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Republicans try to derail Biden’s Covid aid publicity blitz by turning focus to border
Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden has launched a publicity blitz for his coronavirus rescue plan but faces disruption from a messaging war with Republicans over an escalating humanitarian emergency at the US-Mexico border.In brief remarks at the White House on Monday ahead of a national tour, the US president touted the $1.9tn relief package passed by Democrats in Congress last week, Biden’s first major legislative victory.“In the next 10 days, we will reach two giant goals: 100m shots in people’s arms and 100m cheques in people’s pockets,” he said.The law will cut child poverty in half, Biden said, and is “focused on rebuilding the backbone of this country – working families, the middle class, people who built this country”.But it is one thing to pass the bill, another to implement it, the president warned. “The devil is in the details. It requires fastidious oversight … We’re going to have to stay on top of every dollar spent.”Biden added: “We can do this, we will do this. Help is on the way.”The president, who has still not held a formal press conference after nearly two months in office, did take one question from a reporter about whether his predecessor Donald Trump should encourage sceptical Republicans to take the coronavirus vaccine.Biden replied: “I discussed it with my team, and they say the thing that has more impact than anything Trump would say to the ‘Maga’ folks is what the local doctor, the local preacher, the local people in the community would say. I urge all local docs and ministers and priests to talk about why it’s important to get that vaccine.”Maga refers to Trump’s campaign slogan Make America Great Again.The year-long coronavirus pandemic has infected nearly 30 million Americans, killed 534,890 and put millions out of work. But about 107m vaccine shots have been administered, leading Biden to predict a return to a semblance of normality by independence day on 4 July.His stimulus package includes direct $1,400 payments to millions of Americans – the first of which hit bank accounts over the weekend – as well as an extension of unemployment benefits, funding for state, local and tribal governments and money to accelerate vaccinations and reopen schools.It was announced that Biden has appointed Gene Sperling, a longtime Democratic economic policy expert, to oversee the implementation of the package.Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and their spouses are starting an ambitious cross-country “Help is Here” tour to extol its benefits with daily themes such as small businesses, schools, warding off evictions and direct cheques.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday: “We want to take some time, more than a moment, to engage directly with the American people and make they sure they understand the benefits of the package. What the president recognises from his own experience is that, when it’s a package of this size, people don’t always know how they benefit or what it means for them.”The PR offensive began on Monday with Harris heading to a Covid-19 vaccination site and a culinary academy in Las Vegas and the first lady, Jill Biden, touring a New Jersey elementary school.Biden himself is due to visit a small business in Delaware county, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. He and Harris will appear together on Friday in Georgia, a swing state where Democrats’ victory in two Senate runoffs in January were fundamental to the passage of the bill.The White House has said it does not believe Barack Obama’s administration did enough to champion its $800bn economic rescue programme in 2009. Democrats went on to suffer a heavy defeat by Republicans in the House in the following year’s midterm elections.This time the new law is broadly popular among the public, posing a headache for Republicans who were united in voting against it and described it as an overpriced bundle of liberal pet projects unrelated to the pandemic.Lanhee Chen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, said: “The policy argument is a fair one and in fact is the right one to be making but it’s hard in the context of what we see, which is, do you want your $1,400 cheque or do you not? That’s a much easier argument for the Democrats to make in the short run. So I think Republicans have a tall order ahead of them.”Republicans are instead seeking to change the political narrative by switching attention to the southern US border, where there has been a surge of people trying to cross and a record number of children are now in US custody.CBS News reported that by Sunday morning, US border patrol was holding more than 4,200 unaccompanied children in short-term holding facilities, including “jail-like stations unfit to house minors”. Nearly 3,000 of them had been held longer than the legal limit of 72 hours.Sensing Biden’s first major vulnerability since taking office, Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, led a group of Republicans to the border in El Paso, Texas, on Monday. They argued that Biden has created a crisis by halting construction of Trump’s border wall, placing a moratorium on deportations and promising a pathway to citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants.“The cartels were listening,” said Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana. “It’s beyond a crisis at the border. It’s a threat to the republic.”McCarthy said: “It’s more than a crisis. This is a human heartbreak. This crisis is created by the presidential policies of this new administration. There’s no other way to claim it than a ‘Biden border crisis’.”Apparently caught by surprise, the government is scrambling to respond. Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to support efforts to shelter unaccompanied minors. The Associated Press reported on plans to use a downtown Dallas convention center to hold up to 3,000 immigrant teenagers.At the White House press briefing, Psaki said the Biden administration recognises the scale of the challenge and is working to move children to homes or shelters as quickly as possible. “We have been looking at additional facilities to open to move children, unaccompanied children,” she said.A reporter pressed Psaki on whether Fema’s presence means the administration considers the situation a “disaster”.She replied: “I know we always get into the fun of labels around here, but I would say our focus is on solutions and this is one of the steps that the president felt would help – not become a final solution – but help expedite processing, help ensure that people who are coming across the border have access to health and medical care.”The press secretary was also challenged on reports that children are going hungry, sleeping on cold floors and not being allowed outside. The conditions are “not acceptable”, she acknowledged.“This is heartbreaking. It’s a very emotional issue for a lot of people and it’s very difficult and challenging … We want to expedite getting these kids out of these CBP facilities as quickly as possible.”In a swipe at Donald Trump’s administration, Psaki added: “We are trying to work through what was a dismantled and unprepared system because of the previous administration.” More
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Bidenomics beats Reaganomics and I should know – I saw Clintonomics fail | Robert Reich
A quarter-century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and abiding poverty. But Clinton’s political advisers warned that unless he went along, he would jeopardize his reelection.That was the end of welfare as we knew it. As Clinton boasted in his State of the Union address to Congress that year: “The era of big government is over.”Until Thursday, that is. Joe Biden signed into law the biggest expansion of government assistance since the 1960s – a guaranteed income for most families with children, raising the maximum benefit by up to 80% per child.As Biden put it in his address to the nation, as if answering Clinton: “The government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us, all of us, we the people.”As a senator, Biden supported Clinton’s 1996 welfare restrictions, as did most Americans. What happened between then and now? Three big things.First, Covid. The pandemic has been a national wake-up call on the fragility of middle-class incomes. The deep Covid recession has revealed the harsh consequences of most Americans living paycheck to paycheck.For years, Republicans used welfare to drive a wedge between the white working middle class and the poor. Ronald Reagan portrayed black, inner-city mothers as freeloaders and con artists, repeatedly referring to “a woman in Chicago” as the “welfare queen”.Trump replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoiaStarting in the 1970s, women had streamed into paid work in order to prop up family incomes decimated by the decline in male factory jobs. These families were particularly susceptible to the Republican message. Why should “they” get help for not working when “we” get no help, and we work?By the time Clinton campaigned for president, “ending welfare as we knew it” had become a talisman of so-called New Democrats, even though there was little or no evidence that welfare benefits discouraged the unemployed from taking jobs. (In Britain, enlarged child benefits actually increased employment among single mothers.)Yet when Covid hit, a new reality became painfully clear: public assistance was no longer just for “them”. It was needed by all of “us”.The second big thing was Donald Trump. He exploited racism, to be sure, but also replaced economic Reaganism with narcissistic grievances, claims of voter fraud and cultural paranoia stretching from Dr Seuss to Mr Potato Head.Trump obliterated concerns about government give-aways. The Cares Act, which he signed into law at the end of March 2020, gave most Americans checks of $1,200 (to which he calculatedly attached his name). When this proved enormously popular, he demanded the next round of stimulus checks be $2,000.But Trump’s biggest give-away was the GOP’s $1.9tn 2018 tax cut, under which benefits went overwhelmingly to the top 20%. Despite promises of higher wages for everyone else, nothing trickled down. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, America’s 660 billionaires – major beneficiaries of the tax cut – became $1.3tn wealthier, enough to give every American a $3,900 check and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic.The third big thing is the breadth of Biden’s plan. Under it, more than 93% of the nation’s children – 69 million – receive benefits. Incomes of Americans in the lowest quintile will increase by 20%; those in the second-lowest, 9%; those in the middle, 6%.Rather than pit the working middle class against the poor, this unites them. Some 76% of Americans supported the bill, including 63% of low-income Republicans (a quarter of all Republican voters). Younger conservatives are particularly supportive, presumably because people under 50 have felt the brunt of the four-decade slowdown in real wage growth.Given all this, it’s amazing that zero Republican members of Congress voted for it, while 278 voted for Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the rich.The political lesson is that today’s Democrats – who enjoy popular vote majorities in presidential elections (having won seven of the past eight) – can gain political majorities by raising the wages of both middle class and poor voters, while fighting Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months. More
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Biden's make or break moment: president aims to build on success of relief bill
In the White House Rose Garden, where for four years Donald Trump raucously celebrated political wins with his allies, it was now the turn of Democrats to take a victory lap – masked and physically distanced, of course.Kamala Harris, the vice-president, heaped praise on Joe Biden for signing a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the biggest expansion of the American welfare state in decades. “Your empathy has become a trademark of your presidency and can be found on each and every page of the American Rescue Plan,” Harris said.Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have to sell it. Friday’s event with members of Congress fired the starting gun for Biden, Harris and their spouses to mount an aggressive marketing campaign, travelling the country to tell Americans directly how the hard won legislation will improve their lives.Salesmanship was always seen as Trump’s forte but this is a golden opportunity for Biden, a once unlikely saviour. The oldest president ever elected – at age 78 – is riding high in opinion polls. His rescue plan is endorsed by three in four citizens. His opposition is in disarray with Republicans struggling to find a coherent counter- narrative, squabbling over Trump and obsessing over culture wars.But Biden’s long career will have taught him the laws of political gravity: presidents and prime ministers who start on the up inevitably take a fall. He has also spoken of the need to avoid the fate of Barack Obama who, having intervened to stave off financial disaster in 2009, was repaid with a “shellacking” for Democrats in the midterm elections.Politics is about momentum and, with vaccines coming fast, the economy set to roar back, and spring in the air, Biden has it for now. Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, said: “In politics, good gets better, bad gets worse. Biden is on something of a roll right now and so it’s good for him to be a little more aggressive and be seen out and about.“They do want to take credit and he should. The tides will turn; there’ll be periods when they look like they can’t do anything right.”In what the White House calls a Help is Here tour, first lady Jill Biden is set to travel to Burlington, New Jersey, on Monday, while the president will visit Delaware county, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will go to Las Vegas on Monday and Denver on Tuesday. Emhoff will remain out west and make a stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Wednesday.At the end of the week, Biden and Harris will make their first joint trip in office to Atlanta where Democrats’ victories in two Senate runoff elections in January were pivotal to getting the relief package passed against unyielding Republican opposition.The White House has acknowledged that the public relations offensive is an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2009, when the Obama administration did not do enough to explain and promote its own economic recovery plan. Biden, who was vice-president at the time, told colleagues last week that Obama was modest and did not want to take a victory lap. “We paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility,” he said.That price included a backlash in the form of the Tea Party movement and rise of rightwing populism. But there were important differences in substance as well as style. Obama’s $787bn bill, which followed the bailout of the banks, delivered a recovery that felt abstract and glacial. This time the impact is more immediate and tangible: some Americans will receive a $1,400 stimulus payment this weekend, with mass vaccinations and school reopenings on the way.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “I underestimated the extent to which the experience of 2009 has seared itself into the memory of senior Democrats: the interpretation of going too small and paying the price in a painfully slow recovery, spending too long at the beginning negotiating with members of the other party who were never going to agree and never going to compromise, not telling the American people what they had accomplished for them.“The list of lessons learned is a very long one and, to an extent that I find surprising, the administration is refighting and winning the past war.”Despite preventing financial meltdown, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, the biggest shift since 1948. That fit a pattern in which the incumbent president’s party tends to fare badly in the first midterms, and so Republicans are upbeat about their chances of regaining both the House and Senate next year.Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama, argues that the Covid relief bill is the start of the battle for the 2022 midterms and warns that Democrats cannot take the credit for granted since Americans “currently have the long-term memory of a sea cucumber”.He wrote in the Message Box newsletter last week that despite Obama’s speeches and visits to factories, “it was nearly impossible to break through the avalanche of bad news”. But “this plan’s benefits are more specific, more easily understood, and likely to be broadly felt before too long”.Pfeiffer urged grassroots supporters to join Biden and Harris in the messaging effort via social media. “I spent much of 2009 and 2010 banging my head against the proverbial wall because not enough people knew about how Barack Obama had helped prevent the economy from tumbling into a second Great Depression,” he added. “Let’s not do that again.”The plan will also require strict oversight to ensure money is not misspent or wasted. Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “It is a massive bill with massive consequences but it requires not just the president and vice-president and cabinet but state and local governments to also work together to ensure that the vaccines are rolled out in an equitable way and ordinary citizens are able to take advantage of some of the wonderful initiatives that are in the bill.”There has been a striking contrast between Biden and Harris’s disciplined focus on passing historic legislation and Republicans’ fixation on “cancel culture”, from Dr Seuss, after the children’s author’s publishing house announced it was discontinuing several books that contained racist imagery, to confusion over whether the Mr Potato Head toy will still be a “Mr”.The issue, which often gets more coverage on conservative media than coronavirus relief, is seen as a way of animating the base in a way that attacks on Biden do not. The president is not Black like Obama, nor a woman like Hillary Clinton, nor a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, all of which seem to have inoculated him against demonisation by the rightwing attack machine.And despite its popularity with the public, every Republican senator opposed the American Rescue Plan, offering Biden’s team a chance to score political points. Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “It’ll be interesting to see how much they make it about the benefits of the plan versus about Republicans not having voted for the plan.”Chen, policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, added: “The challenge for Democrats is going to be as elements of this come out that will be unpopular, is it going to be defined by the things that are unpopular or the things that would appear to be politically quite favourable?” The OECD predicts that the rescue plan will help the US economy grow at a 6.5% rate this year, which would be its fastest annual growth since the early 1980s. But as Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair discovered, all political honeymoons come to an end.Republicans are already exploring a new line of attack by accusing the president of ignoring the burgeoning crisis of a surge in children and families trying to cross the southern border. The rare outbreak of unity among Democrats – in the Rose Garden, Biden thanked Sanders for his efforts – is not likely to endure. And the next major item on the legislative wishlist, infrastructure, is likely to be even tougher.But it is the American Rescue Plan, and the political battle to define it, that could make or break Biden’s presidency. Michael Steel, who was press secretary for former Republican House speaker John Boehner, said: “They’re making a bet on economic recovery and I hope they’re right because I want the US economy to recover swiftly.”But, he added, “I think that people will continue learning more about the things in this legislation that are not directly related to Covid relief or economic stimulus. There’s definitely a real risk of blowback.”Steel, now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public affairs consulting firm, added: “We could be on the on the verge of a new Roaring Twenties with a booming economy and so much pent up demand for people to travel and live and spend money. We could also be priming the pump for a devastating wave of inflation. The economy is generally the number one issue going into an election and there’s a very real chance that we have a tremendous upside or some dangers ahead.” More
The Quest to Paint the World Green
Once upon a time, a rich hypochondriac was complaining about pains in his head and stomach. He consulted a wise man who pointed out that the root of the problem lay somewhere else: in the man’s eyes. To resolve the persistent headache and stomachache, the sage suggested focusing on just one color in the surrounding environment — green — and ignoring all others.
The rich man promptly hired workers to cover everything in sight in green paint so that he could easily follow the peculiar prescription. Ten days later, when the wise man returned in his saffron robe, a worker hurried over to douse him in green paint as well.
The Nation-State vs. The Climate
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“You have wasted so much money through your monumental stupidity,” the paint-splattered sage upbraided the rich man. “If only you had purchased a pair of green spectacles, worth perhaps four rupees, you could have saved these walls and trees and pots and pans and chairs and sofas and also a pretty large share of your fortune.” The sage drew himself up to his full height to deliver his final message: “You cannot paint the world green!”
The moral of this Hindi tale is simple. You cannot change the world. You can only change the way you look at the world. Perception is everything.
This cautionary tale is particularly ill-suited for these modern times. With the climate crisis pressing down upon the planet, humanity must change the world or face extinction. Figuratively speaking, we must indeed paint the world green — and ignore the so-called wise men who tell us just to put on green-colored glasses.
In the real world, this choice boils down to either shrinking the global carbon footprint or succumbing to a form of “greenwashing” that offers only an illusory environmental protection. The Biden administration faces this same choice. Will it spend a lot of money to help paint the world green or just hand out tinted lenses, whether green or rose, to make us all think that the planet has been saved?
How Green Is His Policy?
The first task for the Biden administration has been to clean up the toxic waste dump of the previous presidency. That has meant rejoining the 2015 Paris climate deal, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and restoring the many environmental regulations that former US President Donald Trump gutted. The new administration has put a pause on new oil and gas drilling on federal lands. It has reversed Trump’s effort to weaken the Clean Air Act. It has supported an international agreement to end the use of hydrofluorocarbons. In all, the administration is looking to roll back around 100 of Trump’s attempts to favor business over the environment.
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These moves will bring the United States back to the status quo ante. The administration, however, has more ambitious plans. In his January 27 executive order on “tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad,” President Joe Biden laid out a detailed list of initiatives that runs over 7,500 words. The very fact that the order addresses the “climate crisis” and not just “climate change” is an important signal of the seriousness with which the administration takes this issue.
The order begins with these words: “We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents. Domestic action must go hand in hand with United States international leadership, aimed at significantly enhancing global action. Together, we must listen to science and meet the moment.”
To this end, the administration has declared that the United States will become carbon-neutral by 2050, which will require steep cuts in emissions. “We need to increase tree cover five times faster than we are,” says John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy for climate. “We need to ramp up renewable energy six times faster. And the transition to electric vehicles needs to take place at a rate 22 times faster.”
But like its initial promise to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days against COVID-19, the administration is already being pushed to do better. Other countries are competing to become carbon-neutral faster: Sweden has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2045, Austria and Iceland have more informally set 2040 as their goal, Finland is looking at 2035, and both Norway and Uruguay expect to achieve the mark by 2030. Apple, Microsoft and General Electric have all committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030 as well. General Motors announced at the end of January that it would sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
A key component of the US race to carbon neutrality is the Biden administration’s version of a Green New Deal. This “clean energy revolution” calls for investing $400 billion over 10 years into transforming the US economy along sustainable lines, creating 10 million good-paying jobs in the clean energy sector and putting environmental justice at the center of these efforts.
But the administration can do just so much with executive orders and through federal agencies like the Department of Energy. At some point, Congress must decide whether the next four years will be world-transforming or just greenwashing.
But Congress — especially the Senate — is a problem. It’s going to be difficult to persuade Republicans as well as Democrats like Joe Manchin, who represents the coal-mining state of West Virginia, to sign on to anything truly transformative. But tax credits for wind power and solar energy were included in the December 2020 stimulus package, which Republicans backed. And Manchin is already co-sponsoring the American Jobs in Energy Manufacturing Act, which provides tax incentives to businesses that switch over to clean energy products. Also in the works is a Civilian Climate Corps, modeled on a similar New Deal-era initiative, that would enlist the unemployed and underemployed to help with such tasks as reforestation and protecting biodiversity.
It will be hard to move Congress on this domestic agenda. The international component may be an even tougher sell.
Going Green Internationally
At least on paper, the Biden administration intends to make the climate crisis a way of reshaping much of US foreign policy. The January 27 order reads: “It will be a United States priority to press for enhanced climate ambition and integration of climate considerations across a wide range of international fora, including the Group of Seven (G7), the Group of Twenty (G20), and fora that address clean energy, aviation, shipping, the Arctic, the ocean, sustainable development, migration, and other relevant topics.”
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.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}The first challenge for the new administration will be to put its money where its mouth is, and one example of that is its contributions to the Green Climate Fund. Established in 2010 to assist poorer countries transition away from fossil fuels, the fund raised about $7 billion out of the $10 billion initially pledged. A major reason for the shortfall was the US, which promised $3 billion but delivered only $1 billion. At the end of 2019, the fund put out another call to replenish its coffers and received pledges of another $9.8 billion.
Kerry has already announced that the United States will make good on its previous commitment by sending $2 billion to the fund. But he has made no mention of US support for the additional replenishment. Climate campaigners have called on the administration to double its original commitment, as a number of European countries plus South Korea and New Zealand have done, and top up its contributions to $9 billion total. Such a firm action by the US might not only persuade other countries to achieve this higher standard but also pressure outliers like Russia and Australia to join the effort in the first place.
The more immediate problem, however, will be the rising levels of debt, particularly in the Global South, that the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into an acute crisis. A number of countries — Zambia, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Brazil — have either defaulted on their loans or are close to it. Meanwhile, the fiscal crisis of poorer countries has pushed several to consider abandoning climate and environment-friendly restrictions on such harmful sectors as industrial mining in order to make financial ends meet. International financial institutions have suspended debt repayments for the world’s poorest nations and are considering various remedies, including the provision of more Special Drawing Rights (SDR) to the worst-off countries through the International Monetary Fund.
It’s unclear where Biden stands on debt relief or cancellation. But the January 27 executive order on the climate crisis includes the following provision: “[D]evelop a strategy for how the voice and vote of the United States can be used in international financial institutions, including the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, to promote financing programs, economic stimulus packages, and debt relief initiatives that are aligned with and support the goals of the Paris Agreement.” It’s possible that the administration will, instead of debt cancellation, promote some form of debt-for-nature or debt-for-climate swaps, preferably in versions that include a greater range of stakeholders including indigenous groups, or perhaps back the issuance of bonds linked to performance on green indicators.
The climate crisis will also affect how the United States negotiates trade agreements. Biden’s appointments to key trade positions suggest that he will be putting labor and environmental concerns at the center of US policy. As a presidential candidate, Biden urged making future trade deals contingent on countries meeting their commitments under the Paris agreement, and members of Congress are already pushing the new president to change the US-Canada-Mexico trade deal to reflect this condition. Another potential option is a fossil fuel export ban, for which Biden has expressed some support.
The new president is planning to hold a Global Climate Summit on Earth Day next month, though it’s unclear how such a meeting would differ from the one held in December 2020 to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris agreement. Climate campaigners are urging the administration to use this opportunity to focus on “super pollutants” such as methane, black carbon, and HFCs, which contribute disproportionately to global warming.
In the meantime, preparations for COP26 — the UN climate change conference — are beginning for November in Glasgow, UK. The hostility of the Trump administration and the divided attention span of the Biden team — not to mention the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — may compromise the efficacy of the UN meeting. The Paris agreement came together because of 18 months of intensive preliminary negotiations. A similar effort to forge a pre-meeting consensus for COP26 has been slow to emerge.
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The Biden administration has made commitments on other environmental issues. It has endorsed a “30 by 30” initiative: protecting 30% of US lands and coastal areas by 2030. This effort would require setting aside 440 million more acres of land for conservation. This pledge, part of a global campaign to preserve biodiversity, would require a significant scaling back of extraction activities on federal lands.
Cooperation between the US and China is critical for any global environmental effort to move forward. China is currently the leading emitter of carbon in the world, with nearly twice the annual rate of the United States at number two (though the US still leads in terms of cumulative output over time and per-capita carbon footprint). During the Barack Obama years, the two countries created the Clean Energy Research Consortium (CERC), a public-private initiative that spurs research and development in several energy-related sectors. Renewing CERC would be a first step in boosting U.S.-China cooperation.
Greening national security can and should go well beyond superpower cooperation. The US currently spends $81 billion a year to protect global oil supplies, according to one estimate. The bulk of that money should instead go toward ending reliance on fossil fuels. If access to oil becomes less dependable, that would be an even greater incentive for US allies to accelerate their own transitions to renewable energy.
An Administration in Search of a Doctrine
Presidential doctrines have always presented different ways of preserving US global power. The Nixon doctrine was about protecting allies. Jimmy Carter vowed to defend US national interests in the Persian Gulf. Ronald Reagan promised to push back against the Soviet Union worldwide. George W. Bush emphasized unilateral US military action. Donald Trump went on and on about “making America great again.”
Joe Biden has an opportunity to adopt an entirely different kind of doctrine. He should make explicit what is now implicit in his executive orders, that environmental sustainability will hereafter be the major litmus test for American foreign policy. If this happens, it will be the first time that a presidential doctrine focuses on the good of the planet and not just the good of the United States.
I’m sure that plenty of foot-draggers in Congress, industry and the media are just waiting for Biden to have his “sweater moment,” an updated version of the televised address when President Carter famously tried to elevate the energy crisis of the late 1970s into a larger discussion of morality and malaise. They will want to paint Biden as a green opponent of the working stiff, a clueless globalist, an America-laster. So, perhaps it’s best for Biden to avoid grand statements of doctrine for the moment and focus instead on painting US foreign policy green, issue by issue.
The fate of the United States has never been more linked — virally, environmentally, economically and existentially — to the fate of the rest of the world. As such, there hasn’t been a better moment for an American president not just to look at the planet differently, but to join hands with other countries to make it greener.
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
- in US Politics
In national address, Biden tells states to make all adults vaccine eligible by 1 May
Joe Biden has directed states to make all American adults eligible for coronavirus vaccines by 1 May and set an audacious goal of 4 July for gatherings to celebrate “independence” from the deadly pandemic.
But in his first prime-time address, which marked the anniversary of America’s shutdown, the president warned that restrictions could be reinstated if the nation lets down its guard against the virus.
“Tonight, I’m announcing that I will direct all states, tribes and territories to make all adults – people 18 and over – eligible to be vaccinated no later than 1 May,” Biden said in the east room of the White House. “That’s much earlier than expected.”
He went on to make clear that this does not mean every person can get their shot in the arm by then but they will at least be able to join a waiting list. It signified the growing confidence of an administration that Biden said remains on “a war footing to get the job done”.
The president said his target of 100m vaccine doses in his first 100 days has already been exceeded, with the US now on track to achieve that figure on his 60th day.
In a 24-minute speech that carefully balanced caution and optimism, Biden also announced that the federal government will create a website before 1 May to help people find vaccination sites and schedule appointments. He promised he would “not relent” until the virus is beaten but he needs every American to “do their part”.
He then offered a tangible target with emotional resonance: “If we do this together, by July the fourth there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your back yard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate independence day.”
He added: “After this long hard year, that will make this independence day something truly special, where we not only mark our independence as a nation, but we begin to mark our independence from this virus.”
Trump was frequently criticised last year for setting wildly optimistic dates for reopening businesses and schools. With many states already lifting restrictions again, Biden was at pains to say the fight is far from over. “Because if we don’t stay vigilant and the conditions change and we may have to reinstate restrictions to get back on track,” he warned. “Please, we don’t want to do that again. We’ve made so much progress. This is not the time to let up.”
Wearing a black mask, dark suit, white shirt, striped tie and white handkerchief in his breast pocket, Biden walked up a red carpet flanked by flags to make the address – the first on live television from the east room since Donald Trump falsely claimed election victory at 2.20am on 4 November. More - in US Politics
Joe Biden pledges vaccine eligibility for all US adults by 1 May in nationwide address – video
Joe Biden has pledged all US adults will be eligible for coronavirus vaccines by 1 May as he addressed the nation on the one year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden outlined plans to speed up vaccinations around the country and hoped for a return to normalcy by 4 July. The president condemned the hate crimes against Asian Americans, and repeated his calls for unity, as he urged Americans to continue to wear masks
Biden pledges all US adults will be eligible for vaccines by 1 May in pandemic anniversary address – live More
