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The Democrat in the White House may be different, but the attacks are very familiar. Joe Biden’s early blitz to deal with the climate crisis prompted a hostile Republican backlash eerily similar to the opposition that crippled Barack Obama 12 years ago. Once again, efforts to reduce global heating emissions are beset as radicals, job destroyers and elitists.
Republican lawmakers in Congress have denounced Biden’s wave of executive climate orders and even introduced legislation to bypass the president and approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Republican-led states are also joining the fray with Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who pledges to use the courts to block Biden’s decision to stop oil and gas drilling on public lands. “Texas will protect the oil and gas industry from any type of hostile attack launched from Washington DC,” Abbott said.
While some younger, more moderate Republicans want to reform the party’s stance on climate, criticism of Biden has wandered into bizarre territory, like Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Tweeter that the president showed he was “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the work of the citizens of Pittsburgh” by joining an international emissions reduction agreement that had been signed in Paris. John Kennedy, another Republican senator, mocked Biden’s plan to boost adoption of electric cars by tell fox news Tuesday that “my car does not run with fairy dust, it does not run with unicorn urine”.
The Republican assault was amplified and fueled by Fox News, which aired a series of misleading statements about the Paris agreement and the economic impact of tackling the climate crisis. Much of this has focused on the Keystone pipeline project, lamenting the loss of 10,000 temporary jobs that do not yet exist. Meanwhile, despite Facebook’s attempt to promote precise climate science, the platform is still used by conservative entities such as Prager University, a non-profit media company, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to disseminate. dozens of climate disinformation announcements to millions of people.
This range of opposition “is pretty much the standard Republican message to any sort of climate proposal,” said Robert Brulle, a Brown University scholar whose own research found fossil fuel companies spent $ 2 billion. dollars to lobby lawmakers on climate change between 2000 and 2016. “This argument certainly resonates in regions where fossil fuel use is important.”
It’s also a line of attack for which the Biden administration has braced itself, with the early salvo of executive decrees touted as an opportunity to create jobs for millions of workers. “Unfortunately, the workers were fed a false narrative, they were fed the idea that climate management came at their expense. No it’s not, ”John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, said last week. Kerry noted that the solar industry was rapidly adding jobs before the Covid-19 pandemic, while the coal industry entered a steep decline.
But public and business opinion around the climate crisis has changed dramatically since such tactics thwarted Obama on the issue. Voters’ alarms over floods, wildfires and other climate-related disasters are at record levels, with even a majority of Republicans keen on government action. The recalcitation of elected Republican officials is becoming “more and more untenable”, according to Brulle.
A vibrant youth-led climate movement has flourished as a radical transformation, at least in public image, has taken place in the corporate world, where even the big oil companies are now embracing climate science and the need for a transition to clean energy. The striking change in tenor from Donald Trump’s tenure, where the former president wore a coal miner’s helmet at rallies and claimed to drive a giant truck to the White House, is illustrated by a new General Motors ad, the America’s largest and most loyal automaker, who uses Will Ferrell to brag of its plan to surpass Norway in the manufacture of electric cars.
This new context has led to warnings from younger and more moderate Republicans that the party risks being irrelevant by clinging to denial or obstructionism in the face of the climate crisis. “The Republicans have retreated to a corner,” said Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University. “They need an exit strategy, and so far they haven’t found it.”
The standoff may prove detrimental to Republicans amid a wave of young voters, but more immediately it means that there is only a narrow legislative path for Biden to help curb global heating gases and put the United States on the path to net zero emissions by 2050. Republicans have been stung by Biden’s wave of executive action on climate, but the president will demand deeper emissions cuts from Congress and will have to choose his battles in a finely balanced Senate.
According to Jeff Holmstead, a Republican who was a former deputy administrator, there is a “decent chance” that some sort of bipartisan legislation could push through a national clean energy standard and funding for wind and solar power, if not one. carbon tax or some other more radical action. at the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Many Republicans are looking for solutions they can support to tackle climate change,” said Holmstead, now a partner at the Bracewell law firm. “That said, Biden will still have problems if he’s seen as an attack on fossil fuels. If Biden veers too far to the left, he’ll have trouble with Republicans and moderate Democrats. That’s why he kept his distance from the Green New Deal.
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