A HERO RISES?

Photo by Steven Gute “Navajo Nation’s Monument Valley Park”

BY JUDITH LEWIS MERNIT

We were so ready for him to disappoint us.

Joe Biden, he who in the Democratic primary season ranked lowest on everyone’s climate scorecard, who declined to sign the circulating pledge to cancel on his first day in office the permit for Keystone XL, the pipeline that carries oil sands from Canada’s Alberta to U.S. markets for refining and export. Joe Biden, who in the primary debates was still talking about natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to tide us over as we wait for battery storage to come online. Biden, who refused to ban fracking.

But the Joe Biden who took office on January 20 as the 46th president of the United States, wielding a refreshingly green executive-order signing pen, is not the Joe Biden who launched his campaign in April 2019 as the presumptive favorite in the Democratic field. That man confronted a phalanx of well-organized climate groups that had helped elevate a democratic socialist from Vermont and a Massachusetts progressive to the top two spots in the polls early on.

The movement, restructured and re-energized by young people who studied everything from the fight for civil rights to the 2010 Tea Party to understand how best to alter public opinion and thus effect substantive change, had no interest anymore in the hoary opposition to green technology that said decarbonizing the grid would kill the economy. Its activists knew that investment in clean energy was an ideal way to jumpstart a flagging job market. They knew the price of inaction and knew that not all of the damage could be measured in dollars.

Photo by Jacek Dylag

To his great credit, Biden listened. And he moved. And he kept moving even after he secured the nomination and the progressive left lost its direct leverage. During the final presidential debate, when Biden voiced support for phasing out the oil industry, which he hurriedly clarified to mean ending subsidies for fossil fuels, the GOP thought that they had him. Millions of fund-raising emails went out to supporters warning that Biden would destroy the economy, kill jobs, rob your children of their college savings with a single stroke.

That the attack didn’t take owes in part to nature: The fury of a planet scorned by fossil fuels has now become obvious to anyone with access to a weather report. No longer was it possible to deny that a hotter planet was intensifying wildfires and lengthening the season during which they posed a danger: Seven of the largest wildfires in California’s history have come in the last four years, and five of the top 10 happened in 2020.

Nor was the hurricane data unclear anymore, as it had been in previous cycles of fury and quiescence. Harvey’s 60 inches of rainfall in 2017 likely owed to human-caused warming, say the experts, so did Hurricane Irma’s unprecedented wind speed that same year, and Laura’s rapid intensification in the Gulf of Mexico this year. It’s no longer possible to chalk such disasters up to cyclical changes. There’s a trendline, and it’s headed upward at an alarming clip.

Emboldened by a public that repeatedly tells pollsters how much they welcome fast government action on the environment, Biden on his first day rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, recommitting the United States to its fair share of the effort to keep global temperatures below catastrophic levels. He rescinded the cross-border permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, as he had pledged to do last May, long after his spot on the Democratic ticket had been secured. (Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was disappointed, but in his cannily worded statement also acknowledged that the new president has to live up to his promises.) He placed a moratorium on oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and had the Diet Coke button removed from the resolute desk. (A win for the environment, and not just because artificial sweeteners contaminate drinking water.)

But then he went deeper. The new Biden administration’s 10-page “Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis” begins with environmental justice and continues on to elevate science to “ensure the integrity of Federal decision-making.”

The order directs all federal agencies to vet any rules or proposals made in the last four years for their commitment to science and rescind them where necessary. Among those already up for review are a rollback of methane-leak rules for the oil and gas industries (methane is the primary component of natural gas and a climate-accelerator exponentially worse than carbon-dioxide in the short term), the previous administration’s drastic reductions in fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks, and a disastrous rule imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, which called for “transparency” in science: A cagey bit of gaslighting designed to make public-health science impossible. The rule would require researchers to disclose all of their data, right down to the protected medical details of their study subjects. Chris Zarba, a past director of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, called it “a bold attempt to get science out of the way so special interests can do what they want.”

To his great credit, Biden listened. And he moved. And he kept moving even after he secured the nomination and the progressive left lost its direct leverage.

Undoing that one rule alone would reverse much of the damage wrought by the past administration, which consistently regarded scientific research as another enemy of the people. But wait, there’s more: The executive order also addresses the national monuments whose acreage Trump slashed to appease Utah politicians and establishes an interagency working group to assess “the social cost” of climate pollutants. That means the climate costs to public health, infrastructure battered by floods and agriculture in years of record heat and drought now figure into agency decision making.

Missing from the order is any move to ban hydrofracturing for natural gas or oil, which is probably okay: Fracking is doing a good job of banning itself these days. (And most of it happens on private land, outside of the federal government’s purview, anyway.) But the absence of any mention of banning natural gas exports or a hard target for an emissions-free grid should remind us all that the work has just begun. In 2012, when Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman asked Occupy sociologist Frances Fox Piven why betrayed progressives should vote to give Barack Obama a second term, she gave an answer I’ve never stopped quoting: “Because,” she said, “he is vulnerable to the kind of momentum pressure” a progressive movement can bring to bear. 

So bring the pressure. And meanwhile, relish the progress. Biden may not have been the climate advocates’ first choice in the beginning. But now we know he is listening.

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Judith Lewis Mernit has been reporting on environment, energy, politics and social justice since 2003, with a focus on solutions to the climate crisis. She has published work in Sierra Magazine, Yale e360, the Atlantic, Audubon, KCET, Mother Jones, High Country News and Capital and Main, where she wrote a column on climate and 2020 electoral politics.

This article was originally published by Red Canary Magazine.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.