Biden’s battle against climate change is working – it’s a shame American voters just don’t care

The president’s green economic plan is working, but that doesn’t mean it will help him at election time, writes David Callaway

How Biden responds to this challenge will define his presidency and his legacy (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

President Biden was on tour in the mid and western US last week, touting his economic plan to revive the middle class after decades of rising inequality, and coining a new phrase for what he hopes will be an emerging economic age: Bidenomics. 

Left almost unsaid in his speeches in Chicago and elsewhere was that one of the key goals of his infrastructure and technology push is to combat climate change. That’s the way his campaign team wants it. 

There’s no doubt that the thrust of Bidenomics in the president’s first term, one of the most ambitious economic programs since the New Deal, has been to create renewable energy jobs and at the same time fight the inevitable march of global warming. But even with all its successes, and the massive investment that followed his signature Inflation Reduction Act last year, climate change remains a deeply unpopular political issue. 

Despite this summer’s extreme heat waves in Texas and the American South, and Canadian wildfire smoke darkening skies and making people sick from the Midwest to New York City, climate change remains a distant priority to most Americans. Issues such as abortion, gun control, taxes, inflation, and yes, even the advanced age of both Biden and former president Donald Trump, tend to be bigger concerns for many voters. 

A recent Pew Research poll found that almost three-quarters of Americans don’t see climate change as a priority, and for most of them it’s not even in the top 10 of their lists of issues. 

There have been lots of headlines in recent weeks that because of this summer’s smoke and heat, which clearly illustrate that global warming problems in other parts of the world can and do affect living conditions where most Americans live, attitudes might be changing. But they aren’t changing fast enough to make an impact in next year’s election.

Polls aside, most of us will say that we support efforts to fight global warming, as long as they don’t require any sacrifices from us, like giving up our gas stoves or pizza ovens, or our SUVs. Politicians sense this and take it to the extreme, saying a transition to renewable energy will rob us of our freedoms and cost us tens of thousands of high-paying fossil fuel jobs, many of them in Republican-led states. 

The facts speak otherwise. The Department of Energy said last week that clean energy grew by 3.9 per cent in 2022, to more than 460,000 workers in the wind, solar and battery storage sectors and more than any other industrial group. 

Biden, armed with science but trapped by public opinion, faces a challenge of growing the economy by supporting renewable energy without hitting any political tripwires, such as mentioning environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices, or calling on oil companies to cut back production. 

A classic example of the tightrope he walks occurred last week when his push to transform the US auto and truck fleet to electric vehicles ran headlong into the United Auto Workers union, traditionally one of the Democrats’ biggest supporters. The UAW came out against the idea of electric vehicles, and has so far withheld support for Biden’s candidacy. 

How Biden responds to this challenge will define his presidency and his legacy. But only if he wins re-election. Otherwise, he will be remembered as a one-termer who got in only as a protest vote against Trump. 

Talking up his successes at the local level is one way to do that. Another way is to position Bidenomics as a strategy to protect US interests from China, which is also racing to transition its economy, and is an enduring political foil in US political campaigns.  

In its mid-year global investment report this week, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said the economic transition “toward a decarbonized economy will involve a massive reallocation of capital as energy systems are rewired.”

Biden and his economic team understand there is a historic opportunity emerging for the US to grab this capital and re-ignite its sluggish economy in a way that can help the world adapt to a growing existential threat. He just needs to find a better way to explain it.