The president’s remarks at the U.N. global-warming conference were mostly hot air.
The president’s remarks at the U.N. global-warming conference were mostly hot air.
O ne way to feel good about your performance at something is to find someone worse at it. So, someone failing to make headway at AA might rationalize it by saying, “Well, I may drink a bottle of wine a night, but Bob over there drinks four! I’m fine.” This is President Biden’s approach to politics.
During the 2020 election (and even to this day), Biden’s inability to deliver on his own promises or meet the targets he sets for himself — be it at the border, in Afghanistan, or on any number of domestic issues — is typically dismissed with “Trump was worse!” The trouble is that, as a long-term strategy, this doesn’t work. People catch on, even on the left.
Yet now the president is trying the same approach with climate change. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Scotland this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “the U.S. launched several initiatives intended to show a contrast between its work and the reluctance of [its] rivals,” meaning Russia and China. For instance, the U.S. rejoined the High Ambition Coalition to ensure that the global temperature rise is limited to 1.5°C. In addition, Biden pledged to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030, commit to ending deforestation, and redirect public money away from fossil fuels. Addressing the world, President Biden criticized Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin for their refusal to make further climate pledges as well as their absence from the conference.
But was anyone looking to China and Russia for moral leadership on this or any other issue? The bottom line is that, as the climate-change radicals in the Democratic base see it, Biden is failing to give them what they want. And no amount of finger-pointing at authoritarian regimes is going to help win them over. Greta Thunberg, the popular Swedish activist, made this point perfectly clear. Her response to the congregation of world leaders, gathered to focus solely on the issue she cares most about, was to disparage them. In front of a large crowd of protesters, Thunberg accused Biden and the other world leaders of only “pretending to take our future seriously.”
“Change is not going to come from inside there. That is not leadership, this is leadership,” she said, pointing to her fellow protesters (armed with placards and slogans such as “we are unstoppable, another world is possible”). “We say no more blah blah blah, no more exploitation of people and nature and the planet . . . No more whatever the f*** they’re doing inside there.”
Thunberg is not the only person who feels that way. In April, the New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo published a piece whose title declared, “Biden Wants to Spend Billions to Fight Climate Change. It’s Not Enough.” Apparently, the $174 billion for electric vehicles, $80 billion for rail lines, $50 billion for severe-weather protections, and $35 billion for climate research (and much, much more) is “not nearly big enough” of a spend. Manjoo cites a Roosevelt Institute report suggesting that to achieve a carbon-neutral American economy in time to avert a climate catastrophe requires at least $1 trillion of spending per annum for at least a decade.
The same month, The New York Times Magazine published Eric Levitz’s “Why the World Can’t Trust Biden on Climate.” Levitz points out that, in part owing to the checks and balances of the American political system, Democratic presidents have failed to deliver even their more modest promises related to climate change. In his view, the way to get things done, in addition to a huge increase in spending, is to grant statehood to D.C., the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico and mandate nonpartisan redistricting in the House.
Much of the rest of the country takes a different view. According to Pew Research’s figures from January 2021, 80 percent of Americans say that strengthening the economy should be a top priority for the president and Congress, while only 38 percent said that climate change ought to be. There was a very predictable split between Democrat-leaning and Republican-leaning voters, with 14 percent of Republicans finding the climate issue important compared with 59 percent of Democrats.
When Biden rejoined the Paris agreement earlier this year, the political justification was largely symbolic. He was signaling to his party and to left-leaning leaders across the world that, when it comes to the climate, he is a responsible player — much more so than Trump. The more appropriate symbolism, however, came from this week in Glasgow: footage of Biden falling asleep mid conference.