Contending with our climate

Photon-based political graffiti: one of my favorite innovations to come out of the Trump era. Thanks Vox.

Any attempt to catalog the failures of the Trump administration risks an unceremonious burial under the sheer quantity, banality, and stupidity of the available examples. However, there’s one that cries out for immediate remedy - aside from the obvious COVID-19 effort.

The US effort against climate change has, for the last four years, gone in the opposite direction from where our global allies and rivals are heading. Even in the absence of any federal guidance, there are major US companies in carbon-intensive sectors getting in front of the transition - for example, automakers are making huge commitments to electric vehicles. As if the risk of losing the biosphere that nurtured human civilization were not enough, our policy malfeasance creates additional risks that apply specifically to the US. To name just two: we continue to lose global influence to players that are in a position to take rapid climate action (hello China!) and remain vulnerable economically to the sector’s volatility the longer we continue to rely on fossil fuels.

The Biden climate agenda is the most ambitious propounded by any incoming administration. Even without control of the Senate, there are a number of executive actions he will likely take. However, even his complete package of policies is completely insufficient to actually solve the problem. There’s a vast difference between what scientists are saying is necessary and how mainstream news sources report on the issue. This NYT article, for example, is an excellent overview of the political obstacles to Biden’s climate actions, but it never properly establishes what’s at stake should they fail.

We should simply accept at this point that there will be no major climate legislation during the first half of Biden’s term in office. There will be no crossover support from Republican senators under McConnell’s leadership, and while I certainly hope to be proven wrong, I can’t imagine that both of the available Senate seats in Georgia will go to Democrats. I also suspect that the deference of the federal judiciary to the power of the executive will vanish on January 20.

What remains, then? Perhaps the most influential means Biden will have to move in the right direction is foreign policy: he can reenter the Paris accords, and negotiate for additional commitments from other nations - who, after all, represent over 80% of all carbon emissions. I hope there will also be a concerted effort to extract voluntary commitments from the most carbon-intensive industries to make a rapid transition, an effort where cooperation between governments could be especially powerful. Most of all, I want the Biden administration to be steadfast in confronting their opposition with the planetary scale of this ongoing tragedy. Perhaps the words of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, spoken from within America’s golden age of leadership in science and exploration, might help:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

I feel compelled to close on a hopeful note, so here are the Biden administration’s first ten executive actions on climate, as compiled by Vox. It’s already worlds better than what we’ve witnessed over the last four years.

What would you add to this list?