Pirate's Cove

This really isn’t about the climate, is it

Biden’s Climate Plan Puts Inequality and Jobs on Par With CO2

When Joe Biden released his climate plan last week, the Democratic candidate for president emphasized one overarching goal—and it wasn’t the reduction of greenhouse gases. Instead, he unequivocally linked broad climate action to employment.“When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax,’” Biden said in a speech unveiling the plan. “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs.’” His proposal aims to create 1 million openings in the auto sector, in part by investing in electric vehicle charging, plus another 1 million positions retrofitting homes for energy efficiency and weather resilience. The word “union” appears 32 times in the plan’s 15-page outline.

A campaign promise is not policy, but the rhetoric and substance of Biden’s proposal represented two noteworthy developments. As a candidate, he’s signaling a bigger commitment to addressing climate change through policies targeting racial and economic inequality. At the same time, Biden is moving away from the discussion of climate change as a purely scientific problem.

That’s good, because it’s not about science. And this is the same guy who was in charge of the failed 2009 Stimulus, which, yes, did create a whole bunch of jobs, but most were temporary and disappeared after the money dried up, while others were lost when the “green” companies went belly up. Still others which were permanent were teachers (surprise). It cost somewhere between $540k to $4.1 million per job.

Biden isn’t the first American politician to link climate and jobs—in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama pledged to create 5 million “green collar” jobs in the next decade—but the extent of the emphasis on employment is refreshing for many in the climate justice movement. “One of the critiques of the way many White organizations discuss climate change is that it is all technocratic, not something that the public can readily grasp or feel it’s relevant,” says Peggy Shepard, executive director of We Act, a Harlem-based non-profit environmental justice advocacy group, who said she was one of the many consulted by the Biden team. That approach to climate, as she sees it, can lead to narrow questions: “What can the average person do about reducing carbon by a certain percentage by a certain year?”

Yet, it was nowhere close to that number. How many of Joe’s jobs will be government jobs?

By emphasizing policies that address racial and economic equity, Biden’s plan takes an approach to climate that goes beyond market-driven solutions. There’s no mention of a carbon tax, for instance. And while the proposal does emphasize business-oriented priorities such as putting the country in a position to manufacture nascent technologies such as carbon capture and green hydrogen, a related social justice-centric plan also outlines the creation of a White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and aims to “target resources in a way that is consistent with prioritization of environmental and climate justice.” (Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority shareholder of Bloomberg News parent company Bloomberg LP, wrote an editorial in support of the plan.)

So, this is really all just left wing mule fritters, wrapping their Modern Socialist policies in the banner of ‘climate change’.