Joe Biden, touted as the US’s first climate president, is presiding over the quiet weakening of his two most significant plans to slash planet-heating emissions, suggesting that tackling the climate crisis will take a back seat in a febrile election year.
During his state of the union speech on Thursday, Biden insisted that his administration is “making history by confronting the climate crisis, not denying it,”, before reeling off a list of climate-friendly policies and accomplishments. “I’m taking the most significant action on climate ever in the history of the world,” the US president added.
However, last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would delay a regulation that would reduce emissions from existing gas power plants, most likely until after November’s presidential election. The delay comes as the administration waters down requirements that limit pollution from cars, slowing the country’s adoption of electric vehicles.
Joe Biden just did the rarest thing in US politics: he stood up to the oil industry Bill McKibben
The backtracking could jeopardize Biden’s goal of cutting US emissions in half this decade, which scientists say is imperative to averting disastrous effects from global heating, and shows the competing pressures upon a president looking to hold together a wobbly coalition including climate activists, labor unions and centrist swing state voters before a likely showdown with Donald Trump later this year.
I was a bit shocked hearing his plan to halve US’es emissions by 2030. Sounded unrealistic to me.
I think it’s shocking because declaring an ambition that is in line with our needs is uncommonly sensible electorally for Biden.
I fully recognize that his targets during 2020 were not realistic, but that’s appropriate. No goal of this magnitude ever arrives on time, as planned. But if you know that, it means you MUST aim for at least what is appropriate (if not more) because if you scale your ambition to what is sensible, you’ll get even less than that.
I didn’t bother reading the article. I think Biden and his campaign are stupid. Right now, it’s very, very, VERY clear to me that his vulnerability isn’t “the middle”. The very concept of “The Middle” is a fiction at this point. There are moderate, Democratic leaning independents who may or may not show up, and there exist some persuadable voters who are not insignificant, but they are not the deciders in Georgia and Michigan and Pennsylvania. The real, real, real obvious threat to Biden’s reelection is that his base has completely eroded. You can’t build a campaign on courting the tiny slice of swing voters if you’ve got no base for them to add to. The base needs enormous reconstruction. I don’t know if it’s possible, but Biden is running a campaign which looks currently like a case study in how to ignore expert wisdom and lose massively.
I am not a Democrat. I am a progressive, former Democrat. I am squarely the type of Obama-to-Bernie voters that the party really needs to recapture if they’re going to have a future. I want to help Biden, and that means marching in the streets yelling ‘Stop committing genocide!’ ‘We need a Green New Deal!’ ‘Pass the PRO Act!’ ‘Raise the minimum wage!’ ‘Child credits now!’
I’m trying to lead a horse to water, but this old horse really seems determined to die of dehydration out of some misguided sense of spite. C’est la vie, n’est pas? I’ll try not to give up hope, though boy, he and his handlers aren’t making it easy.
The IRA is a fantastic overall piece of legislation that gives us a fighting chance. Most policy experts agree that it has a lot of very achievable goals – thanks to its structure that offers uncapped subsidies for certain beneficial productions that are estimated to represent well over a trillion dollars in real investment, on top of the fact that renewable energy already out-competes fossil on NEARLY all financial metrics.
And if Biden loses, huge amounts of this progress can be undone by executive action, inaction, and feebleness by a Trump administration. Which he, I remind everyone has pledged to do.
If the bill lasts more than a couple of years, it will build its own constituency a la medicare and become VERY sticky and hard to remove. But it’s very vulnerable right now.
So yeah, as someone who thinks climate is the top issue everyone should be caring about since it represents an existential threat to our entire human race, I think it’s fine for Biden to focus for the next year on winning that election. If he wins that election, most of the very significant progress will get 4 more years to cure – it will be pretty well locked in and indeed many growing industries will be craving more. Rural states seeing major investment for the first time in decades in the form of renewable energy industry will want more. It has the potential to be really transformational.
Plenty of solid reasons to criticize Biden. Climate is not one of them. He’s made progress that is difficult to fathom for people who only have cursory knowledge of the US energy economy.