(Joe Biden photo by Gage Skidmore)
We Are Definitely Screwed Maybe is a newsletter about the things that scare me. You should subscribe, so you’ll always know what to be afraid of.
Joe Biden’s climate plan is the best a major party nominee for president has ever had, but that’s not saying much. At the moment however, powerful people who know a lot about climate change are being very kind to Biden. Washington Governor Jay Inslee, formerly the presidential candidate whose entire stump speech was dominated by climate change, has expressed only uncomplicated optimism about Biden’s plan. When David Wallace-Wells asked Inslee to criticize it, he said, “I’m going to defer, I’m going to let that one pass because I’m just so focused on the immediate future—winning this election and implementing these policies.”
Serious, action-minded people can find things to praise about what the Biden campaign is offering if he manages to get elected. According to Bill McKibben the plan is “a truly useful compendium of the mainstream and obvious ideas for an energy and conservation transition,” though he adds, “The crucial job of activists, then, is to always be demanding that we move faster.”
And the climate change documents on the Biden website contain stern words for fossil fuel companies, promises to spend a lot of money, and praiseworthy rhetoric, like this:
We cannot turn a blind eye to the way in which environmental burdens and benefits have been and will continue to be distributed unevenly along racial and socioeconomic lines—not just with respect to climate change, but also pollution of our air, water, and land. The evidence of these disproportionate harms is clear.
But I worry that this isn’t a serious commitment to correcting for the ways in which white supremacy burdens people of color with a disproportional amount of suffering caused by climate change, and it is instead just a bunch of liberal niceties. Liberal niceties are helpful in a way, I suppose. Maybe today’s presidential candidate rhetoric will become tomorrow’s sanctimonious Toyota commercial, and maybe we should all be thrilled about that, but forgive me if I am not. The specific racial justice actions outlined in the plan mostly involve reinstating policies to protect marginalized communities, which have been rolled back by president Trump, and promises to ensure universal access to clean water (which will become more challenging when the temperature increases and causes droughts, though I’m pretty sure he’s just talking about removing pollutants). I’m glad this is on Biden’s website. It’s not nothing.
And yet, powerful, intersectional statements about environmental justice notwithstanding, an inadequate climate plan is inadequate, and the consequences of an inadequate plan are horrendous. Personally, I’m not giving out As for effort anymore, or patting politicians on the head for “listening to the scientists” if they don’t then do what scientists are telling them to do. The stakes are too high, and we’ve been at this for too long. We should call good plans good, and inadequate plans bad.
I’m not being unreasonable, I hope. I’m actually being pragmatic, I think. Below is a fun YouTube video about some of the basics of climate change from a guy who calls himself ClimateAdam, and it makes two points I want to stay on throughout this essay: 1) It’s too late to prevent climate change, and 2) Nonetheless, climate change is a worsening emergency that needs to be stopped. That in mind, I’m going to use Adam’s video as a kind of litmus test for climate plans.
I find analogies helpful, and I’m going to dissect the ones Adam uses. He says we often mistakenly talk about climate change like it’s a bomb that needs to be defused before it goes off, opening a pandora’s box of infinite ecological evil. Climate change isn’t a problem that can be defused, because the damage has already begun, and is worsening. And using one big explosion as a model for the consequences of inaction is even more misleading. Earth most likely won’t turn into an uninhabitable Venus-like wasteland, and as much as we like to use “or else we’re all doomed” framings, there’s not much science pointing to human extinction as a likely consequence of climate change, no matter how bad it gets, although wars, famines, droughts, and mass extinctions of other species are in the offing—a human death toll in the billions, maybe?—so worst case scenarios are nothing to soft-pedal.
The analogy Adam offers as an antidote is that climate change is like a mugger repeatedly punching a hapless bystander. People of ostensibly good conscience are a second, even more hapless bystander watching this all unfold, and, bizarrely, doing basically nothing. They plot an end to the punching at first by creating arbitrary deadlines after which the punching must stop, but then they miss the deadlines, and basically give up, and just lament how bad the punching has gotten, all the while wishing out loud that they’d taken action before it was too late. And meanwhile the cartoonish punching just carries on. Bap! Bap! Bap! Bap!…
Ah, but real punching—like real climate change—is less fun. You can take a soft bop to the nose without much permanent damage. If the hands punching you are gloved, you can actually take hundreds of grazing shots to the face in one fight, but they add up. In 1966, Muhammad Ali only needed five rounds to turn Henry Cooper into a famously ugly mess that splashed the press with so much blood that the ref ended the fight. In 2019, after 12 rounds without a knockout Badou Jack looked so swollen and cut up and, well, ghoulish that people were pretty sure his career was over, and that’s probably why fights don’t go on longer than 12 rounds (speaking of arbitrary thresholds). Boxers can, of course, die in the ring, or shortly after a fight, like Patrick Day did last year. And, like football players, boxers can probably experience CTE from repeated concussions, so doctors are trying to figure out if that explains why they sometimes become suicidal. Basically, one punch is bad, and a billion punches obliterates your head. At some point in the middle the injuries are irreversible, and eventually the person dies, but no doctor can tell you how many punches it takes to get there; just that the only safe thing to do is not get punched.
The climate change assault, if you will, is not a boxing match. Scientists can’t really point to one absolute life-or-death, end-all-be-all ratio of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere, so it’s hard to state with authority exactly when we have to stop other than “ASAP.” So there’s no climate change referee here, and the climate change mugger has been punching his victim for a really, really long time. The only good news is that a big crowd of people has formed, all screaming at the mugger to stop. But the bad news is that the mugger is punching more ferociously than ever, and—most perversely of all—a second crowd has showed up, and they’re not screaming stop, but braying for more blood.
For a climate plan to be good, it would have to be a plan that at least tries to get the punching guy to stop punching. Before we evaluate the Biden plan on those terms, here are some bullet points to keep in mind about humanity’s awareness of climate change, and our progress toward stopping it.
It’s been 38 years since Exxon’s in-house researchers linked fossil fuel pollution to global warming, and then suppressed those findings. They then lied to the public for years about climate change.
It’s been 32 years since Bill McKibben first synthesized the science literature on greenhouse gases and atmospheric warming into a digestible, prime time-ready article for the New York Review of Books called “Is The Earth Getting Hotter?” We can safely say the whole world has known about the problem ever since.
It’s been 26 years since the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change entered into force, committing all signatories to keep greenhouse gas emissions “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human induced) interference with the climate system.” We didn’t do that.
(Wikipedia emissions graph by Tomastvivlaren)
Instead of declining since then, emissions have mostly risen, or, in the best years, leveled off. Global emissions need to A) stop increasing year-by-year globally, an outcome which would simply cause emissions to plateau, as they mostly have in the US. Then we need emissions to B) steadily decrease, which can ostensibly happen if we create energy sources that don’t pollute and then—crucially—we don’t also build new polluting energy sources, making all that green energy effectively pointless. C) we have to get to a point where essentially all of our energy needs are met by non-polluting sources. You know how it’s sort of a relief when you see a COVID case number graph trending downward? But then you remember that it can’t just trend downward? And that it needs to actually plunge all the way down to zero before the problem goes away? Climate change graphs are kinda like that. A downward-trending emissions graph doesn’t show the climate getting better, it shows the cause of the problem getting worse more slowly. Emissions have to drop down to approximately zero, and only then can we even hope that climate change might get better.
Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report basically saying that humanity was most likely going to miss the window to limit temperature increase to an already very undesirable 1.5 degrees celsius, and that we were headed toward something worse. That report, combined with a very scary article from Wallace-Wells that had come out some months earlier, finally got climate change into the “mainstream discourse,” whatever that is.
According to that report, as of January 1, 2018 the world could emit 420 gigatons of CO2, and still have a 66 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees. Given that we emit about 42 gigatons per year, you can do your own back-of-the envelope math on this, but here’s mine: we’re at about 300 gigatons left currently, and we’re not on track to steadily decrease emissions year-over-year, therefore we have about seven years before we’ve emitted so much CO2 we’ve definitely blown our shot at 1.5 degrees. CarbonBrief put the number at eight years when they made the following graphic last year:
So are the plans outlined at Joebiden dot com slash clean dash energy, and Joebiden dot com slash climate up to this monumental task? Emphatically no, and it won’t take me much time at all to explain why in the broadest sense: We have about seven years before the global carbon budget is expended, and the Biden plan will “put the United States on an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by no later than 2050,” which is 7+23 years. In the plan’s defense, we’re supposed to get a “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035,” which is only 7+8 years, but electricity generation only accounts for 27 percent of our total emissions according to the EPA. The plan, in short, completely disregards the 1.5 degree goal.
And to choose a path toward more warming is unforgivable. 1.5 degrees of warming compromises Earth’s future enough—the results would be catastrophic. To subject our world to even another half a degree on top of that exposes us and our descendants to unspeakable horror. ClimateBrief helpfully compared the two outcomes according to the best mathematical models available, and the results are infuriating. Some highlights:
Access to freshwater in the areas they studied would decrease by 17 percent, as opposed to 9 percent in the 1.5 degree scenario.
Wheat production would decline by 16 percent instead of 9 percent.
Sea level rise by 2100 would be 50 centimeters higher than the baseline level instead of 40 centimeters.
But there’s more to dislike about this plan than the timeline. Getting back to that punch-in-the-face analogy: another thing that makes Joe Biden’s plan so inadequate—and honestly the same goes for most comparable plans—is that it simply fails to scream “stop” at the guy punching the other guy in the face. Instead, it promises to coax the guy into stopping, very slowly, basically by distracting him with other things to do, many of which haven’t been invented yet.
Moreover, the plan on Biden’s website isn’t serious because it relies on fantasies. The Biden campaign promises to “Accelerate the development and deployment of carbon capture sequestration technology,” for instance, which is climate fairy dust. The idea of sucking carbon out of the air and storing it in big tanks is cool and everything—I always picture it as a contraption from a Dr. Seuss illustration—and we should definitely try to make it work, but as a technology that actually helps Earth on the scale we need it to, it’s simply not real yet, and it may never be. It’ll be great if it happens, but it’s a low probability side-bet. It shouldn’t be a feature in any climate plan any more than “find a wish-granting toad” should be.
And here’s the Biden bullet point on “Innovation”:
Drive dramatic cost reductions in critical clean energy technologies, including battery storage, negative emissions technologies, the next generation of building materials, renewable hydrogen, and advanced nuclear—and rapidly commercialize them, ensuring that those new technologies are made in America.
To “drive dramatic cost reductions” as an agenda for a federal government means to subsidize those industries and/or give them tax breaks. And if one drives down the cost of one product, the other product will take its ball and go home, one assumes, right? Lol, no, it will be a knock-down-drag-out fight against some of the world’s richest and most noxious bastards, as we all know.
The Biden Plan touts Obama-era regulatory achievements, and implies that it will bring enforcement back, and says by the end of Biden’s first time “an enforcement mechanism” will exist—what that mechanism will be is anyone’s guess. But rather than call directly for a halt of fossil fuel emissions via powerful new regulations, the meat of this plan involves funneling money and resources into products that compete with fossil fuel. These are actions that companies and political adversaries will—and already do—attempt to overpower by activating conservative people’s well-established resentment toward environmentalism.
For example, if someone driving a diesel truck feels slighted by someone they perceive to be on the left—be they an electric car driver, or simply a Black Lives Matter protester—they might do this cutesy thing called Rolling Coal where they make big clouds of black smoke come out of their exhaust in order to feel better. Environmentalism is a culture war issue, and Fox News is already treating Biden’s plan as such. Instead of capitulating to the realities of the market, we can expect environmental resentment to be weaponized and further racialized.
Ever since 2008, when presidential candidate John McCain blurted out “Drill offshore and drill now,” and discovered that Republican rally crowds are full of weird people who will start hooting and give you a standing ovation if you declare your undying loyalty to oil companies, we’ve been in an era when right-wing politicians signal their antagonism toward climate change activism in order to drum up support.
This support is not an acknowledgement of innate economic realities—it’s a culture war signifier, which means it flies in the face of good sense. In 2018 Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis said during his campaign, “I’m not in the pews of the church of the global warming leftists” as a not-so-subtle way of telling fossil fuel companies they should support him—even though his state is one of climate change’s most vulnerable victims. Trump’s energy policies go out of their way to reward red states financially for their reliance on fossil fuels.
In an era where everything gets turned into a culture war issue, politics should probably be treated as a competition for power, and that’s something Republicans appear to understand intuitively, while Democrats, it appears, do not. I would even argue that progressive icons like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t exceptional power politicians. They’re usually just the only ones who even appear to be fighting at all on any given day. Meanwhile, members of Democratic leadership like Steny Hoyer have a tendency to soften their own demands before the Republicans even arrive at the negotiating table, a process you can watch in real time right now as the Democrats give away people’s COVID unemployment benefits.
So it surprised me to see activist and progressive think-tanker Julian Brave NoiseCat write in The Guardian that Biden’s plan is “in the broadest strokes, the climate policy gospel according to many progressives.” I respectfully disagree with Julian Brave NoiseCat.
In comparison to the Sanders Green New Deal (RIP), what’s missing is any sense that we’re telling the punching guy to stop punching. The Sanders plan emphasized things like, “Making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution, through litigation, fees, and taxes, and eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies.” In fairness, the Biden plan ends fossil fuel subsidies too, but that’s not like telling the puncher to stop, that’s like taking away the brass knuckles we gave him. Sanders also emphasized something very important that Biden, for the most part, doesn’t: regulation. The Sanders plan promised to “Regulate all dangerous greenhouse gases.”
Here’s an excerpt from the Sanders plan that I particularly liked:
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will jointly develop an economy-wide survey of climate risks. To create this report, the SEC will require corporations to audit and report their climate risks. The EPA will use the information to target the worst climate risks through economy-wide regulations to limit carbon pollution emissions under the Clean Air Act to achieve our carbon pollution reduction goals.
And even this is just a baby step toward telling the punching guy to stop punching. By quantifying emissions from corporations, we can say that this hypothetical Sanders EPA would have learned something valuable. But once that Sanders EPA started regulating based on that information, the federal government would be asking for a million court battles—and if those battles had made it to our right-wing Supreme Court, success would have been far from guaranteed. For instance, back in 2014, the court was further to the left, and the EPA’s proposed climate enforcement under President Obama was pretty modest, but the Supreme Court still watered it down. It will be worse next time. If Biden’s “enforcement mechanism” is a whole new regulatory agency (and I hope it is!) I worry that such an agency won’t survive a showdown with the judiciary at all.
I’m not saying this just to be a downer. It’s just that the Biden climate plan would have to be more ambitious than the Sanders one to even have a shot at telling the punching guy to stop punching. We all know Democrat plans get severely watered down, and that as McKibben wrote in his article about Biden’s plan, “few of the proposals will get enacted in their precise form.” So maybe the problem is just that this is a plan created by Democrats, and they are a party that is unfortunately not capable of coming up with an effective plan.
Now, I’m not going to say this next part is simple (it’s usually a very bad sign if the essay you’re reading says “actually climate change is simple” at any point), but what needs to be accomplished one way or another if a plan is going to be effective is that greenhouse gas emissions have to stop, much like the guy needs to stop punching the other guy. He doesn’t need to slow down, or transition to a less damaging type of attack. He has to stop. Conservative fear-mongering about The Future Liberals Want is based in a fairly accurate, if simplified, snapshot of the solution to the problem: Things like coal and natural gas power plants need to stop running—right now if possible. Oil has to stop being extracted and turned into gasoline. Giant, diesel-powered container ships have to stop. Planes have to not take off. Etc, etc… That’s how climate change gets fixed.
The absence of these things will trigger a sharp sudden demand for substitutes. New infrastructure jobs have to go to marginalized people, and benefit marginalized communities. There are tons of potential downsides, like potential energy shortages, potentially violent pushback from right-wing people. And getting the timelines right so that millions of people aren’t plunged into poverty is a non-negotiable prerequisite to a good plan that is also effective.
But dirty energy has to go, so the elusive Good Climate Plan would be one that threads that needle. And this has to start now-ish. Here in the US and other rich countries, we have a head start on building renewable sources of energy. In order to soften the blow, we’re obligated to throw what I call The Off-Switch sooner than countries that aren’t as far along in their development. But before long, everyone has to shut it all down.
And that’s it. That’s the point at which the punching guy stops punching. Much like everyone staying home all of a sudden this March, it is not what the gatekeepers of our economy want to see happen, but it is simply what has to happen. If you picture greenhouse gas emissions as a pollution leak—and that is indeed what they are—we need to shut the leak off.
In 2010, during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the craziest thing to watch was the live video feed of the gushing leak on the seafloor, taken by a camera that had been attached to the bottom of the ill-fated rig. There was the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, live on TV. “Jesus christ someone just fucking stop it!” you would hear yourself involuntarily blurt out as you watched it. But it just kept going like that for five months before they managed to cap it.
No such emotionally charged live footage exists for climate change, but it might soon. A coalition calling itself Climate TRACE (Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions) will, according to a recent Vox article by David Roberts, roll out a method for tracking all the greenhouse gas emissions in the world in real time. Being excited about this feels a little like getting excited about some new “invention” from Elon Musk, but I can’t help it. The ability to bring up real-time data that exposes climate profligacy and outright villainy in real-time sounds to me like a breakthrough technology. Armed with that kind of information, my hope is that activists can easily reveal the outrageous disparity between individual footprints and institutional footprints, and that will in turn both stimulate activist anger, and show us exactly where to direct it.
The other reason I’m so excited about something as dorky as Climate TRACE is that in the event that a climate plan worthy of actual optimism moves forward, I suspect we’ll need day-to-day information about our progress in order to stay engaged. It would have to be a little like the graphs of daily new COVID cases, but with more visceral power. Somewhere to check every day when you log on, to get a snapshot of whether emissions are getting better or worse today.
Because my sense is that if you look out the window while a Good Climate Plan is moving forward, things won’t look “normal,” and the stock market might sometimes have to suffer, kinda like when people were taking COVID seriously in March and April. My hunch is that on some days, such a plan would look like a mass protest action to some, and just a bunch of incivility and vandalism to others, depending on whether you’re watching cable news or not. Another hunch I have is that outrage at many different types of injustice will be involved, not just climate justice—or, as climate journalist Mary Annaise Heglar put it on a recent episode of her podcast, “There’s no special kind of justice.” Another hunch: the targets of that outrage will play martyr, and launch their own version of a protest movement. In short while 2020 has been a parade of horrors, it’s also given me a lot of hunches about what a Good Climate Plan might look like.
In the meantime, I worry that US presidents simply cannot tackle serious problems in a mature way ever for the exact reason Trump refuses to seriously deal with COVID: the president has to be a cheerleader for the stock market. Fossil fuels make cheap energy, and that’s a baseline reality that captains of industry expect to see for the foreseeable future. Last week, Warren Buffett’s company invested heavily in natural gas. Buffett is a billionaire because he tends to be right about matters like this, and he simply has to be wrong in this case. His company, like many other companies, must lose value if there’s going to be a Good Climate Plan. Whoever is president when all that precious shareholder value gets lost isn’t going to have good poll numbers over on FiveThirtyEight dot com.
So as long as “good economy”=”good president,” and as long as “Dow Jones green up arrow”=“good economy,” then maybe the ever-present goal of getting re-elected and keeping one’s party in power permanently if possible means elected officials on the national stage cannot do anything about climate change ever.
I’m not saying lose hope. Never do that! I’m saying if the world has a shot at finding the elusive Good Climate Plan, maybe activists will be going it alone.
Note for people who read all the way to the bottom: Hi. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, please subscribe and spread the word. I’m hoping to post these more often, with a paid tier, and more in-depth reporting, etc. Earning more subscribers is the only way to make that possible. —Mike
Fantastic work, thanks. Off to stare at a wall for a bit now.