As the climate crisis nears a breaking point, the United States needs to take the initiative and set out a tangible plan to avert humanity’s greatest threat. While Joe Biden and his Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, former Secretary of State John Kerry, present a much more climate-friendly array of policies and initiatives than the outgoing Trump administration, they fall well short of what is necessary. Given the urgency with which we have to act to avert climate change, the Biden administration needs to ensure that its climate plan is not only sufficient to combat the crisis, but also that it will be able to withstand Republican attempts to undermine it. Unfortunately, both of these are far from certain.
Biden’s flagship climate proposal is to reach net-zero emissions and a 100% clean economy by 2050. Unfortunately, if (and it’s a very big if) we meet that goal on schedule, we would be fifteen to twenty years too late. The general scientific consensus has us reaching a point of no return sometime between 2028 and 2035. He also promises that he will rejoin the Paris Agreement, use diplomatic leverage to encourage other nations to comply with climate targets, expand nuclear power, eliminate offshore drilling, ensure every American has access to clean water, expand rail and freight, implement a carbon tax and provide attractive incentives to retrofit buildings with clean technology, among a multitude of other generally agreeable proposals. While these are not insignificant, they are certainly insufficient, especially if emissions are not eliminated until 2050 or beyond.
Though Biden nominally supports these policies, he has not provided much detail on how he will be held accountable for them. The only accountability he has provided is a promise that Congress will pass a bill in the first year of his presidency outlining an emissions target for the end of his first term in office in 2025. However, he does not give any indication as to what this target may be, not even a rough estimate, which renders it largely pointless as he has already been elected. For the rest of his proposals, he has provided little to no information on milestones for his policies for Congress and voters to hold him to. Since the time frames for the achievement of many of his proposals end after even a potential second Biden term will conclude, it is essential to have frequent milestones outlined so Biden and his administration can be held to their promises.
What’s more, the fact that Biden merely supports these policies means little if they are not enacted at all, which Republicans will gleefully set out to undermine. During the first two years of Obama’s presidency, Democrats controlled the presidency and both chambers of Congress, but they immediately buckled and droppedthe public-option healthcare proposal that Obama ran on in 2008, and ended up whittling it down to what became the Affordable Care Act, which only barely passed (with no Republican votes) and incorporated many conservative healthcare proposals like the individual mandate, which was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank largely funded by the Koch brothers. If Democrats struggled to pass very moderate healthcare reform when they controlled both Houses of Congress and the presidency, the chances of Biden’s environmental policy passing in both an only slightly Democratic House and an almost certainly Republican Senate when nearly all Congressional Republicans don’t believe that climate change is a threat at all (and certainly all oppose further climate regulation) are virtually nil.
The only way to pass climate legislation is to engage people and tell them what climate proposals will do to change their lives for the better, a rather more compelling message than “nothing will fundamentally change”. Democrats were projected to take the Senate in 2020, but, despite enormous fundraising for their extremely moderate candidates, they could not beat some of the most unpopular Senators in the country like Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, and Mitch McConnell.
This dismal performance directly contradicts the conventional wisdom that running extremely moderate Democrats in traditionally Republican or swing states is the best way to unseat Republicans. Unfortunately for the environment, the Democrats seem like they haven’t learned from this defeat as right now, Democrats’ Senate hopes rest on two January runoff elections in Georgia, where Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff is spending much of his time telling people about how he doesn’t support progressive policies like the Green New Deal and instead touting his moderate persuasion.
On the other side, Republicans in Washington have made quite clear that their agenda is a pro-corporate, anti-scientific, and anti-environment one, and yet even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we are facing a climate crisis of enormous proportions, they are still electorally viable. Why?
Republicans have successfully convinced the American populace that climate action is a zero sum game; that what is good for the planet is definitionally bad for the economy. This carries the implication within it that it would be economically impossible to revolutionize our energy and infrastructure, and those who wish to do so do not care about the material well being of Middle America. By accepting this framing, many Democrats are forced to run on more conservative climate policies. This is especially true in presidential elections, where swing states in Middle America have a disproportionately large fraction of Electoral College votes, and in Congressional races in Middle America. In 2016 and 2020, fracking was a surprisingly big issue, with much ado made about whether or not certain candidates would ban it or not, just because it could maybe swing a few tens of thousands of votes in Pennsylvania.
It’s crucial that supporters of climate action build an effective electoral strategy to shift the climate debate for future election cycles, because, if given the chance, Republicans will strip away any gains made during the Biden administration, just as the Trump administration so effectively neutralized the climate gains made during the Obama years.
In just four years, Donald Trump removed the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and appointed Scott Pruitt, an open climate denialist, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose tenure saw environmental regulations repealed on an unprecedented scale before he was forced to resign in 2018 when ethics violations he committed came to light, including the abuse of loopholes in the Safe Drinking Water Act to funnel tens of thousands of dollars to aides and his use of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to support a lavish personal lifestyle, including hundreds of thousands on first-class or charter plane seats and luxury hotels. His replacement, former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, has been little better; he declined to limit soot pollution even in the face of evidence that doing so would save over ten thousand lives per year and advocated against the use of confidential scientific studies by the EPA, which scientific groups have argued will drastically limit the research available to the agency.
To prevent this from happening again, we must ensure either that Republicans do not gain enough power to repeal our efforts or that our climate policies enjoy so much popular support that Republicans cannot continue to oppose them while maintaining electoral viability.
If we are to take a more substantive step toward a fully renewable and eco-friendly society, we need to reframe the issue of climate change. A Green New Deal would not only make our energy supply completely sustainable and much more efficient, but bring hundreds of thousands, if not millions of new jobs to America. Despite our status as the richest country in the world, our infrastructure is poor and in need of improvement. This is especially true in Middle America, where public transportation, clean water, and smooth and structurally sound roads and bridges are hardest to come by.
The jobs created by a Green New Deal would vastly outnumber those replaced, and those employed would be paid a living wage and work in environments much safer than those they left behind. Such a proposal is not as radical as it is made out to be; what is truly radical is leaving a substantial part of the country decades in the past with declining economic fortunes solely for the profit of a small few who dominate the domestic energy sector.
With the possibility of transitioning to a self-sustaining energy supply, we can reduce our reliance on foreign oil and natural gas from countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia, whom we must shape our foreign policy around to meet our energy needs, and Venezuela, Bolivia, and Yemen, where we intervened and disrupted legitimate governments and caused authoritarian crackdowns and mass famine in order to meet our energy needs.
In pursuing a more productive foreign policy, we can expose the frivolity of the already unpopular destructive foreign intervention that has defined both Republican and Democratic administrations for decades and gain ground on a crucial wedge issue that has been key to Republican electoral victories since Eisenhower in 1952.
We can also look to countries around the world with strong welfare programs for a blueprint on shifting public policy in a more progressive direction. Every other developed country on Earth has, for example, implemented some form of single-payer healthcare, and among the mainstream parties in all of those countries, not even the most conservative run against wholly eliminating it, as Republicans do in the United States. Programs with extremely widespread benefits are much more popular than those targeted at specific groups of people because, when only a small, usually not very well off part of the population receives the benefits, they are much more easily stigmatized. This is part of why, in the US, public option and single payer healthcare programs poll as well as or better than the Affordable Care Act among the general public, despite the fact that they are portrayed by the media and by politicians as much more radical.
Knowing this, a climate plan like the Green New Deal, which would bring hundreds of thousands if not millions of new jobs across the country and vastly improve the infrastructure that we all use while pulling out no stops in averting the climate crisis, would certainly garner more support than Biden’s proposed climate plan. It’s much harder to vote against your cousin or neighbor having a decent job, or against the new bullet train that saves you gas money and makes your work commute take half the time it did before, than it is to vote against intangible numbers that someone in D.C. says are important but have no discernable immediate impact on your life.
Thus, though Republican opposition to any meaningful climate action may seem insurmountable, the solution is clear. Instead of attempting to compromise with Republicans, we can reject the “radical” label they have bestowed upon us, not by promising not to enact progressive policies, as Biden and many Democrats instinctively have, but by reframing Republican policies of denying Americans good jobs and infrastructure, maintaining endless war, and destroying the environment to serve the interests of a wealthy few as that which is truly radical.
We are facing a monumental crisis, and we must deal with it now while we still have the chance. President-elect Biden at least believes that it’s a real problem, unlike President Trump, but his plan to deal with it is woefully inadequate. Make no mistake, we still have most of our work ahead of us; we must not accept Biden’s piecemeal proposals and continue to fight for a Green New Deal to defeat climate change and come out of it a stronger nation and a stronger world.
Comments