If he treated the issue as more than an occasion for taxpayer-funded political patronage, he might actually get somewhere.
If he treated the issue as more than an occasion for taxpayer-funded political patronage, he might actually get somewhere.
J oe Biden has one thing right about climate change — that any meaningful evolution of U.S. policy can come only from a “unified national response.” There isn’t one of those in the making, and Biden shows no inclination or aptitude for forging a new climate consensus.
Instead, he is leaning into his favorite mode of politics, corporate welfare, by promising to have the federal government purchase a large new fleet of zero-emissions vehicles, which, he says — based on almost nothing — will create 1 million new jobs. He is issuing executive orders to this effect, which are practically meaningless — the president has no money to spend other than what Congress appropriates, and Congress has not appropriated funding for a happy-hour shopping spree at Tesla or General Motors, that quondam ward of the federal government.
“Democrats should act like they won the election,” progressives say. And they should. But there are 50 Republicans in the Senate and 211 Republicans in the House who won their elections, too. Biden has not learned the lesson of the failure of the Affordable Care Act regime: that major changes in national policy require an actual “unified national response” rather than a speech about the need for a “unified national response” — or, short of that, at least broad bipartisan consensus. Major policy changes that happen without that kind of consensus are inherently unstable.
Democrats will advise Biden to take a different lesson from the ACA fiasco: that Republicans will not negotiate in good faith, and that they will oppose major Democratic initiatives no matter what compromises or concessions are offered. The point is a fair one — Republicans after all these years still have not put forward a credible alternative to the ACA, which they continue to abominate even as they warmly embrace its most popular features, such as the preexisting-conditions mandate. And Republicans have paid a price for that: Joe Biden led Donald Trump by 13 points in a poll asking Americans whom they trusted more on health care, and not just because Trump never got around to rolling out that terrific health-care plan he talked about for five years or so. The polls routinely show a Democratic advantage over Republicans on health care even larger than the one Biden enjoyed over Trump. Republicans who could think of nothing to say other than “Harrumph!” during the 2009 health-care debate have ceded the issue to the Democrats, and they will not win back credibility there quickly or easily.
Similarly, the Americans who care the most about climate change overwhelmingly trust the Democrats on the issue over Republicans. But the politics are not the same. Americans have direct experience with the shortcomings of the U.S. health-care system, and, especially, with the U.S. health-insurance system. Climate change is a different and, to many Americans, distinctly less urgent issue, which is why it has been consistently ranked a low priority by voters for so long. (Perhaps you do not think it should be ranked a low-priority issue, but it is.) Biden and the Green New Dealers understand this, which is why their climate-change proposals are larded up with massive spending schemes rather than offered as straightforward restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions, multi-trillion-dollar make-work campaigns rather than plain mandates. And this is one reason why Republicans do not take these proposals all that seriously: a spoonful of sugar makes the legislative medicine go down, but the Democrats demand truckloads rather than spoonsful, enough to induce fiscal diabetes.
Biden can put his name on the Paris agreement, but the Senate will not ratify a treaty accepting its terms or pass legislation to implement them. Biden can demand nine-tenths of the Green New Deal while claiming not to have gone quite whole hog, but he is not going to get it. Presidents can’t pass laws or amend the Constitution or appropriate money. One of the things they can do is campaign to build consensus where no consensus exists. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Ronald Reagan did it. Biden should at least give it a try.
If he does, he might be surprised at what is in fact possible: About a quarter of U.S. electricity still is generated by coal-fired plants, and replacing that coal with natural gas would represent a meaningful improvement in greenhouse-gas emissions. A third of worldwide electricity is coal-generated. In 2019, U.S. firms exported about 4.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and there is a great deal more where that came from. This is a more practical alternative than, say, windmills, as attractive as that twelfth-century technology may be — and it is considerably more effective than moral posturing. Of course, Biden can’t expect the oil-and-gas industry to cooperate with his program while he is waging war on it, preventing the development of infrastructure necessary to its flourishing.
But if he understood climate-change as an energy issue rather than an occasion to shovel a great mound of money into the coffers of politically connected industries and firms, he might see his way toward finding some common ground with Republicans.