Climate action advocate Clarence Edwards' observations about how power works in Washington

The Battles We Pick

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Clarence Edwards has worked on nearly every side of US foreign policy and politics—from presidential campaign finance to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to lobbying Congress for groups like the Friends Campaign on National Legislation and Bono’s ONE campaign for global treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS. Clarence even worked in the Washington embassy of one of America’s allies. As he says on the podcast, his career has been everything he’d hoped for as a Black kid in Baltimore reading World Book encyclopedias.

Clarence and I had a fascinating discussion of the thing that interests him most: how power works in Washington—and how that changed when Trump came on the scene. For anyone working to sustain an advocacy career over a period of decades, curiosity about power dynamics and gleaning the right lessons can be very helpful.

The episode concludes with a conversation about the challenge of getting climate legislation through Congress, particularly the difficulty of building much-needed bipartisan consensus. Despite the years of Republican resistance, Clarence doesn’t view bipartisanship on climate change as impossible. He says he’s seen too many things change that once seemed permanent.