the start of the Iran war, new analysis from 350.org shows that over $100 billion has been siphoned from ordinary people to oil and gas companies due to soaring energy prices.In addition to the horrific loss of human life, campaigners say the crisis highlights how dependence on fossil fuels enriches the few at the expense of the many. The analysis estimates that rising oil and gas prices have already cost consumers and businesses an additional $104.2–$111.6 billion. Impacts have been sharp and immediate, from textile factory layoffs in Bangladesh, to fuel rationing in Kenya, to a looming recession in the United States.The 350.org analysis calculates losses from price spikes using weighted oil and gas price averages over the first month of the war, combined with global consumption levels and adjustments for uncertainty, such as reduced demand and rationing in response to rising prices.It does not yet include wider knock-on effects, such as rising fertiliser and food costs, declines in economic output and employment, or broader inflation driven by fossil fuel price volatility. As a result, the true economic damage is likely significantly higher than the losses from oil and gas prices alone.The $111 billion lost to higher oil and gas prices alone could instead build enough solar power to supply around 40 million households in high-consumption countries, or about 150 million households in lower-consumption contexts.This figure is also roughly equivalent to current annual international climate finance—public and private funding provided by developed countries to developing countries under the UN Climate Convention and the Paris Agreement. Anne Jellema, Chief Executive of 350.org, said: “On top of the incalculable suffering of families and communities torn apart by the war, ordinary people around the world are paying an extraordinary price through fossil fuel-driven energy spikes. Over $100 billion has gone straight into the pockets of fossil fuel companies, while families struggle to afford energy and basic necessities. The case for windfall taxes has never been clearer.” The organisation warns that, without urgent intervention, the impacts will deepen, particularly for lower-income households and countries already facing economic strain.“Next month, governments will gather in Colombia to discuss how to end the era of oil, gas and coal. No more procrastination: our leaders must seize this moment to adopt binding targets to phase out fossil fuels and ramp up investment in a clean, safe energy future for all.”350.org is calling on governments to tax the fossil fuel industry’s windfall profits in order to protect households from soaring prices. The group says that part of this revenue should be used to subsidise access to fast-deploying renewable solutions, such as rooftop and community solar and electric vehicles.It emphasises that investing in renewables is the most effective way to stabilise prices, strengthen energy security, and shield economies from future crises. 350.org is also urging governments to agree on binding plans to replace oil, gas and coal with homegrown renewable energy, for example, through a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Note to Editor: To identify the oil and gas price delta, the analysis used various data sets, including data of the International Energy Agency, TradingEconomics and regional gas price benchmarks; the price in the week ahead of the outbreak of the war as the baseline for comparison, which likely slightly underestimates the price shock as trading prices had already modestly increased due to the anticipation of a possible conflict.
US allows Russian oil tanker into Cuba
Cuba has not received any oil in the three months since the US captured Venezuela’s former president.
Paul McCartney Reunites Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo
Someone get Sweden on the phone because it’s looking like the former Beatle deserves serious Nobel Peace Prize consideration.
Pete Hegseth Just Revealed the Real Roots of His Sadism and Rage
When Pete Hegseth talks to God, he asks the Almighty to help him kill people—as violently and ruthlessly as possible. In a potential violation of the separation of church and state, Hegseth has ordered monthly prayer meetings at the Pentagon, and in his first such gathering since launching the war against Iran, the defense secretary pleaded for divine assistance in mowing down the Iranian foe.“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our nation,” Hegseth intoned to a military audience, reciting a prayer previously given by a military chaplain before the Venezuela raid and applying it to American troops in Iran.“Give them wisdom in every decision,” Hegseth continued, “endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”Hegseth’s prayer service attracted only scattered media attention. But it helps explain the real impetus behind a development that deserves far more notice: The appointed leader of the world’s most powerful military regularly speaks about his capacity to rain terror and death on the enemy with an undisguised relish that should unsettle us all.By now it’s become unmistakable that Hegseth’s tenure has been marked by open and unrestrained sadism and bloodlust. He enthuses about raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and about “punching” the enemy “while they’re down.” He speaks of liberating the military from “stupid” rules of engagement. He delights in unleashing its “maximum lethality.” He rhapsodizes about killing “without hesitation”—with no moral qualms whatsoever.This talk has already stirred deep concern among lawmakers. “The U.S. military needs to be better than other militaries,” Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy pilot, told me, adding that we should conduct ourselves as “merciful people” who “respect life” and “respect the rule of law.”Yet Hegseth’s prayer also displays something else: With fresh clarity, it exposes how the roots of his bloodthirstiness lie in his particular brand of right-wing Christianity.Hegseth appears to be a devotee of Christian Reconstructionism, a theology preached by influential far-right pastor Douglas Wilson that aims to reshape all earthly endeavors around the dictums of what his disciples claim is God’s law. As scholar-of-religion Julie Ingersoll explains on Sarah Posner’s podcast, Wilson believes that “all authority belongs to God,” rendering the state’s authority wholly subordinate to a “higher category of biblical law.” A Pentagon spokesman has confirmed that Hegseth recently met with Wilson and is his “admirer.”What does this say about Hegseth’s conduct in the Iran war? A lot, it turns out. During his prayer extolling “overwhelming violence,” Hegseth expanded on this by reading from Scripture. “I pursued my enemies and overtook them,” Hegseth preached, quoting King David recounting his wars against Israel’s ancient foes and likening them to the Iranian enemy. “Those who hated me I destroyed. They cried to the Lord, but He did not answer them.“Snap the rod of the oppressor,” Hegseth continued in his appeal to God. “Break the teeth of the ungodly” so that “wicked souls” are “delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.” Hegseth directed this prayer toward “our men and women in harm’s way right now”—meaning in Iran. As the Reverend Brian Kaylor, who closely tracks Hegseth’s services, told me, Hegseth’s verses are “kind of a Mad Libs mash-up of biblical violence.”What should we make of this? The relationship between organized religion and the military has long been complex and contested. The armed forces have chaplains. But their role is pluralist, affording members of diverse faiths a place to seek guidance. Yet speaking from the government-owned Pentagon, Hegseth has urged prayer “in the name of Jesus Christ”—his Christian God.Official religious appeals, it should also be noted, have long been commonplace within the armed forces. Military chaplains have often prayed publicly before missions. Presidents have at times claimed divine blessing for conflicts or pronounced the enemy godless. It’s of course understandable that troops facing danger would pray for deliverance.But Hegseth is doing something different. It’s unusual for a defense secretary to directly appeal to God—his God exclusively—to assist in maximal killing, says Ronit Stahl, a historian of the military chaplaincy. What’s notable is Hegseth’s suggestion that God actively approves of as much killing as possible, and his enlistment of God in making it “overwhelming”—supremely violent and brutal.“Rarely has an American military leader justified killing by declaring that God has sanctioned violence as an ultimate, higher good,” Stahl told me. “It’s highly unusual for high-ranking officers or civilian military leaders to relish killing and violence in God’s name as a religious duty.”Hegseth has open contempt for limits on what our military can inflict on foes. He has called for “no quarter” and “no mercy for our enemies.” That means killing enemies who have surrendered—a war crime. His executions of suspected Caribbean drug runners violate international law—and possibly U.S. law and American military codes, as well.But grasping the roots of this in his particular far-right Christianity makes all this bloodlust more intelligible—and much worse. If Hegseth truly believes his war on Iran is unfolding in accordance with his conception of biblical law—the highest authority of all—then that explains why he treats all those niggling secular constraints as unbinding on him. Maximum violence and killing of the enemy—who cry out to God but, unlike Hegseth, don’t get an answer back from Him—are affirmatively good.“It’s not the way somebody who claims to be a person of God—a religious person—should think,” Senator Kelly, who has flown many combat missions himself, told me. War, he added, “is a morally and ethically complicated thing for any person. Any serious warfighter struggles with it.” If we don’t wrestle with this, Kelly said, we’ll “start to lose ourselves.”The ugliness here runs deeper still. Like other MAGA figures, Hegseth sees himself as a warrior saving “Western civilization” from ruinous barbarism, which includes battling against everything from the Iranian regime to mass migrations. Hegseth’s biceps tattoo extols the Crusaders, whom he sees as his inspiration: God apparently wants Hegseth, their spiritual descendant, to kill Western civilization’s enemies as violently as possible.But Western civilization has also bequeathed to us another legacy worth invoking here: the just-war tradition, which is grounded in conceptions of our common humanity. That’s the idea that our adversaries are human beings in spite of their “enemy” status, which places limits on what we can do to them in war. It was given early formulation by Cicero and elaborated on by European philosophers like Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant.Political theorist Matt McManus notes another irony here: Christian thinkers like Augustine also helped formulate a theory of forbearance in war, premised on Christian principles, that appears anathema to Hegseth. As McManus told me, this theory requires the waging of war “for the right reasons and in a non-brutal way.”Obviously we’ve failed miserably at times to honor those ideals. But that should lead us to try harder to meet them, not to decide they’re worthless or unattainable. Hegseth imagines himself heroically defending “the West” while discarding its noble contributions to that just-war tradition.These ideals generally include prohibitions on needless wars; on excessive cruelty; and on unnecessarily wanton and unrestrained killing, especially of civilians and combatants who surrender, among other things. Hegseth has violated all of them: The rationale for his war is based on lies. He casts his maximally brutal killing as an inherent good. His war has killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including many children. He lionizes the killing of enemies who surrender.But Hegseth answers to a higher authority. Utterly incapable of genuine humility, Hegseth knows with unshakable certainty that those simply cannot be transgressions. No: They’re all in God’s plan.
A GOP Governor? In California? Unless the Dems Get It Together, Yes.
The Democrats are in danger of giving away one of the most important perches in American politics, particularly with a radical Republican like Donald Trump in the White House, and one that they should easily own: the California governorship. The party’s lack of strong internal leaders, ideological divides, and inept handling of issues of race and identity have combined to create a chaotic mess with dire potential consequences. Democratic leaders, both in California and across the country, must immediately start working on a path to ensure that at least one of the candidates who qualifies for the general election in the California governor’s race is a Democrat. The California primaries are officially on June 2, but voters receive and can mail in their ballots as soon as May 5. That’s just six weeks from now. Instead of each party having primaries, California is one of the states where the top two candidates go to the general election. And the polls suggest that if the election were held today, the two candidates who advance might be Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, both Republicans. And Bianco and Hilton aren’t Arnold Schwarzenegger–ish moderate Republicans but true conservatives who want to implement Trump’s vision in California. California is a heavily Democratic state (Kamala Harris received 59 percent of the vote compared to 38 percent for Trump in 2024), so what the hell is going on? Democratic dysfunction. Of the 10 candidates running, eight are Democrats. Bianco and Hilton are each near 20 percent, essentially splitting the statewide GOP vote. Meanwhile, the eight Democrats are all getting a chunk of the state’s Democratic vote, leaving the entire field stuck in either single digits or the low to mid teens. Polls also show from 15 to 25 percent of the electorate saying that they are not sure who they will vote for. That likely consists of Democratic voters unable to sort through their eight choices. The three leading Democrats, former Representative Katie Porter, billionaire venture capitalist Tom Steyer, and Representative Eric Swalwell, are all close to Bianco and Hilton in the polls. But at this point, there is no guarantee that any of those three will make the general election. How did we get here? Part of the problem is that there is no clear heir apparent to outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom. Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis started running for the top job, didn’t get much support, and then shifted to the state treasurer’s race last August. Senator Alex Padilla chose to stay in Washington, despite pleas from some party officials. Harris opted against a run, as well. The field does include some figures with strong résumés. Xavier Becerra was in the House leadership in Washington before stints as attorney general of California and health and human services secretary in the Biden administration. Antonio Villaraigosa was the speaker of the state Assembly and the mayor of Los Angeles. But in more than a year of campaigning, none of the Democratic candidates has broken out from the rest of the field. Some California Democratic leaders are very aware of this issue and have been trying to fix it. Earlier this month, Rusty Hicks, the chairman of the California Democratic Party, released a public letter urging some of the lowest-polling candidates to get out of the race before the formal filing deadline on March 6, to ensure that their names were not on the ballot. No one dropped out. Hicks last week publicly released a poll funded by the state party that showed Hilton at 16 percent; Bianco at 15 percent; Porter, Steyer, and Swalwell at 10 percent, and the other Democrats even further back. Hicks, to his credit, is not being subtle. But the situation is actually getting worse. The University of Southern California and KABC-TV Los Angeles were due last week to host a debate that was supposed to include only the top candidates in the race. To select which candidates would qualify, a USC political science professor came up with a formula that assessed the candidates’ fundraising and polling. This process was not perfect because the formula resulted in the inclusion of the five candidates who have consistently polled the highest (Bianco, Hilton, Porter, Steyer, and Swalwell) but also a sixth, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who is way down in the polls. The formula assessed how long a candidate has been in the race, so it essentially rewarded Mahan for entering the race late (January 29) but with strong fundraising. Mahan is a moderate and has signaled he would be less antagonistic toward tech companies and other wealthy interests in California, so they have poured millions into his campaign. I don’t think Mahan should have been included. That said, the debate sponsors were generally acting in a mature, pro-democracy way, trying to provide voters a real discussion between the truly viable candidates. But on the eve of the debate, the excluded candidates started aggressively complaining. And then, shockingly, the leaders of the state Legislature in California joined in. The four excluded candidates are all people of color: Becerra; Villaraigosa; Tony Thurmond, the state’s superintendent of public education; and former State Controller Betty Yee. The six candidates who would have been in the debate all are white. So the legislative leaders and the excluded candidates blasted the debate as racially exclusionary. The debate was canceled due to the backlash. This is nonsense. I wish one of the top-polling candidates were a person of color. The whiteness of the leading candidates no doubt reflects racial inequalities in California and the United States—there aren’t a ton of Black or Latino Americans who can spend tens of millions self-financing their gubernatorial run, as Steyer has. But trying to winnow the field to the most viable candidates is not racist. This is another example of the Democratic Party being unable to recognize the difference between racist practices that hurt a wide swath of people of color and individuals invoking their race in self-interested ways. And this troubling racial dynamic is not just about the debate. Hicks, the party chair, has been noting that the firm conducting the surveys for the party is run by Black and Latino partners—a clear move to rebut potential criticisms that the polling is somehow racially biased. So now, we’re only weeks away from the start of voting. It’s time for some leadership. Harris, Newsom, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have all cast themselves as leaders in the fight against Trump and authoritarianism. It’s easy to bash Trump. It’s harder to publicly demand one of your friends and allies end a campaign that they have put their blood and sweat into. But the governorship of California is too important to go to a Republican because Democratic leaders were afraid of offending fellow Democratic politicians. Even if Becerra or Yee stay in the race, I suspect their support will sink even closer to zero percent if prominent Democrats like Harris and Pelosi are urging people not to vote for them. But that may not be enough. I’m still nervous about Porter, Swalwell, and Steyer canceling one another out and finishing behind Bianco and Hilton. Two designated Democratic candidates would be best. The most natural process would be for the party’s center left to collectively endorse one candidate, and the party’s progressive wing to back another. Swalwell is the most moderate of these three and is already getting support from prominent center-left figures in the party, such as Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego and California’s own Senator Adam Schiff. Pelosi and others in that establishment bloc should also endorse him. Alternatively, they could choose Becerra, perhaps the most qualified of the 10 candidates. He’s polling terribly now, but a collective endorsement from the party’s poobahs would probably lift him to the top of the field. Meanwhile, groups such as the Working Families Party, progressive officials in the state, and leftist national figures like Senator Bernie Sanders should choose Porter or Steyer. (Representative Ro Khanna has already endorsed Steyer.) I favor Steyer myself. The billionaire has a progressive platform and is a fairly fresh face in California politics. I respect Porter, who was a strong voice, particularly in hearings, for progressive economic policies when she was in the House. But she just lost the U.S Senate race to Schiff in 2024. And she has a reputation for treating staffers terribly. I don’t love the idea of Democratic leaders anointing two white male candidates in California, which has only had white male governors throughout its history despite being one of America’s most racially diverse states. But Harris or Padilla would likely have been leading candidates if they had run, so I’m skeptical that the party leadership in the state is ignoring potential candidates of color. That said, if Becerra, Porter, or one of the other candidates who isn’t a white man can get collective party support, great. The key is to consolidate around two Democratic candidates—which ones is less important. Hicks has called for the low-polling candidates to drop out by April 15. That’s a reasonable timetable. It gives the struggling candidates a last chance to show viability, while leaving a few weeks for Democrats to consolidate around a few candidates. But after April 15, it’s really time to get serious. California Democratic leaders have played a huge role in resisting Trump, mostly notably in their rapid move to redraw the state’s congressional districts to offset Texas doing the same. Pelosi was an instrumental figure in getting Biden to leave the presidential race after his dismal debate performance. It’s time for the party there to make another tough set of decisions to winnow this field and produce a Democratic governor in California. If they can’t sort this out and they hand the state to a Trumpy Republican, it will be the latest sign that Democratic Party leaders aren’t up to the task of stopping authoritarianism.
Why Liberals Should Maybe Hope the Republicans Nuke the Filibuster
Donald Trump—juggling a war that shows more signs every week of dragging on far longer than he imagined, a nation of enraged air travelers, and a day of protests against him that was the largest of its kind in American history—is still making time to attack American democracy. He’s leaning hard on Senate GOP leader John Thune to ditch the filibuster and pass the party’s voter suppression bill, the SAVE America Act. The president posted late last week: “When is ‘enough, enough’ for our Republican Senators. There comes a time when you must do what should have been done a long time ago, and something which the Lunatic Democrats will do on day one, if they ever get the chance. TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and get our airports, and everything else, moving again. Also, add the complete, all five items, SAVE AMERICA ACT items. Go for the Gold!!!”I have less than no use for the SAVE America Act. Like a lot of liberals I know, I’d be fine with a reasonable law that required voters to present ID. But this bill isn’t that. Under such a reasonable law, for example, a driver’s license should constitute valid ID. Under this bill, however, a regular driver’s license—which is the standard issue of 45 states, with only five states offering the Enhanced Driver’s License that the act deems kosher—would not suffice. That’s absurd. More importantly, the act is—as many have pointed out, including Norman Ornstein on this website—effectively a poll tax, requiring registered voters to reregister with proof of citizenship. (Do you even know where your birth certificate is? Do you still live in the same state where you were born?) The idea of requiring an ID to vote polls very well, but the act itself, once people are informed of the specifics, does far less well. Besides all that, it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Even the Heritage Foundation, creator of an “Election Fraud Map” presumably designed with the intent of raising the alarm about this alleged pestilence, could find only 1,620 cases of people being criminally convicted or paying a civil penalty for voter fraud—going back to 1982. How many Americans have voted since 1982? It has to be several billion. And even a right-wing outfit with a clear agenda couldn’t scrape up 2,000 offenders!So it would be awful for the country and for democracy if the SAVE America Act passed. And it would be, on one level, appalling to watch Thune cave to Trump one more time and nuke the filibuster (which he reportedly is not of a mind to do). And yet … even though it would cause some short-term pain, in the long run I’d love to see the GOP nuke the filibuster. You should too, and here’s why.Basically, liberalism and the Democratic Party have a long list of legislative achievements they’d like to pass into law. On wages, the economy, federal benefits, health care, primary and secondary education, higher education, the environment, monopoly power, tech power, and so much more, there are bills sitting around in Congress that various Democrats have dutifully written. They’re mostly pretty good. Some—in fact, I’d say most—have a Republic co-sponsor or two. Conservatism and the Republican Party, by contrast, have no such agenda and are sitting on no such trove of bills. Their domestic agenda can be summed up in five words: Reduce taxes and cut regulation. Sure, there are a few other things: Throw out immigrants, keep boys out of girls’ sports, and of course crack down on an epidemic (voter fraud) that doesn’t exist. But that’s about it for them. Meanwhile, the Democrats—the party of government—want, quite logically, the government to do a lot of things.Now imagine that it’s January 21, 2029, and somehow it has come to pass that we have a Democratic president, 53 Democratic senators (with nary a Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema in the bunch), and 229 Democratic House members. Full control of government, in other words.What could these majorities do? Well, with the filibuster in place—which requires 60 senators to overcome—not much of anything, really. Oh, they’d pass a few things, as Joe Biden managed to. But it would be pulling teeth the whole way, and the American public would mostly see more dysfunction. And dysfunction always, always, always benefits the party of anti-government, because all they need to do is point their fingers and say, “Look? See what a mess the federal government is?”Now let’s ask ourselves what these hypothetical majorities could do if there were no filibuster, and they could pass bills in both houses with simple majorities. It would depend on how aggressive they want to be—more on which later—but assuming a reasonable level of zeal to do what they came to Washington to do and pass laws that make people’s lives better, they could pass bill after bill after bill.First, they could undo the SAVE America Act and pass their own voting rights law. Then starts the real work. An $18 minimum wage, and indexed to inflation so that Congress never has to hike it again—done. An overtime pay bill, vastly expanding the number of American workers eligible for overtime—done. A permanent child tax credit—done. A bill to make, say, vocational schools and community colleges free—done. A bill to expand rural broadband; to jump-start green energy projects; to offer subsidized childcare to working parents; to grant a period of paid family leave, like they have in 145 countries; to build affordable housing units—done, done, done, done, and done. And then: cracking down on monopolies, on Ticketmaster, on crypto and AI. Those things would take more guts, but I’d like to think the party would do at least some of them.Imagine Americans’ reaction to seeing all this activity. For the first time in ages, they’d be seeing not bickering and dysfunction but one party actually passing laws that make their lives a little better! They could, if they wished to, make FDR’s first 100 days look lackadaisical by comparison.And once they passed these things? They’d stick. One argument you regularly hear about the filibuster is that if Democrats can pass things with 51 Senate votes, the Republicans can just un-pass them with 51 the next time they control the Senate. True enough. They could. But I say let ’em try.Let them try to repeal an $18 minimum wage, a law that would be instantly popular. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare in about 70 tries, and it wasn’t nearly as popular as a higher minimum wage would be. The Republicans would not succeed at repealing most of what I listed above. Or if they did succeed, they’d get strafed at the polls in the next election. Nuking the filibuster would also, contrary to what nearly everyone says, increase bipartisanship. Here’s why. If Senate Republicans know that Democrats can pass things with a simple majority of 51, some of them—not many, but some—will think to themselves, Well, if this going to become law anyway, I might as well try to get my fingerprints on it; get an amendment in there that helps my state or makes the law slightly more palatable. With the threshold at 60, the incentive to seek compromise is zero, because no Republican wants to be that sixtieth vote that helps a liberal piece of legislation pass. But if they know it’s going to pass anyway with 51, a few will play ball. And they, not the hard-liners, will be the Republicans with leverage and power in a no-filibuster Senate. So all that is why, even though I’d hate to see the SAVE America Act pass this year, I’d also see a huge silver lining. By killing the filibuster, Thune would be setting the table for many future important and usually irreversible liberal legislative victories.And on top of that, he’d be doing the Democrats’ dirty work for them, because here’s another grim reality of filibuster politics: The Democrats don’t have the guts to kill it. I don’t care if they had 62 senators. The most they’re willing to do is soften it—move the threshold down to 54, say. That’s a typical Democratic half-measure. The filibuster is one issue on which Trump’s bull-in-china-shop posture is what America needs. Trump is too dumb to know all this. I suspect Thune does, which is why he’s holding the line. And I guess, for the sake of the 2026 and 2028 elections, we should be glad that he does. But just remember: If he caves, all is not lost in the long run.
Hey, Washington Post! You’re Wrong: Congestion Pricing Is Great.
Congestion pricing inspires a lot of hatred. The concept is simple: Charge drivers a toll to enter an area—usually downtown—in order to raise money for public transit, while reducing traffic and pollution. And it has worked now in several cities, reducing pollution and commute times, with numerous side benefits. Yet as Washington D.C.’s mayoral race heats up, the departing Mayor Muriel Bowser has insisted that it is “the wrong policy for the wrong time.” The Washington Post editorial board agrees, calling it “self-destructive” and claiming it would “cripple” downtown D.C.Like so much else that emanates from The Washington Post these days, these words represent the ghoulish death rattle of a dying order. The right hates congestion pricing because it despises public goods and wants to keep us alone and fuming angrily in our cars. Moderates fear controversy and too often accept right-wing narrative as a proxy for public opinion. But the two mayoral candidates to Bowser’s left—especially Janeese Lewis George, a socialist city councillor—support the policy. Regardless of the outcome of its elections, Washington D.C. should go ahead and embrace congestion pricing because it works. We have seen what the car-dominated world brings us: long commutes and numerous traffic fatalities, extreme vulnerability to price shocks like the one resulting from Trump’s senseless war on Iran, pollution that exacerbates childhood asthma and other conditions, an unending climate crisis that caused Los Angeles to begin last year with deadly fire and end it with flooding that filled people’s homes with mud. We know that alternatives are out there. It’s time to move on. In New York City, we’ve seen what congestion pricing can accomplish. According to MTA data released at the end of 2025, just under a year into the policy, congestion pricing has reduced traffic in the tolled zone by 11 percent and exceeded its goal in revenue raised for the public transit system (raising more than half a million after expenses). The anticipated downsides haven’t materialized, either. It’s not hurting businesses; in fact, by some measures, it’s helping. In the tolled zone, foot traffic has not only increased but has increased more than in the rest of Manhattan. By other measures—storefront vacancies declining faster in the tolled zone, increased sales tax receipts—business is booming. The argument that it hurts the poor—which The Washington Post recently recycled—was always a canard, since in New York City, even in the outer boroughs, less than a third of low-income residents have cars, and only 2 percent use a car to commute into Manhattan for work. It can’t even be said to hurt the working or middle class, since New York City car owners are significantly richer than New Yorkers without cars. True, car ownership is less rarefied in other cities. But given the volatility of gas prices and car insurance, relieving people of the need to drive by using revenue to improve public transit is an urgent matter of economic justice. Not only was the right wrong about congestion pricing’s ills, but the problems anticipated by the left haven’t come to pass, either. Some environmental justice advocates and Bronx residents feared that drivers trying to avoid the toll would flood the South Bronx, exposing an already-polluted area to even more deadly congestion. But that has not happened.Oblivious to all this, Trump keeps trying to cancel New York’s congestion pricing law, not only with social media posts stating in block letters “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,” as if trying to will it so through keyboard warfare, but with lawsuits. Governor Kathy Hochul has so far stood up to him, and the courts keep backing her up, with a federal court early this month declaring, yet again, that New York’s policy is legal and that the president can’t stop it. And now that it’s working, congestion pricing is also popular. Among New York City residents, more people favor it than oppose, a Siena College poll found this month. That’s a big change: As recently as December, a little less than one-third wanted congestion pricing to remain in place, with more than half supporting the president’s efforts to kill it. (Back in April 2024, when it was still hypothetical, it was even less popular, with two-thirds of New Yorkers opposed.) This experience—widespread hatred of congestion pricing as a proposal, followed by popularity once it’s implemented—is mirrored all over the world. In London, where congestion pricing has cut car traffic in half, raised billions for public transit, and increased visitors and commuters to the city’s center, only 39 percent of Londoners supported the policy at first, with approval soaring to 59 percent just five months into its implementation, as traffic dropped. In Stockholm, the same thing happened: People resisted congestion pricing at first, and upon seeing the results, 70 percent of the city’s residents favored it.Indeed, there’s evidence that a more serious war on cars could be effective and popular in the long run. New York City officials are discussing the possibility of charging for street parking, which will inspire the predictable howls of pain from committed motorists. But if it improves quality of life in the city, people might end up liking this too. Over the last two years, Paris has been restricting car use even more than New York, banning most private cars from entering some neighborhoods, with steep fines. A year ago, Parisians supported making 500 more streets car-free, in a referendum. A recent mayoral election was widely viewed as a referendum on the pedestrian-centered urbanism of outgoing Mayor Anne Hidalgo—and her fellow Socialist party candidate won handily. Drowning out the loud critics, the voters endorsed a cleaner and more livable city. The Parisian mayor rode to the site of his victory speech on a bicycle. Rather than listen to the Trump toadies at The Washington Post, or the city’s current, cautious, centrist leadership, D.C. should consider following the examples of New York and Paris. Cities can aspire to more than the misery that car culture has inflicted on the world. Let’s embrace a vision of urban life in which we can all—literally—breathe more easily.
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