Today, Explained - Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Joe Biden is tacking to the left and embracing a historic climate plan. Vox’s David Roberts explains whether it stands a chance. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's not every day a very serious candidate for president of the United States announces a $2 trillion climate plan. In fact, it had never happened before Joe Biden did it last week.

And it speaks to how discombobulating this particular moment is that you may have missed the news altogether. If you did, we're here to explain it to you. And where to start? Well, I know. Let's start with the other guy, because President Trump has been taking action on climate, too. I mean, I guess you could describe it that way. David Roberts writes about climate change at Vox. He's re-envisioning an approach as no approach. First thing he did in office was pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which I think was a signal as to his intentions.

And since then, pretty much the sole action he's taken on climate change is to reverse or roll back Obama-era regulations meant to control it. That is really the sum total of what he's done on climate change. And what are the latest developments on that front? It's a little bit hard to keep track because there's one or two of these a week. He has repealed and weakened regulations that protect water, air, and land. And this includes repealing the Obama-era clean water rule, weakening protections for endangered species, and loosening rules that limit pollution and carbon emissions. But I think the one you're talking about is he is not tightening soot pollution standards. And of course, soot is notoriously damaging for lungs and heart health.

And it's also notoriously kind of racist in its effect. It's concentrated in low-income and communities of color. But he's also rolled back Obama's fuel economy regulations and Obama's regulations on power plants and Obama's regulations on methane. I mean, just go down the list. He's losing a lot of those battles in court, but that's what he's trying to do. All right, so that's option A. And for contrast, option B, Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.'s brand new $2 trillion plan to combat climate change. Yes, it is unquestionably the most ambitious climate plan ever proposed by a presidential candidate.

It sounds big. How should we break it down for the people, David? I divide this kind of new democratic alignment around climate policy into three basic buckets. Standards, investments, and justice. All right, off we go. Let's talk about the standards. Sure. So he wants to put, for instance, a net zero carbon standard in the electricity sector by 2035. So that would drive out all coal and natural gas out of the electricity sector and replace it with zero carbon sources in 15 years, which would be fast.

Really fast. And the investments? Investments, right. Big public investments. And this is a real sign of how far Biden has moved. In his initial plan, he had $1.7 trillion in investments over 10 years. And in this new plan, he's got $2 trillion of investment over four years. So, he really heard that critique and ramped up that part of his plan. And, you know, investments cover a range of things, but a lot of it is going to be in low-carbon infrastructure, you know, sort of electric car chargers, high-voltage transmission lines, CO2 pipelines. But it's the investments that I think hold out the most hope for creating jobs. And that is, of course, like Biden's overarching focus in almost all policy areas is jobs, jobs, jobs.

When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is hoax. When I think about climate change, the word I think of is jobs. Good pain. Union jobs. And what about the third and last bucket? And then the third bucket is justice, which is sort of an overarching concern that covers the other two. So, for instance, he's saying that 40% of all these investments that he's talking about must go to vulnerable communities. If you're talking about $2 trillion, that amounts to quite a bit of money. So justice is sort of infusing the whole thing.

And that means justice for the vulnerable communities that are hurt most by the effects of climate change and also the communities that are invested in fossil fuel economies and will be hurt by the transition to clean energy. So like your coal mining communities and fracking communities, that kind of thing, you have to take care of those people as well

if you want to bring them along. And this has sort of been forming on the left, on the climate left for a while. And Biden absolutely took it up and is echoing it. He is singing that song now, but it's really unprecedented for sort of the ambitious climate advocates, for the moderates in Congress, for Joe Biden, the presidential candidate. Everyone's more or less

singing from the same hymn book on climate policy on the left now. And that's just a new thing in the world. How did this come to be? Biden didn't start out as the climate guy, right? That was Governor Jay Inslee. Now, all of a sudden, Biden's Mr. Green New Deal? Early in the primary season, Joe Biden put out a climate plan that was not received particularly favorably. Reactions were anywhere from tepid to extremely negative.

The youth sunrise movement, people gave him an F minus on that initial plan, which I think, you know, there's some debate to be had about whether that was entirely fair, but suffice to say, it was probably among the weakest plans of any of the presidential candidates. The minute Sanders conceded, Biden and Sanders started working together with an eye toward exactly this, like, let's demonstrate some unity. Let's try to bring these two factions of the left that have been fighting so much together. And, you know, climate was part of that. So, the left, the climate left, sort of the green groups and unions and environmental justice groups and sort of the whole range of the left has been consulting and working on policy really furiously over the last couple of years. And they've sort of come around to a rough consensus or alignment around a few basic principles.

And so this new plan is right in line with that basic alignment that's come out of the left. You follow this stuff more closely than most. Were you surprised to see this old and new guard come together on climate? Well, anything that appears good surprises me these days. So, yes, it is surprising. I mean, it is actually. I think the logic, sort of the strategic and political logic for why he's doing this is clear enough. Like, it's not, I mean, if you wanted to tell a cynical story about it, you could. He needs youth enthusiasm. He knows there's no prospect for real bipartisan cooperation on this issue. So, there's no point in trying to sort of pretend there is. So, you might as well just get the left on your side. So, the logic is clear, but it does, I think, speak well of Biden.

And I do think it shows that when he says, right, because when he first started running, there was a real vibe of like, I'm going to be the guy that restores normal, right? I'm going to take us back to a normal, sane Obama world that we all know and miss. credit that he has seen the chaos since then and sort of come to appreciate that this historical moment is more than that. He's going to have to be more than that. And now he's started talking about, he knows he needs to be a transformational president. He knows he needs to be an FDR-style, big vision president. And that's not what he's known for. He's not really shown signs of that throughout his career. But I think he is genuinely aware of the historical moment and trying his best to respond to it. All right. Biden has united with the left on climate. Now he's got to deal with the right.

I'm Sean Ramos for him. That's next on Today Explained. Thank you. help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. All right, David, Biden's got a bunch of the political left on board with this climate plan. What about everyone else?

Let's start with conservative Democrats. The sort of genuinely conservative Democrats that used to hamper climate policy back when Obama was trying to pass it are mostly gone from Congress, right? It's all part of this sort of partisan sorting. So, like, there aren't that many genuinely conservative Democrats left or Democrats from sort of fossil fuel states. So, there just isn't – that group of people is much smaller. And I think that they, much like Joe Biden, have seen that we're in a real historical moment here and maybe like the normal political rules don't apply. So, I think at the very least they are open to it. And plus, this isn't, you know, as much as the right tries to make this seem like sort of Froot Loop socialist whatever, Biden's talking about industrial policy to create jobs, which is just a long-storied American tradition. That's what the New Deal was. I mean,

Americans are familiar with how government can do this. It lives in historical memory. So, this isn't the kind of left policy that tends to sort of trigger centrists, right? I mean, investments in jobs like unions, like Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO came out with, you know, complimentary words about this plan. The unions like the idea of giant investments that create jobs. Like, there's not really a political constituency in the Democratic Party who is against the idea of big public investments to create jobs, right? It's a very popular policy across the board. So, let's talk about the right instead. Republicans are fighting over extending unemployment benefits right now during a global pandemic.

How's Biden going to convince anyone to work with him on $2 trillion in climate spending? Oh, my goodness. Well, how much time do you have? He's got a lot of hurdles. First of all is the question of whether Democrats win Congress, win the Senate specifically. So if Republicans keep control of the Senate and Biden wins the presidency, all that legislation goes away. So that's the first hurdle. If Republicans lose the Senate, if Democrats win the Senate and Biden has the presidency and the House and the Senate, then he has to deal with

the Senate filibuster. So the question is, will Biden and congressional Democrats try to substantially reform or get rid of the filibuster? If they don't, then once again, most legislation is off the table. You know, even, you know, like Chris Coons, a senator who has been a real institutionalist for years and has always defended the filibuster, even he said the other day, I will not sit idly by for four years and watch the administration, the Biden administration,

have its key nominations and its policy agenda thwarted. That was intended to say that I believe we should defend the filibuster, but I'm not willing to sit by for four years and watch an entire administration lose the opportunity to make real change. Even the institutionalists recognize that we have to get something done this time. And if that requires procedural, you know, sort of hardball, maybe, you know, we'll have to acclimate ourselves to some procedural hardball. The one thing I think that Biden absolutely can do and absolutely should be focused on

and that people should absolutely hold him accountable for is executive action from the president's office. And there's a lot you can do with the agencies. There's a lot you can do with EPA and Interior and stuff like that. And the only sort of cap on that kind of ambition is kind of boldness. Again, it's a procedural hardball, but also it will depend a lot on the people he has around him. So I think in this administration, even more than normal, staffing is a huge, huge question. It's something that climate advocates are really focused on right now.

Who are the people around him talking in his ear when these decisions arise? When I hear you mention executive action on climate, I think about President Obama, who did lots of that only to have it undone as we saw, you know, last week, this week, practically every other week by President Trump. Any chance Biden has learned anything from being around for all of this? Well, I think the main lesson from Obama's reign generally, but especially on climate change, is just Republicans aren't going to cooperate. There's no amount of pursuit, no amount of begging, no amount of, you know, meeting them in the Senate cafeteria and glad-handing them. All their incentives point to blocking everything. So, there's a question of whether Joe Biden realizes this or not, because early in his

campaign, of course, he was talking about like— Look, I get in trouble. I read in New York Times today that I that one of my problems is if I were to run for president, I like Republicans. OK, well, bless me, father, if I have sinned. But, you know, from where I come from, I don't know how you get anything done. I don't know how you get anything done until we start talking to one another again. And no one really knows how much he's just saying that because it appeals to people, because it really does appeal to people when he talks like that, or how much he really believes it. But lately, he's sort of dropped that.

So, I think he's learned from Obama that, A, there's no margin in slowing yourself down in the hopes of getting some bipartisan cooperation. You just got to go full speed the second you have your hands on the reins of power because the window for getting things done is very short. And if you try to sort of talk Republicans into things, they will deliberately drag it out and make it take forever, like they did with the ACA, you know, and just burn up the political power and momentum you have and ruin your administration or anything after that. So, hopefully, Joe Biden has learned that history demands that he just take concerted action no matter what Republicans say.

If he could make something happen here, would that put the United States back on track with the planet's climate goals? Well, that's a little bit of a complicated question. It's the basic target that the IPCC has laid out is that the entire world needs to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Slowly but surely, the countries of the world are all coming around behind that target. That's kind of becoming the standard target. And that is what Biden and Democrats say they are aiming for. Science requires a timetable for measuring progress on climate that isn't three decades or even two. Science tells us we have nine years before the damage is irreversible.

So my timetable results is in my first four years as president. So in that sense, it is in line with what the scientists say. Now, of course, you know, as much as some sort of hardcore climate advocates might want more, the fact is that if the U.S. can get its shit together and accomplish what is in Biden's plan, it would be one of the most amazing feats of national will in world history, much less American history. So, like, there's no, this is not unambitious. So, it's definitely putting us on the road that's in line with science. Like, you know, the ethics of it, you can always, like, more ambitious is always better. There's always going to be people who want you to be more ambitious. But this is about as fast as I can even imagine American politics being pushed. David Roberts writes about climate and energy for Vox. He's got a piece titled, Joe Biden Has a Chance to Make History on Climate Change,

up at Vox.com right now.