Fintan O’Toole: Biden can make America great again only by making it green

There is one respect in which Donald Trump’s administration was not chaotic but efficient, organised and relentless. The former US president and his backers were very serious about climate change and the environment. Denying the first and destroying the second were the closest Trump came to a coherent programme for government.

This was not just about negative acts such as pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accords, or refusing to face up to the transformations necessary for human survival. It was a systematic undoing of the progress that had been made over the previous decades.

Trump boasted as he left office of not having started a war. But he did start one: a war on nature.

It is no exaggeration to say that the new president's success or failure on this question has existential implications, not just for the US, but for the planet

An analysis by the New York Times found that by the time Joe Biden took office last month, his predecessor had managed to dismantle 98 existing regulations on carbon emissions, clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals. Some of these rules were put in place up to 60 years ago: in Trumpworld, it would be ideal if the 1960s and the dawning of environmental consciousness had never happened.

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It is hard to think of any parallel in history to this methodical shredding of environmental protections. Governments have ignored the existing rules or failed to create necessary new ones. Trump declared open season for pollution, carbon emissions, the ruination of wilderness preserves and the killing of endangered species.

This direct assault on the natural world was also reflected indirectly in his foreign policy and even in his catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic. He prioritised relations with the biggest producers of carbon fuels, Russia and Saudi Arabia. And his need to deny climate change underlay the assault on science that later crippled the US response to the coronavirus.

All of this makes environmental policy utterly crucial for Biden. Beneath the madness and distraction, it was Trump’s signature issue. It will have to be Biden’s too.

That he knows this himself was evident when, on his very first day in office, he brought the US back into the Paris accord. Just a week after his inauguration, he signed a slew of executive orders to freeze new oil and gas leases on public lands and double offshore wind energy production by 2030; to create a White House office of domestic climate policy; to define climate change as a threat to national security; and to conserve at least 30 per cent of federal lands and oceans by 2030.

Driving the much more revolutionary change required for the US to become a world leader on climate change will be a vast political challenge

Perhaps most telling – because in any other context it would be so obvious – was Biden’s order that federal agencies should make “evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data”. That such an instruction should be necessary is the greatest acknowledgment of just how deep denialism had gone within the US governmental system under Trump.

In signing that tranche of executive orders, Biden described the threat of climate change as “existential”. It is no exaggeration to say that the new president’s success or failure on this question has existential implications, not just for the US, but for the planet.

The US is, in the first place, a huge creator of greenhouse gases. In per capita terms, its CO2 emissions are more than twice China’s.

Every American is responsible for 16.2 tonnes a year. That’s three times more than, say, a French person. Every 2.3 days, the average American emits as much CO2 as the average Malian or Nigerien does in a year.

It is critical to the moral pressure on poorer countries like China and India that those who have done most to create the climate crisis are seen to be doing most to solve it. Otherwise, the fragile global consensus necessary for concerted action threatens to dissolve in a welter of whataboutery.

At a deeper level, the US created an ethic of endless, heedless consumption that glamourised a model of capitalism that is ultimately incompatible with human survival. Consuming like there is no tomorrow means that there isn’t. Having led the world towards that culture of infinite disposability, the US has to help lead it away again.

Hence, Biden’s rapid injection of a sense of urgency into the task of undoing Trump’s damage sends a powerful signal. But he and his advisers understand very well that signals are not substance.

It is one thing to sign executive orders using the unilateral power of the presidency. Driving the much more revolutionary change required for the US to become a world leader on climate change will be a vast political challenge.

A glimpse of how the internal politics will work can be caught in the reaction to one of Biden’s most decisive early moves: his cancellation of presidential permissions for the Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to the US Gulf Coast.

This form of oil production is phenomenally destructive. It creates vast strip mines that scar the landscape and leave toxic tailings ponds large enough to be seen from space. It also emits vast amounts of carbon.

Cancelling the Keystone pipeline was a basic first step for Biden. But it delivered an immediate economic hit to the workers who were building it.

There is an unpleasant truth that can and will be grossly and cynically exaggerated by the polluters and their political and media allies

“Killing 10,000 jobs and taking $2.2 billion (€1.8bn) in payroll out of workers’ pockets is not what Americans need or want right now,” claimed Andy Black, president and chief executive of the Association of Oil Pipe Lines.

The Fox Business channel, not generally a champion of the downtrodden, was quick to highlight the plight of displaced workers: “I got boys to raise, boys to put through college and, you know what, they are taking my jobs away and I don’t expect the government to pay my way in life,” said Lynn Allen, a father of three and a welder for 34 years, who was laid off from the Keystone XL pipeline project following Biden’s announcement.

In truth, Biden’s decision did not kill 10,000 jobs. The work on the pipeline is seasonal and short-term. The number of workers actually laid off is fewer than 1,000. But that’s not nothing. There is an unpleasant truth that can and will be grossly and cynically exaggerated by the polluters and their political and media allies. There’s a hell of a lot of sludge in this propaganda pipeline, waiting to be poured over Biden and the Democrats: effete elitists wrecking the livelihoods of honest-to-God American workers (mostly white and male) just to please foreigners and protect some goddamn wild animals.

No one knows better than Trump that this rhetoric can be impervious to reality. He had hard-hatted miners waving “Trump digs coal” signs at his rallies while he roared “We are back, the coal industry is back”.

The truth was the opposite: the rate of decline in coal burning under Trump was actually much steeper than it was under his predecessor Barack Obama. At least 145 coal-fired units at 75 power plants closed during the Trump presidency and a further 73 announced their intention to switch away from coal.

But this reality had little real impact on Trump’s support, either within coal communities or with the wider electorate that responded to the imagery of a restoration of the old blue-collar, big-muscled energy-producing United States.

This opposition is not going to melt away. Neither is it going to engage in any rational, evidence-based debate about climate change and survival.

In 2019, Democrats in the House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution calling for a Green New Deal. When it came to the Senate, then still controlled by the Republicans, it was treated with open contempt and mockery.

Their leader Mitch McConnell, from the coal state of Kentucky, set the anti-elitist tone, claiming the plan “might sound like a neat idea in places like San Francisco or New York” but would result in communities across the country being “absolutely crushed”. It would “kill off entire domestic industries” and eliminate millions of jobs.

Democrats now have control, by the thinnest of margins, of the Senate. But their new chair of the powerful Senate Energy and National Resources Committee is Republican senator Joe Manchin, from the coal state of West Virginia.

Climate change is having catastrophic effects on the US, from apocalyptic wildfires in California to terrible floods in Alaska

Manchin, in his first Senate campaign in 2010, ran ads showing him firing a bullet from his hunting rifle through a climate change bill being proposed by Obama. Manchin is heavily funded by carbon energy companies. In 2018 he initially voted to confirm an open climate change denier, Bernard McNamee, as Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The prospects of getting a stable majority in the Senate for large-scale climate action proposals seem grim; Biden may well have to resort to tactical manoeuvres. One of these should be, as the new Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has suggested, declaring the climate crisis a "national emergency". There is nothing dishonest about this – it is. Thirty-eight countries (including Ireland) and the European Union as a whole have already declared it so.

Climate change is having catastrophic effects on the US, from apocalyptic wildfires in California to terrible floods in Alaska. Trump declared an emergency to try to get funds to build his infamous wall on the Mexican border. If the Republicans can use the device to invent a phoney crisis, the Democrats can surely use it to tackle a real one.

Last week, Earl Blumenauer, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced draft legislation that would require Biden make such a declaration. Doing so would allow him to adopt sweeping measures such as redirecting funds away from defence contracts and towards green infrastructure.

Biden’s long-honed political instincts go against such a radical gesture, but if – as he says and clearly believes – the crisis is existential, boldness is not merely justified but demanded.

What will ultimately determine the success or failure of Biden’s climate revolution, though, is the story he is able to tell.

Trump, his party, his media enablers and the network of think tanks have a clear narrative: Biden and the Democrats are trying to destroy jobs and communities for the sake of an emergency that does not exist. This message will be endlessly repeated and massively amplified.

The counter-message has to be more than doom and panic – even if both are justified. It’s about job creation, innovation, opportunity, the new frontier of technology – all the stuff that is also deeply embedded in the American psyche.

It helps that American capitalism is already shifting in the direction of change.

Nothing is more American, after all, than the internal combustion engine. It shaped the real economy from Henry Ford’s Model-T, and the new industrial system needed to create it, onwards. It has also shaped the American imagination, from the symbolism of sexual potency to the grungy road movie.

Shortly after Biden won November's election, the chief executive of General Motors, Mary Barra, expressed her desire to work with his administration and announced GM's decision to end production of all oil-powered cars, trucks and SUVs by 2035 and shift its entire new fleet to electric vehicles.

She did so for the same reason coal-fired powered plants kept closing under Trump: fewer and fewer investors want to put money into dirty industries. The smart money, literally, is on green technologies.

Trump won in 2016 by playing on Americans’ fears that they were falling behind and losing out. Biden can win the climate wars by playing, with an entirely different intent, on those same fears.

The US really has fallen behind on climate change and its people will lose out on the next industrial revolution if their prosperity continues to depend on the rapacious destruction of the planet. Biden needs to convince enough of them that it is time to make America great by making it green.