The Daily - Biden’s Climate Shift

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

On the campaign trail and when he first came to office, President Biden had ambitious plans to deal with climate change, including promises to reduce fossil fuel production. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, however, Mr. Biden has largely stopped making the case for these plans, instead turning his focus to pumping as much oil and gas as possible. What is behind the president’s retreat on climate?Guest: Coral Davenport, an energy and environmental policy correspondent for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Rising costs at the pump, war in Ukraine, an emboldened fossil fuel industry and stalled legislation have imperiled President Joe Biden’s climate agenda.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, President Biden has largely stopped making the case for his ambitious plans to fight climate change and has instead focused on pumping as much oil and gas as possible. I spoke with my colleague, Coral Davenport, about the president's sudden retreat on climate. It's Tuesday, April 12th. Coral, when Joe Biden was elected, we had you on the show to talk about what the world would look like if all of his climate policies were put into place.

And you described a kind of clean and renewable energy utopia in the United States. Do you remember that? I do. We talked about how you would get up in the morning and drive your electric vehicle to work and you would stop on the way and plug it in and just get that nice charge and, you know, arrive at work and turn on your light, which would be powered by wind and solar coming in from the Iowa prairies. Yes, that would be our clean new world. Right. And it feels now like we are a very long way from that vision and also that conversation.

I think it's fair to say that that vision is much further away than we would have imagined on day one of the Biden administration. And that's especially true right now because of what Biden is saying about energy policy in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Well, to that point, describe the kind of policies that Biden is talking about right now in response to the war in Ukraine that really illustrate how far we've come from that original climate vision. Well, it's not that he has abandoned his climate vision by any means, but certainly the war in Ukraine has led to this spike in gasoline prices, spike in oil and gas prices. And so what we've seen, first of all, is Biden call for the largest ever release of oil from the nation's strategic petroleum reserve, flooding the market with new oil. He has called for exporting U.S. natural gas to Europe to increase European supply.

So they're no longer reliant on Russian gas. And he's called for American oil and gas companies to increase their own production. It's a policy called use it or lose it, drill more or else we'll fine you. So essentially it's saying... Fine you if you don't drill. Yes, exactly. And so it's almost a 180 from what he talked about in his campaign and when he first came in when he talked about ending new fracking on public lands, reducing this fossil fuel production. And it's exactly the opposite of what scientists are saying the global economy needs to do to meet the challenge of climate

change. So when we try to understand why Biden seems to be in such retreat from his original climate vision quarrel, how much of that really has to do with the war in Ukraine and how much may have nothing really to do with the war in Ukraine and instead is just him confronting political reality? Well, the truth is, Michael, Biden's climate agenda has been in trouble since the beginning of the year, at least, even before Putin invaded Ukraine. Mm-hmm.

So Biden came in with this very ambitious pledge to cut U.S. emissions 50% by 2030. That is a huge, ambitious goal. It's very hard to meet. It requires a big transformation of the U.S. economy, but it is in line with what climate scientists say the U.S. needs to do in order to avoid sort of the worst climate catastrophe. So Biden had three major policy agenda items to meet that goal. And one by one, they've all sort of stalled, not totally died, but, you know, maybe hanging by a thread.

Okay. The first one, the biggest one, is a series of clean energy tax credits embedded in that giant Build Back Better bill, of course, the $2 trillion bill that you have done so many episodes on that has been stalled in Congress since the end of last year.

Right now, still, you know, not likely to go anywhere because Joe Manchin, the swing vote in the Senate, has opposed it. We still don't know where that's going. Right. For all practical purposes, those clean energy tax credits are hopelessly stuck in Congress. There's no immediate sign of them being revived. So what's the next stalled Biden climate policy?

So there's a regulation, an EPA regulation, that the administration wants to do on power plants. Power plants are the second largest source of fossil fuel pollution in the U.S. The EPA has been working on a major regulation to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. Ideally, they would want to have something that would transform the U.S. electricity sector, so it's mostly wind and solar. Problem with that is that it has been subject to a Supreme Court lawsuit. The Supreme Court has not yet given its verdict in the case on this regulation, but given the Trump-appointed justices, the general leanings of the Supreme

Court, pretty much everyone, including the administration itself, assumes that the Supreme Court is probably going to severely limit what the administration can do on this regulation. So they've put the regulation on ice until the Supreme Court makes its decision. So that's off the table for Biden as well. What's the final policy? The third piece of meeting this commitment is another regulation. This one would be on cars. Vehicles are the number one source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S. President Biden wants to do a very ambitious, far-reaching, sweeping regulation on the auto industry that would essentially force them to much more rapidly build and sell EVs to the extent that half of all the vehicles sold in the US are EVs, electric vehicles, by 2030. But that has run into trouble as well.

There's political challenges. Auto unions are very worried because it takes a third of the number of workers to build an electric vehicle as a gasoline vehicle. So they're worried that that rapid transition is going to cost a lot of union jobs. And so essentially what's happened with that regulation is right now it's going nowhere. We don't expect to see it anytime this year, maybe next year. And at the end of the day, it may end up also being much less ambitious than President Biden

had originally envisioned. So just to summarize this, well before the war in Ukraine, the three major elements of President Biden's climate agenda were either stalled or had collapsed, and his plan really wasn't going anywhere. Yeah, and I don't think people who work outside of the climate bubble really understood that. I think there's an understanding that that Build Back Better bill is kind of the center of what Biden wants to do on climate, but that there are also these other pieces that he can do without Congress, these two big pieces, you know, on power plants, on cars, that they can move ahead on climate without those. And now those two pieces are also running into a lot of trouble. Right. It's not just Congress.

Basically, all his major avenues towards a big breakthrough on climate are not working. Yes. They're running into Joe Manchin, they're running into the Supreme Court, and they're running into the realities of electoral politics. Right. And then, of course, the war actually starts. Right. And it's one thing to have your agenda in trouble, and it's another to stop publicly making the case for it. And since the war started,

climate change has largely been taken off the presidential podium. The White House thinks it feels out of sync with what voters care about, which is rising gasoline prices. The problem is, if the president is not talking about climate change, that is a really big deal when he has the biggest bully pulpit in the world. We'll be right back. So, Coral, when and, I guess, where do you start to see the president stop really making the case for climate policies once this war is underway? Well, the prime example of this, Michael, is the State of the Union, which, of course, that's the president's kind of biggest bully pulpit moment of the year.

It happened just a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine. Right. And of course, people understood that that was probably going to have to be a central part of the president's speech. But a lot of climate activists and also lawmakers and people within Washington who really care about climate policy, people within the White House thought that this could be a really good moment for Biden to actually lean into his climate policy to make the case to show, look, this is a moment where we need to stop being reliant on oil and gas at all. You know, a way to cut off the influence of petro states like Russia is not just to cut off imports,

but to push our policies forward towards EVs, you know, towards renewables, so we don't need oil to fuel our cars, so we don't need gas to light up our homes. That was a message that they thought was really right there and ready for Biden to lean into. So in their minds, despite the fact that his climate agenda domestically is in trouble, this is a unique and perhaps rare opportunity for him to make the case in a perhaps bigger and more urgent way than ever before, because suddenly there's a war that shows what happens to energy prices when you're relying on the old fossil fuels. On fossil fuels, right. And so... My fellow Americans. Of course, the president steps into the well of the House, gives his speech.

With a duty to one another, to America, to the American people, to the Constitution, and an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny. And barely a mention of climate change. So how does he talk about it? Let's cut energy costs for families. An average of $500 a year by combating climate change. He makes sort of slight mentions. Double America's clean energy production.

He does talk about clean energy. Electric vehicles creating 4,000 jobs in Michigan. He talks about jobs, really like sort of talking points sprinkled through. And solar, wind, and so much more. He barely even talked about his Build Back Better bill, or at least the climate pieces of it. And in fact, to the dismay of some climate advocates. Tonight, I can announce the United States has worked with 30 other countries to release 60 million barrels of oil from reserves around the world. America will lead that effort.

This is where he starts to talk about how oil will get us through this crisis. These steps will help blunt gas prices here at home. And so certainly he has framed this as this is a short-term solution. We're just going to do this right now. And he has framed this as this is a short-term solution. We're just going to do this right now. And he's framed it as, you know, we're going to flood the market with new U.S. oil and gas right this minute, while renewables and clean energy are still important in the long term. But that's kind of the same as putting them in second place. This is our moment to meet and overcome the challenges of our time.

And we will, as one people, one America, the United States of America. God bless you all. And may God protect our troops. Thank you. So when you talk to folks at the White House, Coral, what did they say about why they didn't use this moment, not just the State of the Union, but the occasion of the war itself,

to make a big public case for less reliance on something like oil? So one of the things that I had heard about this speech was that one of the audiences that Biden was trying to reach in the State of the Union was Putin himself. He anticipated that Putin would be watching. And one of the things that they were trying to go for in this speech was to kind of have a moment or an environment where there wasn't that typical partisan divide. And you know what I'm talking about, Michael, where the president says something really forceful about his agenda and exactly half the room gets up and applauds and the other half like sits there and boos and makes faces and thumbs down. That's exactly what they didn't want Putin to see. And so a lot of the more

partisan policy agenda items were taken out and climate change was one of them. They figured the climate change would make Republicans sit, Democrats stand, Putin would see it. Exactly. They edited the speech to try to get that reaction in part to show Putin that as much as possible, this is a house united around this president in this moment. And so I think climate change got short shrift, partly because of that. I also have to imagine that a big reason why President Biden might not have talked a great deal about climate change in this speech is because he knows it's his last State of the Union before the midterm elections, where he's going to face voters who are furious about high gas prices.

Exactly. High gas prices, inflation. And he's setting up an agenda before the midterm campaigns. And so in so doing, he's kind of taking this piece off of the midterm campaign. This piece meaning his ambitious climate agenda? Yeah. He's kind of taking this piece off of the midterm campaign. This piece meaning his ambitious climate agenda. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And just to put yourself in Biden's shoes for a moment, if your climate plan is more or less stalled out, collapsed,

and your party risks losing control of Congress, in part because of high energy prices, which seems like a very real possibility. Doesn't it potentially make a lot of political sense to talk about gas and talk about oil and perhaps not talk so much about climate policy as a purely pragmatic political calculation? As a political calculation, absolutely. And it's not surprising. It's actually exactly what I saw Biden's former boss, President Obama, do 10 years ago when gas prices were last at the highs that they've been in spring of 2012, ahead of the 2012 elections. ahead of the 2012 elections. That was a moment when Obama really wanted to campaign on climate change and gas prices were up. And his advisors at the time said, hell no, absolutely not. And

it kind of disappeared from the campaign. I went back and I read my stories from that time, from the campaign. And as you know as well, Michael, it's a lot of the same advisors. And it looks like they're using the same playbook. When gas prices are high, and that's what voters care about, and voters understand that connection between drilling and gas prices, that's what you talk about, and you don't try to make that bigger, longer connection between like, look, if we do climate policy and get to a place where we have renewables and electric vehicles, then we don't need these energy sources at all. And we don't have to worry, you know, if you're driving, we're all driving EVs, we don't have to worry about gas prices. That's two steps. It requires making a lot of connections and thinking ahead. It hasn't historically translated well into political rhetoric. Right. Or into vote. Yes. Okay. So those are the politics of this moment for President Biden. But,

Coral, how would you describe the climate costs to what he's doing? Because it strikes me that Biden is not only retreating from his climate advocacy right now, but he's in some ways pushing policies that would seem to set his agenda back a bit, that are kind of backsliding? Well, there are significant climate costs. The first reality is that if Biden's climate agenda doesn't succeed, then the U.S. hasn't done its part to lower emissions. And, you know, climate scientists are telling us we probably have like a decade or less for the major economies

to really ramp back our emissions. That's absolutely a measurable effect. And if the U.S. president isn't talking about climate change and demonstrating how the U.S. is going to meet its pledge, which is what's happening right now, the rest of the world, it really sort of takes away the credibility and authority that the U.S. has to pressure the other major economies to do anything about it as well. That's the role that Biden had wanted to play in climate negotiations.

And then just it changes the debate back at home. And it's sort of a contest between Democrats and Republicans sort of showing how we're going to drill more as opposed to how we're going to address climate change and deal with extreme weather catastrophes. Like when the political debate has happened and you're talking about who's going to drill more, that has an impact. Right. I'm curious, Coral, how people in the climate world think about Joe Biden in this moment right now and the journey he's been on over the past two years that has brought us to this point from proposing that kind of utopia that we talked about at the beginning of this episode and now talking about oil and drilling? I mean, do they think of it as political necessity, as a crisis being prudently

planned for? Are they disillusioned? Do they expect this? What words are they using? So Joe Biden has had an interesting journey on climate. You know, before the 2020 campaign, and at the beginning of the 2020 campaign, he was never known as a big climate guy. He always kind of checked the box, but it was never sort of a central thing for him. And then when it started to look like he was going to become the nominee, climate activists kind of came to him and said, look, if you want our support, you've got to get behind this. And it was this moment where as the primaries continued, Biden realized he really did need,

for political reasons, the support of these climate activists. He embraced their agenda and ended up coming out with far and away the most ambitious climate agenda of any presidential nominee, any candidate that I've ever covered. Now, this president who is listening to political reality

is finding that this is not as important, that that has receded. Right. It was politically important to Joe Biden when it was politically important to Joe Biden. And right now, it's not. Yes. And I think that behind the scenes, absolutely, people are still working. All the staffers are still working on trying to get these pieces of the climate agenda passed. You know, I don't want to suggest that it's dead or that it's been abandoned or that it's just, you know, sitting there in ashes yet. Michael, climate activists are not yet fully giving up on Joe Biden, but they want to see a lot more from him soon. And it's a question of whether they will.

Well, Coral, thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me on, Michael. It's always a pleasure. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Austria's Chancellor Karl Nehammer said he was not only pessimistic about the possibility of peace in Ukraine, but feared that Putin plans to drastically intensify the brutality of the war. The Chancellor, the first Western leader to visit Putin since the war began, described Putin as dismissive of the atrocities

that Russia has allegedly committed in Ukraine and determined to launch a large-scale attack on Ukraine's east. And... This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic, to put our masks on until we have more information about the severity of this new variant, and to choose to protect each other as we have throughout this pandemic. With COVID cases on the rise across the Northeast, the city of Philadelphia said it would reinstate an indoor mask mandate,

becoming the first major U.S. city to do so. Philadelphia had lifted its original mask mandate about a month ago. But during a news conference on Monday, the city's health commissioner said that the risk of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from the latest variant of the virus had become too great to ignore. I sincerely wish we didn't have to do this again. I wish this pandemic was over just as much as any of you. But I am very worried about our vulnerable neighbors and loved ones. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Diana Nguyen, and Luke Vander Ploeg. It was edited by John Ketchum and M.J. Davis-Lynn,

contains original music by Brad Fisher, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.