What Joe Biden Needs to do to Become Our First True 'Climate President'

Climate activists in the U.S. are pinching themselves over what the newly inaugurated Biden administration is doing to address the climate crisis. Who would have thought that our first “climate president” would be Joe Biden?

But let’s keep in mind that his brave new stances are the result of years of climate activism, of protests, marches, lobbying, disinvestments, civil disobedience, and arrests. All of this, especially the huge outpouring of students around the world in 2019 and the unrelenting series of extreme weather events, fires, and floods, has put the climate crisis on the front burner and, along with the pandemic and an economy in crisis, helped move Biden from an establishment, fear-of-deficit spending and big-government politician to possibly becoming “the first truly post-Reagan president,” as Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times on Jan. 28. We shall see.

It’s a complex moment because while there’s much to celebrate, we also need to remain in emergency mode to ensure that Biden follows through with his campaign promises, and more, in the face of the powerful pushback that is on its way.

We celebrate Biden’s executive orders and the critical appointments of people like Gina McCarthy as the White House national climate advisor and John Kerry as the special envoy for climate. They are both exceedingly knowledgeable about what needs to happen, and McCarthy will ensure that every cabinet secretary views their work through a climate and justice lens.

Never before has anyone in the White House uttered the kinds of progressive words on climate that McCarthy has recently: “Climate is a racial justice issue and solving it advances justice and creates union jobs.”

This statement is immensely reassuring because it is imperative that justice and job creation be at the center of Biden’s climate rollout.

But the transition won’t happen unless the Labor Department is on board. Fortunately, the green energy sector is far more job intensive than the fossil fuel industry, but the salaries are not on a par with that largely unionized industry. This means that in giving financial support to the clean-energy economy, the federal government needs to demand that the new jobs be family-supporting union (or union equivalent) jobs and that they are available as soon fossil fuel workers begin to transition.

Working families and communities deserve to know that fighting climate change won’t result in unemployment or a reduced standard of living.

Solar panels and wind turbines aren’t the only jobs available in the new green economy. There are tens of millions of workers needed to build electric fast-rail systems and charging stations for electric vehicles, not to mention the workers needed to rebuild our dangerously decaying storm management and freshwater delivery systems, and to retrofit millions of homes and office buildings to save energy and make them resilient to extreme weather events.

These things have been needed for well over a decade. Had prior Democratic administrations been willing to address them, millions of jobs would have opened up already for the unemployed or underemployed citizens who felt betrayed and neglected — and decided that Trump at least offered something different.

If Biden does things right, the Rust Belt and rural wastelands of the United States can again become thriving union towns with safe, dignified jobs that are simultaneously helping America become strong and combating the climate crisis.

Surely Biden understands these things. He’s a good, pro-labor guy. Yet he announced the closing of the Keystone XL pipeline without offering a plan for a just transition. Labor and climate activists mustn’t let him get away with this.

He’s been clearer when it comes to environmental justice. He has already pledged to direct 40 percent of climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities; they have borne the brunt of fossil fuel pollution for decades.

I have met with countless people suffering from asthma, cancer, and heart conditions because they live and work at the epicenters of extraction, refining, and exporting of fossil fuels. For too long, big environmental groups viewed “the environment” as the natural world, inhabited by wildlife. But “the environment” is also where we live, work, play, and pray.

When the more privileged and powerful say NIMBY, or “Not in My Back Yard,” where do we think the toxins are going? If the fossil fuel companies had not felt that they could dump their pollution and their infrastructures in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color (they call them “sacrifice zones”) with impunity, they may have been forced to discontinue their destructive work sooner.

The people breathing clouds of toxic dust or seeing brown, flammable water coming out of their taps may be the first to feel the impacts of the pollution that leads to climate change, but the chemicals involved — carbon dioxide, methane, benzene, nitrous oxide, fluorine, and more — are altering the climate and the environment for everyone.

We are all eventually impacted. This is why fighting climate change means that we must also address the idea of environmental justice for all.

Now, finally, with an administration that will listen, climate activists and others need to make certain that we address and solve four crises — climate, health, economic and racial injustice —simultaneously, not sequentially. Climate is the overarching, civilizational crisis that will render the others moot if not addressed rapidly

Change is coming fast. It can come by disaster or by design.

Let’s be intentional and make sure there’s a managed phaseout of fossil fuels that ensures that the most affected frontline communities — communities of color and poverty and industry workers — are the first to reap the rewards of the new energy systems; that the millions of jobs that will be created go first to those who, through no fault of their own, will be set adrift by the transition, along with those who’ve been un or underemployed for years due to race, Reaganomics, or NAFTA.

If we can do this, we will be stepping through Arundhati Roy’s “portal to a new world,” which, the author argues, the pandemic potentially represents. And, we’ll be stepping into a fairer, safer, greener, and more peaceful planet.