The Democrat in the White House may be different, but the attacks are all too familiar. Joe Biden’s initial blitz to tackle the climate crisis sparked a hostile Republican reaction frighteningly similar to the opposition that frustrated Barack Obama 12 years ago. Once again, efforts to reduce emissions that are warming the planet are being considered radicals, job exterminators and elitists.
Republican lawmakers in Congress denounced Biden’s flood of executive orders on the climate and even introduced legislation to bypass the president and approve the Keystone XL pipeline litigation. Republican-led states are also entering the fray with Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who promises to use the courts to block Biden’s action to stop oil and gas exploration on public lands. “Texas will protect the oil and gas industry from any kind of hostile attack launched from Washington DC,” said Abbott.
While some younger, more moderate Republicans want to reform the party’s position on the climate, criticism of Biden has wandered into bizarre territories, like Texas Senator Ted Cruz tweeting that the president has shown that he is “more interested in the opinions of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh” by returning to an international agreement to reduce emissions that was signed in Paris. John Kennedy, another Republican senator, scoffed at Biden’s plan to increase acceptance of electric cars telling Fox News on Tuesday that “my car does not emit fairy dust, it does not emit unicorn urine”.
The Republican attack was amplified and fueled by Fox News, which released a series of misleading claims about the Paris agreement and the economic impact of dealing with 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 accurate climate science, the platform is still routinely used by conservative entities such as Prager University, a nonprofit media company, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to spread dozens of climate disinformation ads for millions of people.
This range of opposition “is practically the standard Republican message for any type of climate proposal,” said Robert Brulle, an academic at Brown University, whose own research found that fossil fuel companies spent $ 2 billion pressuring climate change legislators among 2000 and 2016. “This argument certainly resonates in areas with a large presence of fossil fuel jobs.”
It is also a line of attack for which the Biden government has prepared itself, with the first salvo of executive orders framed as an opportunity to create jobs for millions of workers. “Unfortunately the workers were fed a false narrative, they were fed the notion that, somehow, dealing with the climate came at their expense. No, it hasn’t changed, ”said John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, last week. Kerry noted that the solar industry was creating jobs quickly before the Covid-19 pandemic, while the coal industry has declined sharply.
But public and business opinion surrounding the climate crisis has changed dramatically since such tactics managed to frustrate Obama on this issue. Voter alarm over floods, forest fires and other climate-related disasters is at record levels, even with most Republicans wanting government action. The recalcitrance of elected Republicans is becoming “increasingly unsustainable,” according to Brulle.
An energetic climate movement led by young people flourished while a radical transformation, at least in the public image, took place in the corporate world, where even large oil companies now accept climate science and the need for a transition to clean energy. The surprising change in the content of Donald Trump’s mandate, where the former president wore a coal miner helmet at rallies and pretended to drive a giant truck in the White House, is illustrated by a new announcement by General Motors, the largest and most serious United States automaker, who uses Will Ferrell to brag of its plan to surpass Norway in the manufacture of electric cars.
This new context has generated warnings from younger and more moderate Republicans that the party is at risk of being irrelevant by clinging to negativism or obstructionism in relation to the climate crisis. “Republicans were trapped,” said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University. “They need an exit strategy and so far they haven’t found it.”
The stalemate may be damaging to Republicans among a wave of younger voters, but more immediately, it means that there is only one narrow legislative path for Biden to help reduce the gases that heat the planet and put the United States on the path of zero net emissions. until 2050. Republicans have been irritated by Biden’s flood of executive climate action, but the president will demand deeper cuts from Congress and will have to choose his battles in a well-balanced Senate.
There is a “decent chance” of some kind of bipartisan legislation passing a national standard for clean energy and financing for wind and solar energy, if not a carbon tax or other broader action, according to Jeff Holmstead, a Republican who was former deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Many Republicans are looking for things 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 is seen only as a fossil fuel attacker. If Biden moves too far to the left, he will have problems with moderate Republicans and Democrats. That’s why he kept his distance from the Green New Deal. “