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WHY BIDEN SHOULD RUN ON CLIMATE  
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Bill McKibben
May 24, 2024
Common Dreams
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_ It’s a strong triple threat to say: Trump will take away your
rights. He will take away your democracy. And he will take away the
planet you’ve known. _

,

 

It seems entirely possible that the upcoming presidential election
will be decided mostly on feelings, or what we now call vibes. In
a poll released this week,
[[link removed]] for
instance, almost exactly half of voters said American unemployment was
at a 50-year high, which is odd since it’s actually near a 50-year
low.

Given data like that, I imagine it’s hard for U.S. President Joe
Biden’s team to figure out how to make the case for a second term.
So far they’ve focused on abortion rights and on protecting
democracy, both of which are not just right but savvy: They focus on
places where former President Donald Trump has weaknesses that most
people recognize. (_Most_ people—somehow a fifth of voters blame
Biden
[[link removed]] for
the repeal of _Roe_). If it were up to me, I’d open a third of
these fronts: climate change.

There’s three reasons for that.

One, it’s popular. Something—some combination of fire, flood, and
movement-building—has persuaded Americans that climate change is
real, and that the government should take action to slow it
down. Across surveys
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clear. And voters perceive Democrats as much better on climate:
Indeed, some new polling indicates it may have played a crucial role
in the last election.
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Two, it gets way more popular when you explain it. A new survey of
young voters from Data for Progress showed that “approval for
Biden’s handling of climate change and the environment improves by
17 percentage points among young voters after respondents hear more
about his climate action. Approval of Biden’s handling of climate
change and the environment reaches 69% among 18- to 34-year-old voters
after respondents read a series of questions about his climate
achievements.” Biden put enormous political capital into winning
passage of the IRA; he might as well get political gain from all of
that.

And three, people hate Trump’s positions on the issue. The highest
profile climate action he took in term one was withdrawing America
from the Paris accords, and less than a third
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voters approved. And this time around he’s doing everything he can
to cement his reputation as the corrupt candidate of fossil fuel.
Yesterday, amid the ruins of the city’s greatest windstorm
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he held a fundraising lunch
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leading frackers in downtown Houston. As Emily Atkin reminds us in a
typically piquant column
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cartel is already supporting Trump over Biden by a 40-1 margin. He
wants more, of course, which is why he held his billion-dollar
extortion dinner
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D.C. earlier this month. And what do you know—when they were told
about his efforts to shake down fossil fuel executives, 
[[link removed]]two-thirds
of likely voters didn’t like it. The oil companies, as a new report
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Change International
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clear, continue to lie about climate change, and their efforts to
“combat” it. At some visceral level, Americans know that (though
it would be good to remind them with a DOJ investigation of those
lies, as Rep. Jamie Raskin
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Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) recommended
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So I think it’s a strong triple threat to say: Trump will take away
your rights. He will take away your democracy. And he will take away
the planet you’ve known.

And I think it’s especially strong because the next few months seem
likely to underline the threat with some of the hottest weather anyone
has ever seen. Memories of _Dobbs_ and of January 6 may be slowly
fading, but right now in America people are sweating. The first big
heat dome of the season has settled over the southland, with Key West
and Miami setting almost unbelievable records for muggy weather—the
heat index down there topped 115°F last week. (That political
savant Ron DeSantis
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outlaw talking about climate within the state’s government). A
new study [[link removed]] out today
shows that heatwaves have tripled since the 1960s in this country, and
that deaths from those hot spells are up 800%. Even more ominously,
the water offshore in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico
is preposterously hot
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which is why forecasters are predicting a record hurricane season.
(Bring back memories of Trump trying to divert storms
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his Sharpie.)

So here’s what Biden can legitimately say:

He has done more than any other president—by far—to support the
buildout of clean energy.

And he has, with his pause on liquefied natural gas (LNG) export
permits in January, done more than any other president to cramp Big
Oil’s style.

That second point is a low bar (presidents always prefer carrots over
sticks)—but it’s a real one. In fact, as the _Times_reported
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week, it’s the thing that collapsed an “uneasy truce” between
the fossil fuel industry and the White House.

To the industry, Mr. Biden’s pause on new gas export permits “was
a wake-up call,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American
Energy Alliance, which supports the fossil fuel industry. “He could
be potentially icing billions of dollars in long-term LNG contracts.
That’s real. That’s tangible.”

If I were running the campaign, I’d have Biden out there in the
heat, out there in the wreckage after the hurricanes, out there when
it floods and burns. And my message would be relentless and simple:
“To get out of this cycle of destruction, we need clean energy.
I’ve supported it. My opponent has opposed it, and on laughable
grounds—that windmills cause cancer, for instance. So let’s go
forward, not backward.”

Voters want candidates in touch with reality, even if they don’t
always have a firm grasp of reality themselves. But everyone can tell
the temperature, and over the five months to the election it’s going
to be hot.

_Bill McKibben [[link removed]] is
the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and
co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is
"Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He also
authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New
Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable
Future."_

_Common Dreams [[link removed]] is a
reader-supported independent news outlet created in 1997 as a new
media model._

_Our nonprofit newsroom covers the most important news stories of the
moment. Common Dreams free online journalism keeps our millions of
readers well-informed, inspired, and engaged._

_We are optimists. We believe real change is possible. But only if
enough well-informed, well-intentioned—and just plain fed up and
fired-up—people demand it. We believe that together we can attain
our common dreams._

* Joe Biden
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* Climate Change
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* elections
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* Inflation Reducation Act
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