George W. Bush was famously on vacation when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Calls for him to visit the disaster-torn region triggered an unfortunate presidential photo op: Bush, distantly viewing the devastation from an Air Force One window. The former president later said the image was “detached and uncaring.”
After a couple of presidential vacations himself, Joe Biden is in a similar situation. The Bidens touched down in Lake Tahoe yesterday after a Delaware beach vacation earlier this month. Biden will momentarily leave the Tahoe Blue to visit Hawaii this week, where wildfires wiped out Lahaina and roughly one thousand people are still missing. The visit might not mean much; political consolation isn’t all that consoling to people whose homes and families were destroyed. As Jeff Blehar asked this week: “What value are these visits to the people who are actually suffering?”
The aloofness, however, with which Biden visits Hawaii after he initially refused twice to comment on the fire is insulting — especially because the Bidens are staying in former presidential candidate and billionaire Tom Steyer’s Tahoe manse.
Steyer and his wife are both climate activists. His new investment fund, Galvanize Climate Solutions, buys and upgrades real estate with a “decarbonization goal.” When asked by Politico about climate deniers, Steyer said:
I don’t know exactly how to define ESG. What I do know how to define is an investor looks to the future. We’re talking about climate. We’re talking about making business decisions for the future, which includes an awareness that, “Oh, by the way, we have this huge crisis that we’re going to have to solve.” So this is just dollars and cents.
His wife, Kat Taylor is the co-founder of Beneficial State Bank, which donates its economic shares to the Beneficial State Foundation. This foundation seeks an “immediate end to fossil fuel finance and to redirect the flow of money toward a just, inclusive, regenerative economy. “
“We think our depositors and borrowers want to create an economy that is fully inclusive, racially and gender just, and environmentally regenerative,” Taylor said in a 2016 interview.
Meanwhile in Hawaii, activists with the same mindset as Biden’s landlords might have contributed to the state’s worst wildfire ever. Hawaiian Electric was reportedly aware of its system’s vulnerabilities that could contribute to a national disaster — but renewable energy was more important to the climate-driven company. “While there was concern for wildfire risk, politically the focus was on electricity generation,” Mina Morita, the former chairwoman of the state’s utilities commission, said.
Biden’s billionaire friends and the Hawaiian company that pushed equitable power are related in mindset. It’s the mindset that cried “climate change” at the start of the fire, even though “wildfires aren’t started by an angry Mother Earth.”
As Dominic Pino wrote this week: “We don’t have all the facts yet. What we do know is that, under pressure from the government, Hawaiian Electric was all-in on the green agenda and was dragging its feet on wildfire prevention.”
Private companies investing in the green-energy transition — instead of power and safety — are out of touch. So too, is a president who touts his climate activist connections days before visiting a state that might have been set ablaze by renewable-energy projects.