How Biden channelled his MAGA spirit His climate policy put America first

For economists and other professional-class proponents, putting a price on carbon — or internalising the externalities of climate pollution — was “smart policy” and offered an elegant technocratic fix. These advocates never much cared that there was no popular base for increasing the cost of energy. Even worse, the policy was easily ridiculed by the Right, whose entire argument was that climate change was a liberal plot to destroy jobs and make life more expensive. Such policies have been roundly rejected in the ballot box and in the streets. By contrast, Biden’s climate policy was not framed around a carbon price or tax but rather in terms of investment in the energy and other infrastructure required to decarbonise. Instead of making fossil fuels more expensive, the goal was to use “industrial policy” to make clean energy cheap.

Not only did this approach signal a break with neoliberal economists — it also split from a stale wing of the environmental NGO and activist community who saw climate politics only in terms of opposition to fossil fuels. The modus operandi of these advocates was blockading pipelines and calling for bans on fracking, fossil fuel-burning cars and boilers. But opposing energy that nearly everyone still relies on in their everyday lives is bad politics. Indeed, a large majority of Americans (69%) claim they are not “ready to phase out the use of oil, coal and natural gas completely”.

Finally, analysts are waking up to the fact that decarbonisation is much more about building entirely new infrastructure — such as electricity generation units, transmission lines and public transit — than banning fossil fuels. As such, in the suite of legislation passed between 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration centred what the Financial Times’s Rana Foroohar calls a project of “re-industrialisation” or what Ezra Klein calls a “liberalism that builds”.

This impressive approach to climate policy managed at last to partially overcome the antagonism between environmentalists and labour unions. As Foroohar put it, Biden’s industrial policy is “most beneficial for groups such as the steelworkers, electrical workers and other industrial unions”. A winning climate coalition must include the very workers we need to build a green future, and Biden’s policies encouragingly pointed in this direction.

The Biden administration also departed significantly from the green orthodoxy that decarbonisation is simply a matter of moving to “renewables”, most notably solar and wind farms. Labour unions are highly sceptical of such an approach — not least because, in the words of one union official, solar and wind installation jobs are “a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organise”. Rather, the Biden administration took an “all of the above” strategy that included a commitment to some risky technologies such as nuclear power, carbon removal and advanced geothermal. A notable example is the creation of a “Hydrogen Hub” in Philadelphia, which will establish a foothold for labour unions in a landscape marked by deindustrialisation, poverty and decline.

However, despite all Biden’s achievements, Trump is still predicted to win the election, and on the climate front, emissions continue to increase. While Biden clearly hoped that his investment programme would help to build a popular coalition able to stave off Trumpism, the reality is most Americans have little idea it exists. According to a poll by Heatmap news, “nearly 60% of voters said they knew little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act”, and other surveys suggest the same.

Part of the problem is that Bidenomics has all the marks of BlackRock — not of Biden, as it has centred private capital over muscular public sector ownership or planning. Its approach had two pillars: first, “the plans” from Elizabeth Warren’s progressive campaign, and second, Wall Street, led by BlackRock alumnus Brian Deese, who saw the opportunity to align the state with efforts to paint finance green through “Environment, Social, Governance” (ESG) investing.

This approach mobilises what Daniela Gaborb calls the “derisking state”, aimed at using government largesse to entice investments from the private sector in the form of lucrative tax credits. This means that when these investments hit the ground — and let’s be clear, most have not — they don’t plant the flag of the Biden administration in left-behind communities. Instead, they touch down under names such as Micron, Hyundai and NextEra.

Contrast this with the New Deal Works Progress Administration or the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built massive, socially useful infrastructure projects emblazoned with Franklin Roosevelt’s visage. Or the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired millions of unemployed young people to plant trees and repair the soil. The message was clear: here was a government that would directly solve public problems. In comparison, Biden’s rebrand of the Civilian Climate Corps is hiring mere tens of thousands of people and nearly all the work has been outsourced to non-profits rather than being undertaken by a remade public sector.

That said, the progressivism of Biden’s economic policy cannot be denied, given its commitment to prevailing wage standards, incentivising investment in fossil fuel communities, and, above all, full employment. Yet this was always a top-down affair, and there is scant evidence that these policies resonate much with ordinary people. With inflation still rocking household budgets and eating into modest wage gains, progressive Biden-partisans are digging in their heels: “But look at the numbers! The economy is so good!” For America’s working-class majority, however, the economy does not feel so good — and that is all that matters in the election.

And so we encounter a situation where a betting person would predict Trump winning and perhaps the Republicans winning both houses of Congress. If this happens, many of Biden’s industrial and infrastructure investments might reach fruition in the first Trump term. Climate advocates are most worried about the likelihood of Trump reversing much of Biden’s climate progress — particularly around culture-war flashpoints such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. But perhaps the more menacing scenario is that Trump is able to take credit for the Biden agenda. Some might even say it was originally the Trump agenda: reviving manufacturing and investing in American infrastructure. Imagine Trump rallies at factories opening their doors with thousands of new industrial jobs, or Trump affixing his MAGA brand to new visible investments in roads, bridges and electric grid infrastructure, just as he printed his name on millions of Covid relief cheques in 2020.

A second Trump term, unlike the first, might actually credibly enact the post-neoliberal Trumpist agenda — all thanks to Biden, who lacked a political strategy to assure it for the Democratic Party. Given that we are likely in a period of political “realignment”, with echoes of the Seventies’ swing towards the Republicans, the risk is that such an outcome could keep Right-wing populists in power for decades to come.

Of course, Trump can still lose. If he does, Democrats should remember that progressive policy alone cannot automatically generate the mass working-class politics needed to create a lasting majority in the 21st century. Rather than giving Wall Street or Donald Trump all the credit for radical Democratic infrastructure projects, Kamala Harris might be wise to plaster her face all over them.

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Matt Huber is Professor of Geography at Syracuse University and the author of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet.

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