Joe Biden Is in No Position to Lecture the World on Climate Change

Yves here. I’m actually surprised that anyone outside the US, or say the Anglosphere, thinks the US has anything credible to say about global warning. The US press has glossed over the fact that Obama spent nearly all of his presidency outside the Paris climate accords. He signed up only for apparent historical record burnishing purposes, less than six months before he left office, opening the window procedurally for Trump to revoke the commitment. As you can see below, Biden is worse than all hat, no cattle. He’s not taken actions that are within his authority to combat climate change, which would at least show that he’s doing more than posturing.

Although many readers are likely familiar with the broad strokes, this post does a good job of detailing the Biden Administration’s many climate change failings.

By Aaron White, the North America editor of ourEconomy. You can follow him at @aaronwolfwhite. Originally published at openDemocracy

“Nothing would fundamentally change,” Joe Biden reassured donors at a fundraising event at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan in June 2019, amid the backdrop of his presidential primary bid. So far he has kept his word.

It has now been nearly a year since Biden entered the White House. During his first week in office, he rejoined the Paris Agreement, vowed to stop oil and gas drilling on public lands, and committed to passing a historic infrastructure package that would create millions of well-paid union jobs.

It was no Green New Deal, but the US administration appeared to have at least listened to the Left’s demands. Sunrise Movement climate activists, Bernie Sanders and other progressive groups were reportedly given a seat at the table to negotiate the administration’s agenda. Biden established new climate offices – an international one led by the former secretary of state, John Kerry, and a domestic one led by Gina McCarthy. In April, he even hosted world leaders to announce a new US target to reduce emissions by 50-52% from 2005 levels by 2030.

And soon, Biden will head to the UN climate change conference, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland, with nearly his entire cabinet in tow, to lecture the world on the need to transition to green energy as soon as possible to limit global warming to 1.5℃.

He is departing from a city lined with climate activists demanding that the administration revoke the permit for Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline, which will transport oil from Canada to the US, and declare a climate emergency (which he has the authority to do without congressional approval). And he leaves a congress whittling down his signature legislation ahead of an impending 31 October deadline set by house speaker Nancy Pelosi. (The White House denied this deadline on Tuesday.)

“Biden is going into COP26 still without any climate laws on the book,” Kate Aronoff, climate reporter at The New Republic and author of ‘Overheated’, told me last week.

“There was a lot of hopeful rhetoric at the start of the administration, and it’s true that the Biden White House has some of the most ambitious climate pledges and commitments of any Democratic administration to date, but there’s still nothing there.”

So what is Biden’s climate legacy thus far – and what can he unilaterally do? I’ve been speaking to experts over the past week and have found a deep frustration at not just the lack of congressional action or political will, but at a failure by Biden to directly confront the US’s deeply entrenched fossil fuel industry.

No Climate Legislation To Speak Of

The congressional packages are central to the administration’s climate agenda. Following bipartisan negotiations, the White House decided to pair a $550bn bipartisan infrastructure deal with a larger $3.5trn reconciliation package (in a process that avoids the Senate filibuster) passed on a party-line vote.

Although this sounds like a lot of funding, both packages actually fall far short of the public investment that economists say is needed to halve carbon emissions by 2030.

What’s more, the original top-line figure, $3.5trn, reserved for the reconciliation bill (which is already shrinking by the day) represents just 1.2% of the US economy over the next ten years. “It doesn’t come close to what even many mainstream economists who focus on climate change say is necessary, which is about 4-5% of GDP,” said Thea Riofrancos, an assistant associate professor of political science at Providence College and the author of ‘Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador’.

The $3.5trn package nonetheless would be the US’s most significant domestic policy in a long time. It would expand the ‘child allowance’, institute a national paid-leave programme, fund universal pre-kindergarten for under-fives and two years of free community college, and expand Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing, as well as other public investments.

It would also include a clean-electricity payment programme (which would essentially pay utilities that use renewable energy and fine those that aren’t transitioning to doing so) and clean-energy tax incentives, which would expand the existing credits available for wind and solar and make them refundable – the two centrepiece climate policies in the package.

However, the package is currently being cut to appease senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who both oppose the current spending figure. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Manchin is opposed to the clean-electricity program – the bill’s main climate policy. (Manchin made $500,000 last year from a coal company owned by his son and takes in more fossil fuel cash than any other senator.) On Tuesday, Biden told lawmakers that $1.9tn should be the new target, with likely cuts to the universal community college fund and the clean-electricity program.

“Without passing that reconciliation bill, the US has zero ‘leadership’ on climate when it shows up to COP26,” Riofrancos told me last week.

With the rumoured end of October deadline fast approaching, it’s increasingly possible that Biden will not arrive at COP26 with signed climate legislation. As Riofrancos told me, that 24-hour window at the end of the month will determine “whether or not the US comes to the table with something or comes to the table with nothing – but continues to make it seem like every other country in the world is the problem as to why we don’t have climate action”.

What Can Biden Unilaterally Do?

The Democrats have the smallest possible majority in the Senate, not to mention some members who are wholly wedded to big-money corporate interests – meaning it remains to be seen what substantive climate policy (if any) will be agreed on before the start of COP26. But, if Biden is indeed a climate champion, there is still significant executive power that he can tap into.

He came to office pledging to end new drilling on federal lands, however, in June, a judge swiftly overruled the promised temporary suspension on the grounds that it financially harms oil-producing states. Now the administration is on track to approve the most drilling permits on federal land since George W. Bush was in office. The US is currently the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and gas.

Max Moran, a research director at the Revolving Door Project, which scrutinises executive branch personnel, told me he has been “deeply disappointed” in Biden’s executive actions – or lack thereof – on climate policies. “He controls this entire federal bureaucracy and there’s an enormous number of things you can do on [climate],” Moran said.