Faced with a disgruntled climate voter during the primary season who wanted him to be tougher on the oil and gas industry, Joe Biden shot him one of his infamous “why don’t you go vote for someone else” responses.
But that was six months ago.
Now, as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Biden’s environmental credentials are on the upswing, and not just because his presidential opponent is a risk to the global climate fight.
Major environmental groups were delighted by Biden’s recent announcement of pledges, unimaginable in US politics just a few years ago, including to clean up electricity by 2035 and spend $2tn on clean energy as quickly as possible within four years.
Some campaigners remain unconvinced that he could be as aggressive as necessary with the fossil fuel industry, but his campaign believes they are on the winning path by connecting the environment with jobs.
“We really do see these as interlinked,” Biden’s campaign policy director, Stef Feldman, told the Guardian. “The climate plan is a jobs plan. Our jobs plan is, in part, a climate plan.”
As the coronavirus pandemic has devastated the US economy and forced millions into unemployment, it has also cleared the way for the next president to rebuild greener.
The Biden message: vote to put Americans back to work installing millions of solar panels and tens of thousands of wind turbines, making the steel for those projects, manufacturing electric vehicles for the world and shipping them from US ports.
But Biden’s plan, while significant and historic, would be just the beginning of a brutal slog to transform the way the nation operates. That’s even without calling for an end to fossil fuels, which science demands but Biden has been careful to avoid overtly doing.
Climate plans need Democrats to win big
Democrats would need to gain control of the Senate and put more progressives into Congress if they expect to pass Biden’s climate measures. In a nod to the party’s left flank, and as a salve to the pandemic’s crushing economic blows, Biden has revised his proposal in order to spend more money, faster. He wants to essentially eliminate US climate emissions by 2050.
“What’s going to be possible for President Biden is going to be partially determined by what happens in the other races,” said Tom Steyer, the Democrat philanthropist who ran against Biden in the primary and is now on his climate advisory council. “We’re working as hard as possible to push climate champions up and down the ballot.”
Andrew Light, an Obama climate negotiator and fellow at the World Resources Institute, said the world will be closely observing Biden’s congressional support, including how Republicans react if he wins. “Is it like Obama in 2009, where the Republicans were just absolutely uniformly saying no to the new president? Or is it something where people kind of look at what Trump has done to the Republican party and then go, ‘right, well, we’ve now got to really take this seriously,’” Light said.
Trump’s exit from the Paris climate agreement will happen automatically on 4 November, the day after the election. It will be the second time the US has led the way on negotiations and then pulled out or declined to join. The US also pushed for the Kyoto protocol, an international treaty in 1997, but it never ratified its commitments. To believe the US for a third time, the world will need evidence that Congress is engaged, Light said.
The Biden campaign says that’s where he will excel.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
