Joe Biden’s pandemic strategy has been to under-promise and over-deliver—his Administration, after committing to delivering a hundred million vaccine doses in its first hundred days, managed to double the goal and then some. That strategy is politically savvy, especially coming on the heels of a President who did precisely the opposite at every opportunity.
Biden’s new climate plan doesn’t follow that template, however. He opened his Earth Day summit of forty global leaders on Thursday by calling for the United States to make a fifty-per-cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030. That’s a big number. It’s not as big as it seems on the surface, because the cuts come from where we were in 2005, and we’ve already reduced some since then. But it is much bigger than what the U.S. pledged in the 2016 Paris climate accord.
It’s big enough, and a hard enough target, that meeting it would likely occupy the attention of his entire Presidency. Let’s assume that Biden and, after him, Vice-President Kamala Harris, win the next couple of Presidential elections. That would take us to 2030, but meeting the new goal means that every action between now and then will have to be weighed against it. The infrastructure plan currently before Congress would be a start, and a useful one, but much more would be needed.
And it wouldn’t all be the fun stuff for politicians—the money-spending part. Yes, there are lots of E.V. chargers to install and solar farms to construct, but there are also lots of pipelines and fracking wells to block. There are hundreds of thousands of big buildings that need to be retrofitted for energy efficiency—that’s a lot of landlords and developers to deal with. There are tens of millions of homes that will need to have their appliances replaced—and, if you think that vaccine hesitancy is hard to overcome, imagine induction-cooktop hesitancy. None of these tasks are impossible, and, in the end, all of them will save money. But there are lots of vested interests to stand up to, including some of the most formidable. If Biden can’t get banks and asset managers to stop underwriting fossil-fuel companies, he won’t stand a chance.
To make it happen, he’s going to need the movement that got us to this point—it’s only because so many people pushed so hard for change that he has enough of a constituency to even consider this proposal. It was such groups as the Sunrise Movement that helped finally make climate a top issue among voters. It probably annoyed the Administration when, on Tuesday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey proposed their Green New Deal again, with goals and price tags much grander even than Biden’s infrastructure bill. But it shouldn’t: demanding the climate equivalent of three hundred million shots sets up the kind of useful bidding war that makes progress at this pace possible—and makes the Biden promises look moderate, which is not always a bad thing strategically. But then the Administration will have to act in good faith at every turn. The previous Democratic strategy has been to offer up big cuts in carbon emissions but to accomplish them by building out natural-gas-fired power, thus spiking methane levels. By some counts, following that plan, the Obama Administration managed to run precisely in place, as heat-trapping methane replaced heat-trapping carbon: the Administration claimed victory, but the atmosphere couldn’t tell the difference.
More activists are wise to that trick now, and, presumably, Biden won’t try it. Indeed, the task before us is sufficiently difficult that real transparency will help deal with the unavoidable mistakes and the technologies that don’t pan out. There are doubtless going to be some scandals along the way (such as the one involving Solyndra, the solar-panel startup that collapsed, in 2011, after securing a huge federal-loan guarantee). Knowing that in advance, and owning mistakes when they happen, will make getting past them easier. In that sense, it’s like fighting a nonviolent war: you’re going to lose battles, and everyone is going to know about it. You need enough fervor and momentum to carry you past those losses.
And, of course, any war effort on this scale requires allies. In fact, the climate crisis is literally a world war, against a common enemy. That’s why Biden made his announcement on Thursday, with leaders from around the world, including Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin (and Pope Francis), listening. They won’t necessarily believe him, of course—every President and Prime Minister and autocrat watching will have understood that Biden has limited freedom of action, bound by an encrusted Congress and a Trumpish judiciary. But they need him to be making progress if they’re to do it themselves; in many ways, this is a global-scale confidence game, in the best sense of the phrase.
For a long time, climate campaigners have celebrated announcements, because that’s all they’ve had—it was a big victory if a Presidential candidate so much as mentioned the climate crisis during a debate. But those days end now—with 2030 as the deadline set by science, this is the last proclamation that will get a big cheer. From here on, it will be about execution. A pandemic doesn’t yield to exhortation, and neither does a climate crisis. This is a real shot in the arm, and it’s going to have to last.
