Today, Explained - Hot topic

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

When it comes to climate policy, President Biden has accomplished more than any of his predecessors. But activists want more: They want him to declare a climate emergency. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn and Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Serena Solin and Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're in the thick of summer, which means we've got fires. More than 400 wildfires are burning across Canada, from the western provinces to Quebec, turning the sky bright orange. We've got heat waves. Ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida this week surpassed 100 degrees, feeling more like a hot tub than a proper ocean. We've got records to break. New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA,

shows this past July was the hottest on record. In the meantime, we've got a president who's accomplished more than any other in history on the climate. We did it! We did it, Joe! But there are a lot of climate activists who say it isn't enough. They want President Biden to declare a climate emergency. What that would mean and whether there's any chance he'll do it, coming up on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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Zach Coleman is a climate and energy reporter on the tech side of Politico, but he dabbles in the occasional audio interview. I wouldn't call myself a pro, but I've done a few, so. We reached out to him to find out more about what a declaration of a climate emergency would look like in the United States. But we started with Joe Biden's record on the issue. Well, I think that you look at some of the bills that have passed into law and it's hard to say anything but he's the most accomplished climate president that the U.S. has ever had. Ever. Ever. The Inflation Reduction Act invests $369 billion to take the most aggressive action ever, ever, ever, ever in confronting the climate crisis. I mean, $369 billion in climate and clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act.

That's his signature climate law that was signed into law in August 2022. This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever, ever. And it's gonna allow, it's gonna allow us to boldly take additional steps toward meeting all of my climate goals and the ones we set out when we ran. He passed a bipartisan infrastructure law that also devoted tens of billions of dollars to clean energy and to climate resilience, things that make communities stronger against storms and heat waves and things of that nature.

This law builds back our bridges, our water systems, our power lines, our levees, better and stronger, so few Americans will be flooded out of their homes or lose power in those days and weeks with with consequences of storms that hit. So are environmentalists rather pleased with him if he's, you know, the most accomplished president ever on the climate? They're certainly pleased with him. I mean, look at what the Inflation Reduction Act projects to do. It's going to, by some modeling, reduce U.S. emissions 40 plus percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. And that's still short of President Biden's goal of cutting those emissions in half by the end of the decade. This 10 percentage point

gap to fill to avoid the worst of climate change from coming to fruition. And one way to do that is through declaring a national emergency through what's known as the National Emergencies Act, which would then grant a whole bunch of other executive powers to the president. We are dealing with an existential crisis, and the existential crisis requires solutions that are commensurate with the crisis that we're dealing with. It would grant him tremendous power to marshal federal resources, taxpayer dollars, towards building cleaner energy systems, incentivizing private companies to produce greener appliances and products. It could also give him the ability to stop exports of crude oil, to end all federal oil and gas drilling like in the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of people compare this to a wartime mobilization like World War II. All America alters its pattern of life and work to meet

the demand for protection. So there is this idea that to rapidly reduce climate change and the emissions that are causing it, that you need to get all sectors of the economy and society marching in one direction. And it was something that he did entertain. Biden was actually thinking about doing this? Well, so what happened was there was this months-long negotiation over Build Back Better. The reason his $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan has not advanced in the U.S. Senate is most entirely due to one senator, Senator Joe Manchin, whose primary concern, repeated over and over again, is inflation. And abruptly in July of 2022, Joe Manchin said, you know what?

Deal's done. I'm not doing this. This is a no. So we have this period of time in middle of July where the climate community is all up in arms, saying Joe Manchin from West Virginia, who loves coal and natural gas, killed our climate bill. So Mr. President, can you please declare a climate emergency since Congress is never going to do what it needs to do to confront the climate crisis?

And you would see the White House entertain this conversation. They never shot it down. I would not plan an announcement this week on national climate emergency. Again, everything is on the table. It's just not going to be this week on that decision. And there was an event not long after Bill Backbetter had publicly died that President Biden was going to be speaking in Massachusetts. It was billed as this big climate event. We thought he might say,

this is going to be a climate emergency. I'm going to declare it. He did not end up saying that. He called it an emergency. He walked right up to the line, but he did not declare a climate emergency. Climate change is an emergency. And in the coming weeks,

I'm going to use the power I have as president to turn these words into formal, official government actions through the appropriate proclamations, executive orders and regulatory power that the president possesses. We walk away from that event. And, you know, if you're a climate activist, you're like, well, that was disappointing. A few weeks later, lo and behold, we start hearing about this thing called the Inflation Reduction Act. Joe Manchin is putting out a press release about it. And this is the revived climate bill that ends up getting passed into law in August of 2022. So on one side, you've got this sort of obvious tension between Joe Biden's climate agenda and Congress. And then on the other side, you've got him still managing to be the most historic president in terms of taking action here.

And then you've got this tricky word, emergency, which he's used, but he hasn't gone as far as declaring a climate emergency. Correct me if I'm wrong, but he doesn't need Congress to declare a climate emergency, correct? He does not need Congress. Many presidents have declared national emergencies before, and here's the clearest example. President Trump, when he was president, declared a national emergency at the border.

This is what got him to justify building a border wall and using military funds that have been appropriated for another purpose to build his wall. And this is something that got litigated. He was sued, of course. The Supreme Court ended up siding with President Trump and saying, yes, you can take those funds. This is a national emergency. You can build your wall with those funds. This is the same exact model that climate activists are hoping President Biden will pursue, but for climate. And their idea is, well, the Supreme Court already said that this is cool. So you don't have to worry about it, Mr. President. Go ahead and do it.

I don't know if that would be the case with the Supreme Court. Every case is different, of course. But a president can pull funds from different places to fulfill a national emergency obligation. And that is the model here. So do we know why he hasn't just declared a climate emergency? I mean, there's tricky politics here. I think that he's very responsive to blue-collar voters in places that President Biden needed to win, like Pennsylvania, to even get into the White House. There's this tremendous anxiety about the clean energy transition for entire sectors of the economy and regions of the country. And I think that President Biden gets that.

We're still going to need oil and gas for a while. But guess what? No, we do. But there's so much more to do. We got to finish the job. That's why he advocated for technologies like carbon capture or green hydrogen that are viewed as sort of false solutions by a lot of the climate activist community that ended up voting for President Biden. to extend a lifeline to fossil fuel workers and blue collar workers that says, essentially, you can continue producing this stuff, these fossil fuels, but we're just going to make sure the emissions from them don't get into the atmosphere and make climate change worse.

Now, again, a lot of this technology is not massively available at scale. It's very expensive. So that's viewed as a way to just extend the fossil fuel industry and keep them in business without actually affecting emissions. So there is a concern here about the moral hazard. But I think President Biden knows that declaring by fiat that we are going to marshal all the federal resources towards climate change is going to not sit well with a large portion of the disillusioned with some of the moves the president has made, like approving the Willow Oil Project in Alaska. There's also the issue of precedent setting. Does President Biden want to, with all the culture warring that's going on in this country, declare a national emergency for climate change when a President Trump, who, when he was in office, tried to get federal resources to prop up coal

plants, would he want to risk President Trump doing something in reverse if Trump were to win re-election? I mean, you can envision a world in which a second-term Donald Trump says the opioid crisis is an epidemic and we need to subsidize coal mines and coal plants to provide good-paying jobs for people to get them away from this cycle and to provide economic opportunity for people. I mean, it doesn't seem that far a stretch.

Zach Coleman is with Politico. Read his work at politico.com. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. When we're back on Today Explained, what's to be done closer to home in the absence of a big federal declaration from the president. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca Yo, it's that heat, that heat, that heat, thatained is back. Extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer of Americans. In fact, in your average year, extreme heat kills more people than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. But the president will

not declare a climate emergency to really mobilize the nation into action. So what are we to do in the meantime? Yeah, it's a very important and timely question, the idea of how do we adapt to a changing climate. We reached out to Professor Vivek Shandas for an answer. He focuses on climate adaptation at Portland State University. So to begin with, many places are experiencing temperatures that are at the same hour, 15 to 20 degrees warmer than a place right next to a specific neighborhood. And that has a lot to do with what is on that landscape, how the heat is retained and put back out into the environment. So first thing that cities and regions need to do is really start focusing in on what are those differences

and where are the places that are in fact hotter and face some more of the extreme climate events and who are the communities that might not be able to cope as well to these extreme events. One of the first things I suggest people do is get the data. Second is really to start thinking about heat action plan, where we actually develop a systematic process that describes the different effects on the sectors in that region. A place like California, for example, would have a lot of concern over agricultural workers. It's a massive agricultural productive state. And having safeguards for outdoor workers, agricultural workers, is not currently in any federal or many local legislation. And we need to be thinking about a heat action plan that really centers those communities that are facing many of these impacts first and worst. According to a study by the National Institutes of Health,

farm workers are 35 times more likely to die of heat exposure than workers in other industries. Construction workers have 13 times the risk. A place like Florida would have a variety of issues related to the cascading effects of heat combined with hurricanes, combined with storm, surge, and flooding. Tonight parts of South Florida are underwater. Meteorologists are calling the historic flooding a one in 1,000 year rainfall event. Flash flooding prompted dozens of emergency rescues and forced drivers to abandon their cars. And so these heat action plans would really need to think

about how those cascading events might disproportionately affect communities in a region. Then at the neighborhood scale, we have to start talking about things like district energy. What does it look like to have a lot more air conditioning or heat pumps coming in, but an energy system at that district or neighborhood scale that may fail because it's just not ready for the kind of demand that we're seeing on the infrastructure system. So we really need to start thinking about that. Also at the neighborhood, bus stops and other places where people spend a lot of time outdoors, trying to think about how do we cool those spaces.

There's some amazing programs, for example, with neighborhood greening, city block greening happening in Washington, D.C. There's some phenomenal kind of green corridors happening across cities in Columbia, South America, where entire alleyways and corridors are set up with greening. And really thinking about building codes. We need to get this into the systemic level. We currently have no requirements for developers to design buildings, develop buildings for heat. And so there's some voluntary options that developers have. But right now, we really have nothing at the federal, local, regional scale that requires developers to start building with materials that actually deflect the heat, whether it's lighter color. There's a

massive program happening in South Asia and India specifically that's looking at white paint on roofs of all different forms of development, whether it's informal developments or whether it's large high-rises or even single-family residential homes. It can cool an area by upwards of 9 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit, actually, by putting that white paint directly on a building or a roof. If something as simple as white paint could make a big difference, why haven't we covered everything in white paint? You'd be surprised how difficult it is to get many of these strategies deployed.

They may sound very straightforward, but there are a remarkable number of restrictions, whether it's homeowners association restrictions at the very kind of neighborhood level that require specific colors and not specific colors to be put on buildings or roads or rooftops. Developers are often struggling to find white shingles on rooftops. We often find brown or black shingles relatively easy, but white shingles are not something you can go to Home Depot and pick up relatively easily. Putting white paint directly on shingles of roofs is often not advisable because it degrades that roof material over time. Now, not all white paint is going to behave essentially the same. We've seen

recent studies coming out from various universities showing whiter and whiter colored paint, very, very white paint, in other words. Purdue University researchers have created the whitest paint on record. The paint is so white, I am its favorite part of SNL. And you'd be surprised that getting really white paint, meaning one that would reflect almost 100% of the sun's solar radiation, is a remarkably complicated engineering feat. Because they're getting the pigment, that white pigment, to that really precise, true white state is not something that humans have really done very often. And so what we're really talking about is trying to get a level of white that's engineered in a lab and allows us to be applying it and reflecting that light. And so there are these grades of white, some white doesn't reflect as much, and thereby the materials actually hold on to that heat a bit more. And that causes a little bit of concern for, of course, trying to reflect that heat back out into space. But the problem here, it seems, sort of brings us back to the problem

we see at the federal level where you have inaction, where you have barriers, be they legal or structural or what have you. What do we do about that? Yeah, the federal agencies have been remarkably slow in my read of this work to really respond to heat in a serious and severe way. So the federal government has launched a series of programs recently to be able to advance both the data collection and monitoring at a very hyperlocal scale. We do this through a lot of sensors on cars and bikes and collecting a lot of data. That's a program, albeit relatively small for the federal government,

but nevertheless something that gets communities kind of beginning to socialize the concept of heat. Now we need the federal government to free up some resources so local communities can start getting the emergency preparedness and response actions in place, then we need to really start talking about inter-bureau engagement. So that's through groups like the National Integrated Heat Health Information System. That is a inter-agency coordinating body that allows multiple federal agencies to work together to identify how heat makes its way through housing and urban development, through the Environmental Protection Agency, through the National Institutes

of Health, through all the different bureaus that in some way have direct consequences on the policies they administer, promulgate, and also have direct role to play in how local agencies have the resources, have the technical assistance, and have the capacity to be able to get in front of these heat waves, which are increasing only in intensity and frequency across the country. Many dozens of communities across the country have declared climate emergencies themselves. And so we have a lot of action happening at the local level, which of course gives me hope when I see communities so passionate, so informed, so technically aware and scientifically grounded in the evidence about how heat is playing out in their region and what actions need to be taken.

So I actually have a tremendous amount of hope and optimism for the kind of work that's ahead of us and the strategies that really seem to be working. Professor Vivek Shandas, Portland State University. That's Portland, Oregon, for anyone who is wondering. Our show was produced by Abhishek Artsy and Amanda Llewellyn, for anyone who's wondering. They had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, Serena Solin, Patrick Boyd, David Herman, hello, Amna Alsadi, Miranda Kennedy, and John Ahrens. Take it away, John. No colors anymore, I want them to turn white. Eggshell or ivory, even cream or mother of pearl. It don't matter to me, it could just save the world. I see a line of cars, they should be painted white. White roofs on all white houses

Reflecting the light I've seen people turn their heads They need to look away They're blinded by the reflections Of the sun's rays I look out to the sea and see A painted boat Already painted white but needs a second coat

Maybe then I can fade away knowing we've made it right Our planet will be cooled if it's all painted white. you