Biden Pledges Ambitious Climate Action. Here’s
What He Could Actually Do.
If elected, Joe Biden and his allies are preparing to
pass climate change legislation, piece by piece — knowing full well that the
candidate’s $2 trillion plan would be a tough sell.
Coral
Davenport
By Coral
Davenport
Ms.
Davenport has covered climate change policy in Washington since the George W.
Bush administration.
Oct. 25,
2020, 1:57 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s $2 trillion plan to fight global warming is the most
ambitious climate policy proposed by a leading presidential candidate, a
political lightning rod spotlighted on Thursday night when the Democratic
nominee acknowledged during a debate that it would “transition” the country
“from the oil industry.”
But no one
knows better than Mr. Biden, the former vice president, that it almost surely
will not be enacted, even if his party secures the White House and the Senate.
Thirty-six years in the Senate and the searing experience of watching the Obama
administration’s less ambitious climate plan die a decade ago have taught him
the art of the possible.
Still, a
President Biden could have real impact: solar panels and wind turbines spread
across the country’s mountains and prairies, electric charging stations nearly
as ubiquitous as gas stations and a gradual decrease in the nation’s
planet-warming greenhouse pollution.
“The oil
industry pollutes significantly,” Mr. Biden said at the final presidential
debate, adding, “it has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”
Mr. Biden’s
advisers insist that climate change is not just a political slogan. And on
Capitol Hill, his team is already strategizing with Democratic leaders on how
they can realistically turn at least some of those proposals into law.
“There are
three things we have to do — climate, economic equality and democracy,” said
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, who would become the majority
leader if his party wins control of the Senate. “All three are vital, and
climate is not going to be the caboose.”
If Mr.
Biden wins, he will face a dilemma he knows well — so much to do, and so little
time. As a newly inaugurated vice president, he and Barack Obama dove first
into passing an economic recovery bill in the wake of the 2008 financial
crisis, then focused on the Affordable Care Act. By the time Congress moved to
climate change, the White House’s political capital was exhausted
Speaker
Nancy Pelosi in 2010 forced the House to approve complicated legislation to cap
carbon emissions, but that “cap and trade” bill never even came to a vote in
the Senate. Its passage in the House helped sweep Democrats from power months
later.
“The biggest
factor in not getting climate change done in 2010 was health care,” said Phil
Schiliro, who was Mr. Obama’s liaison to Congress at the time. “And this could
happen again, with the other things that have to come first. The coronavirus is
such an enormous wild card.”
If Mr.
Biden wins the White House but Republicans hold Senate control, Mr. Biden’s loftiest
climate pledges will certainly die.
In that
scenario, “All Biden can try to do is cobble back together the Obama
environmental agenda,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian who focuses on
presidents’ environmental legacies. That would include, he said, rejoining the
international Paris accords — the agreement between nations to fight climate
change, which President Trump is withdrawing from — and reinstating Obama-era
climate regulations. And with a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court,
even that could be thwarted.
But even a
narrow Democratic majority in the Senate would leave a President Biden with
options. And this time around, Mr. Biden wants to do it differently, not with a
stand-alone climate bill but by tucking climate measures into broader, popular
legislation to insulate them from partisan attack.
Democrats’
initial pass would most likely come in an economic recovery package. The $787
billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in 2009, which Mr. Biden
was responsible for putting in effect, included about $90 billion in clean
energy infrastructure spending.
With
Congress arguing over a coronavirus relief bill measured in trillions of
dollars, that $90 billion total is “going to look very small,” said Senator
Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts. “It’s going to be a big, big, big
number that goes into that stimulus bill.”
An
infrastructure bill, long promised by President Trump, could follow and include
language from Mr. Biden’s climate plan to promote construction of 500,000
electric vehicle charging stations and build 1.5 million new energy-efficient
homes. It is also expected that a Biden White House would push aggressively for
provisions to promote trains and high-speed rail.
“I will
fight for a big, bold climate package,” Mr. Schumer said, “and as leader, will
be focused on assembling a climate package that meets the scale and the scope
of the problem.”
If those
spending measures cannot secure enough Republican support to beat a filibuster,
Mr. Schumer plans to use a budgetary procedure, called reconciliation, to
muscle through climate spending and tax policy. Presidents Trump and George W.
Bush used reconciliation to pass their huge tax cuts, and Mr. Obama passed part
of the Affordable Care Act using the rule.
More than a
year ago, Mr. Schumer tasked Democrats on the Senate committees responsible for
climate policy to begin crafting climate-related tax legislation that could be
bundled into a larger budget bill. Such policies could include extending tax
credits for wind and solar power or increasing royalties for oil and gas
drilling on public lands. They could possibly include a tax on carbon dioxide
emissions, although passage of such a measure would violate Mr. Biden’s pledge
not to raise taxes on families with income below $400,000.
“Nothing is
off the table,” Mr. Schumer said.
Many
Republicans are expected to oppose those efforts, countering that they could
harm the economy, but some gas-and-coal-state Democrats who balked at Mr.
Obama’s cap-and-trade bill say they have shifted over the past decade as the
politics and reality of climate change have grown more urgent.
“What’s
changed is that it’s gotten worse,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of
Montana, who said in 2010 that he worried Mr. Obama’s bill would harm his
state’s agriculture and coal industries.
“We’re
supposed to get our first frost tonight — in October, a month late,” Mr. Tester
said, speaking by telephone from his farm in Big Sandy, Mont. “You really have
to have your head buried in the sand not to see we’ve got a problem.”
Senator Bob
Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania and a Catholic, said his thinking had been
shaped in part by Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, which calls for
transformational change to stop climate change and environmental degradation.
“We can’t wait 10 more years,” he said. “I don’t think
we can wait five years.”
Other
coal-state Democrats are not there. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who
shot a copy of Mr. Obama’s climate bill in a campaign ad in 2010 and re-upped
it in 2018, will play a key role in any climate debate, particularly if he becomes
chairman of the Senate Energy Committee.
“I share
Vice President Biden’s concern for tackling climate change,” Mr. Manchin wrote
in an email, but added that major policy changes would not be accepted at face
value. “The devil is in the details,” he said.
With so
much legislative experience, Mr. Biden knows what he would be up against, but
few would count him out.
“Joe Biden
has proved throughout his career that he can bring people together to pass
consequential legislation,” said Matt Hill, a spokesman for Mr. Biden.
Michael
McKenna, who served as a liaison to Congress for President Trump, compared a
potential Biden administration to Bill Clinton’s negotiating team.
“They’d
say, ‘Here’s what we can do,’ and then you start looking for the Venn diagram
of what you could do and what they wanted,” said Mr. McKenna, a veteran energy
lobbyist. Mr. Biden, he added, “gets the racket.”
But beyond
spending and taxation, real policy changes cannot pass through reconciliation
under Senate rules. They will need 60 votes and Republican support. One policy
target is a “clean energy standard” — a law mandating a fast transition to
zero-carbon electricity generation from wind, solar, hydro and nuclear power.
That would go a long way toward ensuring that Mr. Biden meets his campaign pledge
of eliminating planet-warming pollution from the electricity sector by 2035.
It would
also be a tough sell.
“Not going
to happen,” Mr. McKenna predicted. “The progressives are going to be
disappointed.”
Other
policy proposals that would need bipartisan support include the establishment
of a new government research agency focused solely on solutions to climate
change; a mandate for the federal government to purchase hybrid and electric
vehicles; and a measure to promote the widespread use of farm equipment that
captures planet-warming methane emissions from manure.
Some of the
Senate Republicans that could be partners in such ventures are precisely the
ones that Democrats need to lose in November if they are to capture the
majority: Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado, for instance.
One
Republican not up for re-election, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has spoken
of the harm that climate change has wreaked on her state. “She will remain
highly engaged in discussions about clean energy and climate change,” said a
spokeswoman for Ms. Murkowski, Tonya Parrish.
The rest of
the world will be watching.
“If we have
Biden as president, and he will announce very quickly that he will rejoin Paris
and do pieces of regulation that he can control — if he can only muster that,
we should remember that those will have an impact,” said Laurence Tubiana, who
served as France’s chief climate ambassador during the 2015 Paris negotiations.
But, she
said, spending money and reinstating rules will not be enough to meet the
emission reductions needed from the world’s largest economy, nor will that
secure the global influence the United States once had. For that, she said, “it
will be essential to have a law.”
But
Republican filibusters would stand in the way.
There is
another option: eliminating the legislative filibuster to pass a climate policy
bill with a simple 51-vote majority.
Although
the Senate has gotten rid of the filibuster for judicial and executive branch
confirmations, leaders in both parties have opposed ending it for legislation,
fearing the prospect of absolute majority rule.
But climate
change might lead Democrats to take a step that has been considered
unthinkable, some Democrats say.
“If
Republicans still think climate change is a hoax and won’t play ball, and they
take the ball and go back to their court, we’ll find other ways to proceed,”
said Senator Thomas Carper, Democrat of Delaware, who will become chairman of
the Senate environment committee if his party wins the Senate.
Mr. Biden
has designated Mr. Carper his climate point man on Capitol Hill, and the two
enjoy a decades-long friendship from Delaware politics.
“Getting
rid of the filibuster — that shouldn’t be the first thing we should lead with,”
Mr. Carper said. “But Republicans should have in the back of their minds that
it could come to that.”
Coral
Davenport covers energy and environmental policy for the climate desk from
Washington. She was part of the Times team that received Columbia University’s
John B. Oakes award for distinguished environmental journalism in 2018. @CoralMDavenport
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