Vote Biden, or watch the world burn

It’s nearly summer, temperatures are rising, and we’re entering the climate wars phase of America’s election season.

The Biden campaign, and its loyal Democratic spokespeople in the media, are busy issuing shrill warnings about the environmental ‘catastrophe’ that would follow should Donald Trump win in November.

Team Trump, meanwhile, is doubling down on the Republican commitment to protect energy security and jobs – or, as the Donald likes to say, ‘drill, baby, drill’ from day one of his next administration.

When it comes to campaigning, Republicans tend to approach climate-related issues in a pragmatic way: which policies will make most sense to Americans and help us win at the ballot?

The Democrats, by contrast, treat the green agenda as a sacred cause that must be protected from the destructive short-termism inherent in a democracy. Biden’s carbon-reduction targets have therefore been placed far and above the concerns of ordinary voters.

We’ve seen something similar with Britain’s Tories Teresa May net zero agenda, Canada under Justin Trudeau, and various other G20 countries under various other administrations Left and Right.

Last week, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency finalised regulations that will force coal power stations to capture almost all their emissions or face closure. The Democrats claim this measure would be as beneficial for the planet as taking 328 million cars off the roads.

But closing power stations means cutting jobs and making energy more expensive – and in still heavy coal-burning states such as, say, Pennsylvania, that means losing a large number of votes. Pennsylvania is a crucial swing state, which could determine the 2024 presidential contest, so the EPA’s move seems an electoral gift to Trump, who promises to undo regulations on coal-burning and “green-light the construction of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of brand-new, beautiful power plants that actually work.”

Why would the Democrats do something that seems so self-defeating? The main reason is that, for progressives within their fold, belief in climate activism is an article of faith that is much more important than democracy. That’s why Democrats talk about “locking in” Biden’s green policies by introducing legal protections and future-proof guarantees – which the Republican majority in Congress, or a future Republican president, will struggle to undo.

We’ve seen this play out before: in Trump’s first term, he reversed hundreds of Obama-era green policies and pulled America out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. But Trump’s opponents managed to block or slow him down through the courts – and Biden, immediately upon entering the White House in 2021, redoubled America’s vast commitments to carbon reductions.  

It’s thought that, next time, Trump’s energy plans will be better prepared. He will grant and expand drilling licences, make life much easier for fossil-fuel producers and transporters, and cut out the focus on renewable energies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in order to stop the huge government bungs to electric vehicle manufacturers.  

Which might explain why White House officials are now discussing whether or not President Biden should announce a ‘climate emergency’, similar to the Covid ‘emergency’. This move would grant him urgent federal powers to introduce a whole slew of eco-measures that would normally be slowed down, weakened, or blocked in Congress. It would also throw up more bureaucratic obstacles to any Trumpist bonfire of the green tape in 2025.

It’s worth pointing out that the Democrats, who spend so much time warning that Trump will be a dictator in his second term, are more than willing to employ authoritarian tactics when it comes to advancing their ideas.

Of course, it’s not all pure eco-zealotry. There is a strong element of political calculation. Polls suggest that Biden, who promised to be a ‘bridge’ to the next generation in 2020, has lost vast amounts of support among the young over the course of his first term. Team Biden calculate that, by painting their opponents as planet-wreckers,  their campaign might be able to win back large numbers of those disgruntled voters.

Huge numbers of young Americans have been raised to believe – or taught to know, as they would see it – that the climate apocalypse is coming very soon. They are therefore highly vulnerable to and easily mobilised by a campaign message that says: vote Biden or the Bad Orange Man will destroy the planet.

Biden’s problem might be that the young have become rather too convinced that the end is nigh – and cynical about the power of democracy to stop it. Many gloomy Gen Zers think that supporting the more green candidate is so futile they might not bother voting at all. In order to reassure them that the Democratic party is willing to do what it takes, the Biden administration feels it has to adopt ever more extreme-green policies that alienate the rest of the electorate. And so the green agenda might turn into another win for the Bad Orange Man.