Biden’s Climate Plan Won’t Prevent Catastrophe – Dayton Martindale

While Biden’s latest climate plan is much improved, it’s far short of what scientists say is needed. Biden’s aggressive rhetoric will not help build a joint climate plan with China, a crucial step for any global plan to succeed. Dayton Martindale joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay, welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. 

The Democratic Party has released a series of documents on its plans for dealing with the climate crisis, that is if Biden wins the presidential election in November. Biden has been applauded as the coming climate change president with a Rooseveltian vision for the future, and he’s been slammed for refusing to confront the fossil fuel industry and an over-reliance on unproven carbon capture technology. As things stand now and assuming there are elections in November, which I think is still somewhat of a question mark, Biden will be the next president. Will his climate policies live up to the urgency of the threat?

Now joining us from Chicago is Dayton Martindale. He’s a freelance writer on science and politics, was previously associate editor at, In These Times. Thanks for joining us Dayton.

Dayton Martindale

Hi, thanks for having me. 

Paul Jay

So, Dayton, two or three different documents have surfaced over the last few weeks. What are they and what is the Biden administration assuming, there’s going to be one, what’s it promising to do about climate? 

Dayton Martindale

Yes, it’s kind of difficult to keep track of all of it. About a month ago, there were two that came out, one from a DNC kind of internal council on climate change and a much longer one from the House Democrats who had a select committee on climate change suggesting a congressional approach to the issue. But we get a better sense of Biden’s specific priorities in three that have all come out in the last week or two, which which have a lot of overlap.

So the first one is what came out of the Unity Task Force on Climate Change. So that’s some of the people in the Bernie Wing and some people in the Biden wing got together to release platform recommendations on pretty much every major issue.

Paul Jay

And that’s co chaired by John Kerry and AOC.

Dayton Martindale

That’s correct, yeah. So that came out, and they came out with their recommendations, like I said, maybe two weeks ago. And then last week, simultaneously Biden released a new climate plan for clean energy on his website, as well as a draft of the Democratic platform that was obtained and published by Politico. So kind of in those two most recent documents, which are both heavily shaped by that Unity Task Force, you see kind of where Biden in the Democratic Party are right now. And like all climate change things it could be a lot worse, it could be a lot better. I definitely marked some improvements from where Biden was about a year ago. So on his website, he’s now calling for, I believe, two trillion in investment over his first term, which is up from– a year ago when he was saying not even that much over 10 years. And it has a lot more specific timelines and goals than his previous plans did.

For example, it wants the electricity sector to be carbon pollution free by 2035. Every city with 100,000 or more people has a robust zero emissions transit system within a decade. There are specific numbers of homes to be weatherized and made efficient and build new homes. And there’s also a heavy emphasis on manufacturing union jobs, rebuilding infrastructure and rebuilding the auto industry, and innovation and also a big research into new technologies that both could be very useful in de-carbonising the economy, but some of them aren’t necessarily guaranteed to be feasible on a short timescale.

Paul Jay

So did any of this surprise you in the sense that you’ve been fairly critical of Democratic Party climate policy up until now? So is there anything in here that surprised you in a positive way? And then let’s get into what’s missing.

Dayton Martindale

Yeah, I’ll say one slight surprise is just that Biden was willing to move at all from where he was a year ago. He’s obviously been stubborn in defending a vision of which politics is very different from where a lot of the Democratic Party should be at right now. And so I guess there’s some positive just in the fact that he’s changed his tune a bit and willing to enhance at least some of his some of his previous elements, make them more ambitious. That said, can we believe that he will carry out everything he’s now promising? Not necessarily, but at least gives us a tool to put his foot to the fire if and when he’s in office. And the other thing I want to point out as something I was happy to see is what he called a Civilian Climate Corps that models off the Civilian Conservation Corps or the New Deal, basically putting young people to work, rebuilding, restoring ecosystems, planting trees, doing forest management and doing lots of habitat restoration and work to both protect the climate and the environment is an idea that has been bouncing around for a while. Jay Inslee’s campaign put forward a version of it, and it’s exciting to see that kind of message of climate and jobs and federally funded jobs from Biden. I’d like to see more on how many, how are they going to be paid? Are they going to be sort of given a living wage or is it going to be more like AmeriCorps style, some exploitative? But I’m very excited to see that.

Paul Jay

Now, if you look at what scientists are saying, is the window for effective action and really dramatic effective action is being called for, we’re already going to hit the 1.5, I think that’s a given 1.5 degrees Celsius of global temperature warming, post-industrial compared to pre-industrial. And we’re more than likely on the way to two degrees. Is there anything in what’s been proposed that actually stops us from getting to two degrees? Because, I mean, while this all sounds good in certainly in relationship to Trump, because at least there is a climate policy and it’s as you say, it’s more robust than what Biden has proposed even when he was campaigning during the primaries. From what I can make out, it’s nowhere near what’s actually needed to prevent, heading towards catastrophe. And there still seems to be a lack of a sense of urgency. I wonder I don’t want to rain on this parade because like you say, it is something, but that being said, if it doesn’t deal with the urgency of a looming catastrophe, then it seems that, in fact, it’s kind of denying the science in a way. And is this just kind of a sop to get the left wing of the party on board? Because even if everything in this plan actually is executed on, let’s say, the Democrats control the Senate, the House, and they win the White House and so on, if they do all of this, we still hit and pass two degrees warming, don’t we?

Dayton Martindale

Yes, the whole world needs to be zero emissions by 2050. And then after that, we need to be negative net emissions, ideally through forests and wetlands and other other natural carbon sinks, and Biden’s goal is still for the US net zero emissions and that 2050 goal. I think what is widely agreed upon is that the wealthier countries, both because of their historical responsibility and because they are wealthy, can and should aim for a much faster timeline than 2050, because if the US still is only barely getting to net zero by 2050, it’s unlikely the whole planet will be there. So all that is to say the sort of top line goal of the plan is very insufficient. You know, a lot of people in the climate movement want to see goals like 2040, 2035, 2030, for the US and Biden still saying 2050, so that’s one thing. 

Another is a lot of his proposals sound kind of ambitious. For example, build one and a half million sustainable homes in his first term. The wording is sort of ambiguous and suggests that at least most of these, perhaps all, are supposed to be affordable homes. That kind of sounds like a lot, but if you look at the Bernie Sanders Green New Deal proposal, for instance, that was more than seven million, affordable, sustainable public housing units were supposed to be built, People’s Action has called for 11 million. So it’s a pattern of looking at the crisis from Joe Biden and saying, “I’ll do some of that”. And the problem with climate change is that every degree, every tenth of a degree counts. So, if you do half of it, it’s not that the outcome is half as good, oftentimes it’s less than half as good because things get worse as you get warmer and warmer. Not only is there a risk of certain tipping points being reached, for example, as the Arctic permafrost starts melting and releasing methane, that could greatly accelerate warming, but even then, three degrees is so much worse than two degrees, four degrees is so much worse than three degrees.

Paul Jay

Well, it’s so much worse that most of the planet is not inhabitable.

Dayton Martindale

 It begins looking apocalyptic fairly quickly. And so what you get from the Biden proposal and similarly in the draft platform that came out last week is an unwillingness to confront the status quo. He’s fine with investing in all these things, and even then, it’s generally a lot of either public/private partnerships or incentivizing tax incentives for private investment. And so he’s very hesitant to just kind of say, have the government do it or have the public sector just do it, whether that be building publicly owned solar and wind power or jobs guarantee, he kind of wants the private sector to be doing it. But even then, he’s OK investing in renewables, but he’s not with OK confronting the fossil fuel industry or for that matter, the aviation industry or the beef industry. And in general, he’s kind of relying on technology to get us out of having to say no to some of these corporations. And so he said last week, fracking jobs are not on the chopping block. He’s not wanting to ramp down fossil fuel extraction. So I think what we’re going to get is maybe a drastic increase in renewable energy, but we’re also still going to be extracting oil and gas and either using that at home or export it.

Paul Jay

And then two things. One is, you’re not being honest with the workers that work in those sectors if you’re serious, although he doesn’t want to do anything about those sectors, but not only should he, he should have a real plan for how you transition workers from those sectors to renewable sectors. I mean, Robert Pollin, the Economist, has done quite a bit of work on this and has a real plan on how you subsidize workers during the transition. You don’t let them take the fall for it. But by not being honest about all of this, either he’s not going to have a plan that’s effective or he’s going to be susceptible to Trump saying to those workers, he really is going to come after you, if he’s really going to hit the targets he’s talking about.

And then the other part of this is, he really is relying on carbon capture to hit these numbers. And if I understand it correctly, quite an unproven technology. I mean, I don’t have anything against investment to see if it could be proven, but you can’t plan based on it when it’s not yet proven. 

Dayton Martindale

Exactly. I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s really the linchpin upon which his whole sort of approach rests, is that technology is going to solve the carbon capture problem and we’re going to be able to both directly take carbon dioxide out of the air and to scrub it from existing oil and gas or gas and coal power plants. So like you said, there’s some debate on the left over. Whether it’s worth researching. I lean toward your end of, at the very least, look into it.

But there’s just no evidence so far that it can be scaled up to the level it would need to be, to be really impactful on the timeline that’s needed. And so to “bet the farm” on this technology coming through is, like you said, not only incredibly dangerous, but also kind of a lie to people who work in those industries. What’s frustrating to me especially is that Biden and his team often sort of frame his approach as more worker friendly than, say, the Green New Deal resolution. And, it’s true, he does have some stuff around, like protecting the right to organize and other elements, some benefits for co-workers. But he sort of frames himself as worker friendly because he’s promising not to get rid of the gas industry, or at least he’s been kind of silent about it. But what’s actually worker friendly is what’s in the Green New Deal of actually providing these people with training and with jobs that are actually good jobs that are at the same level of payment or more than the previous ones. And you can do this through a federal jobs guarantee. If you go through Biden’s plan or anyone’s plan, it’s clear that there’s more than enough work to go around. So it’s kind of a slight of hand that he’s doing, pretending to be worker friendly through. Like you said, either he’ll end up looking like a liar or even worse, his vision will come true, and we’ll just still have natural gas in four years, eight years, 12 years, that will continue burning the planet.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I think there’s first of all, in terms of the promise of being for union organizing, I remember when he ran the first election with Barack Obama and they promised the Employee Free Choice Act and they absolutely promised up and down they would pass that in the first term. And that was going to make it easier to organize unions, and then they never even brought it to the floor at all as a piece of legislation, so I don’t know how much to believe about that.

More importantly to me, if you cut to the heart of this, two trillion dollars of investment is is going to be an amazing opportunity to make money for the financialization of this plan for the various sectors are going to make money out of building the infrastructure. It’s not going to be done through, you know, publicly owned companies, 99% of it will probably go through privately owned companies. So it’s going to be a ton of money made on this. Now, not to say it isn’t good that it gets accomplished. And frankly, if in fact, it was the effective plan that would deal with the climate catastrophe, then I don’t care how much money they make on it, let them make money. We can’t be, like, moralistic about this because the urgency is such. But if you only do the one that half of it and you don’t phase out fossil fuel and you don’t deal fully with the implications that Carbon capture is unlikely to be effective, if you don’t really build the plan based on not having carbon capture, then all you’re really doing is another infrastructure plan that may stimulate, make some jobs and so on and so on, but we’re going to pass two degrees, we’re going to pass three degrees and it just isn’t going to matter.

Dayton Martindale

Exactly. I think on Biden’s website, it includes the element that he’s going to retrofit and weatherize four million buildings and two million homes in his first term and create one million jobs. And what is clarified in the draft platform. that came out last week, that Politico obtained, is similar wording, except to say it’s going to incentivize tens of billions in private sector investment to do these things. So, again, it’s not Biden wants to do these things directly, he wants to give businesses the chance to do that. I think that’s a risk that in a capitalist system, are these corporations really going to be prioritizing what the most effective way to weatherize a home? What’s the most effective way to green the grid or the cheapest way? And so I think you might get knock-off effects, that these transitions won’t necessarily be done in a way that’s good for not only workers, in their working capacity, but in their capacity, just as people living there might be local pollution or whatnot. And yeah, I think Biden still kind of believes in this sort of competitive framework. It’s very clear when he talks about the auto industry where he says he wants to win the twenty first century with a million new auto industry jobs and really build up the US auto industry with electric vehicles and electric vehicle infrastructure and his frame is, “we’re going to take on China to do this”, right, “China is leading the way in EVs and that’s not right, this needs to be American technology, American made technology that we can export abroad because only Americans can do this technology correctly”. And that’s kind of Biden being more or less like, you know, if China has every technology, why can’t we use that?

Paul Jay

I’d go further. And I think the environmental movement needs to really get their head around what I’m about to say now, I’m sure there are some that have, but let me talk to the ones that haven’t. If the United States and China do not cooperate on dealing with climate and the pandemic, and this pandemic isn’t going away any time soon, if there isn’t a US-China real cooperation we’re done for, there is no way there’s going to be an effective climate policy without China and the United States radically taking action. And there’s no way China is going to if the US doesn’t and the US won’t if China doesn’t. So that means they have to have some kind of real agreement that they’re going to do it.

And not only is Trump, of course, trying to create as much provocation with China as he possibly can, Biden’s trying to out China and bash Trump. I mean, they had an ad a few weeks ago where Biden was going after Trump for being weak on China, and you can just see this theme unfolding during the campaign. In what position will Biden be to create this kind of necessary collaboration after a whole election campaign about he’s more militant anti-China than Trump is?

Dayton Martindale

Yeah, I couldn’t believe that ad when it came out. It really, I think, is a tension in the party potentially because I was reading the draft platform and there’s a lot of language around not wanting to start a new Cold War with with China, but also sort of wanting to be stricter with it than Trump has been. And so it’s like, you know, they want to pay lip service to the fact that we’re not trying to be provocative, we’re just provoking them. And then if you look at the new climate plan from Biden didn’t get a lot into international stuff, it was more focused on domestic manufacturing. But if you look at the one he released last year, international diplomacy was a big element of it. And the whole tone was China is a bad actor, China is emitting too much, and the U.S. needs to take leadership to show them who’s boss. And it’s like, yeah, China is a big emitter.

One is , is the U.S. scolding really going to help that? Is that something that they’re going to be receptive to, no, like you said, we need to cooperate internationally. And two it’s just so embarrassing because it’s not like the US has a leg to stand on, we’ve emitted more, obviously historically, than China has, we still emit more capita, a lot of China’s emissions are manufacturing consumer goods for the U.S. and Europe. So it’s not like the US is good and China is bad, like Biden tries to frame it. I n fact, right now both are not great and need to work together to both be better. And that’s just not the approach Biden has for these things.

I want to say one more thing as well about the auto industry, because that’s where China comes up in the newest policy from Biden. And he does talk about transition to his credit, but I think a little too much emphasis can be put on building electric vehicles when there are so many other social and environmental problems linked to the private automobile in terms of sprawl, in terms of air pollution, just people sitting in traffic all the time and also materials for the cars. For batteries for electric cars, that stuff has to be mined and often it’s in Latin America or elsewhere where there aren’t necessarily strict protections. And Biden does kind of pay lip service in the plan to having supply chains that are U.S. based, but I also don’t know if we want to be opening tons of new mines in the US either. I think the general idea would be to use less of these materials and switch much more aggressive to transit and other shared transportation methods, rather than just replacing every oil powered car with an electric car is not really an environmental issue of the future.

Paul Jay

BlackRock, the big financial asset management company, which I keep blabbing on about if people that follow theAnalysis know the Black Rock and State Street and Vangaurd control more wealth than the GDP of China. BlackRock, in a report recently said that the rivalry between the U.S. and China is going to heat up, intensify, countries are going to have to choose which side they’re on.

And the underlying problem here is that the fundamental dynamics of capitalism in the United States and capitalism in China, these big powers are bumping into each other. And the fact that China has supplanted the United States as the top trading partner for many countries in Latin America and Africa and certainly in Asia, and the elites of the United States simply don’t want to accept that they’re in a bipolar world. And if this was normal times, I guess this rivalry would carry on for a while and hopefully there wouldn’t be a war and they would blow us all up, which cannot be ruled out, given the insanity, frankly, on both sides, although the Americans certainly are more insane on these issues than anyone. And the US has way more nuclear weapons than China does. China, so far at least, has been relatively modest in the numbers of weapons they’ve created.

But all that being said, what if they don’t transcend the normal inclination of their capitalist systems and deal with climate as if there is an invasion coming from outer space and the countries of the world had better get together or they’re going to get annihilated by this alien invasion force. You know, in science fiction films, we’ve seen that where all of a sudden all these countries get together at the U.N. and they all agree, “Oh, we’re going to fight together”, and so on. We practically need something like that, which really means in the US political context, there needs to be a mass movement of enormous scale that demands of this Biden administration far, far deeper reforms and changes about how power is wielded and focused on climate. I don’t think it means, all of a sudden you have to have utopian socialism or we’re done, but we really do, if this administration doesn’t stand up to finance because it’s finance that owns fossil fuel. I mean, you look at who owns the major fossil fuel companies, it’s BlackRocks and Vanguards and all the investors involved in those funds and other parts of finance. They’re controlling the financial institutional investors of the majority control of all the big fossil fuel companies.

And unfortunately, right now, I don’t I don’t see that movement in the United States, Canada or really anywhere else. But I’m hoping this pandemic moment is creating the conditions that are kind of a dose of reality, because honestly, as much as this Biden climate plan, you know, is better, it’s kind of “La La Land”. It makes you feel like, oh, yeah, look, finally, they’re going to do something at least the problem is, something at least is still a catastrophe.

Dayton Martindale

There’s a nerdy part of my brain that likes reading through all these plans, and I read through all the primaries reading them now. And also the plans don’t mean anything without a movement to back them up. We’ve said that the Biden plan is wildly insufficient. What’s even worse is that not even this could pass is if Republicans keep the Senate or even if they don’t and we don’t abolish the filibuster. And so I think-

Paul Jay

-Or if a right wing of the Democratic Party blocks it in the Senate, which we’ve seen happen over and over on issues like this.

Dayton Martindale

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think we’re in kind of this limbo where the plan is simultaneously not near enough and more than can be passed in the current political climate. And so, I mean, I think there is a lot of good work being done to change the political climate. 

One of the founders of Sunrise [Movement] was in that Unity Task Force commission with John Kerry and AOC, and hopefully we see some movement fingerprints in how the plans are changing. She has also said that she’s disappointed that it doesn’t confront fossil fuels directly.

So, yeah, I think whatever’s in the plans, we need more, you know, almost, no matter how good it gets in this one, isn’t that good. But even, even if it were Bernie’s plan, we need more. I think hopefully with this moment of mass protests and dissatisfaction with every government from the local to federal, that we will see something new arise. And potentially it’s on U.S. movements also to, reach out and collaborate with Chinese environmental and labor movements, for instance. But I think we have a lot of work to do.

One thing I’ve been thinking is sort of as disruptive as this moment feels with with COVID-19 and with kind of the largest by number of protesters movement in history with the Black Lives Matter uprisings, I kind of both worry and hope that the next 10, 20, 30 years are all going to kind of feel like this in some ways where we can’t, hopefully we won’t be stuck inside all the time, hopefully we won’t have a pandemic, but we’ll have natural disasters rising in number and we’ll be needing to push for more and more at all levels, from the governmental to community groups in climate response and environmental response and for other social justice issues. So I think kind of this unsteady moment feels unsteady and might just be what the rest of our lives look like for better in some ways and for worse than others.

Paul Jay

I’m quite sure you’re right. I also want to add, for people that haven’t heard me go on about this before, I’m not in any way suggesting that there’s some equivalency between Biden and Trump. Trump is an out and out fascist and needs to be defeated. There’s no conversation at all about a climate policy as long as Trump and his allies are in power. But that being said, there shouldn’t be any illusions about what Biden represents a different section of capital. I think it is better that that section of capital is in power, versus the more fascistic section. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about it and the need for the movement that’s in the streets now to get bigger and broader and hopefully more able to get out of the house and to take on the Biden administration, because it’s natural inclination, no matter if Joe Biden’s a perfectly nice guy, which so many people seem to think he is, let’s take their word for it that he is. But his inclination in his whole career is to go where the political winds take him. And the biggest political wind comes from Wall Street. And there’s no reason why he won’t keep leaning that way unless–one has to really applaud the progressives that have run for office, and some have won, some haven’t, but I think it’s a really positive development.

And the movement in the streets has to take on a really conscious attitude, not just on the question of police reform, which I think is very important, but take on this issue of climate. And all these issues are so interconnected and the siloing of issues really has to take a backseat to a broad, I would hope, some kind of popular front of some kind where it all comes together and it’s able to exert real pressure on what I assume will be a Biden administration. Otherwise, we’re going to see a repeat of the Obama administration. That’s a little different because of the pandemic moment, but not enough different to deal with the nature of the threat.

Dayton Martindale

Yeah, I think one hopeful thought might be that a lot of these, “Defund Police”, movements and frankly, even some of the outrages over the virus are being rightly directed at Democratic mayors and governors in some cities and states. Where I am in Chicago, Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot ran as a progressive and then has refused to budge on defunding the police or any other repressive demands. So hopefully I think people are getting more used to the idea that electing Democrats itself isn’t the answer, and electing Democrats itself doesn’t get us where we need to go. And, you know, they need just as much as anyone else to have enormous pressure on them, enormous mass movements, and even then, let’s hope we can push them as far as we need on the time scale we need.

Paul Jay

All right, Thanks for joining us. 

Dayton Martindale

Thank you. 

Paul Jay

And thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.news podcast.

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