The Climate Case for Joe Biden as the Best President in Our Lifetimes
There has been a lot of negative press coverage of President Biden lately. Some of this is inevitable, following a less-than-impressive debate performance. Our talking heads in the media are behaving as they too often do at times like this, like jackals who smell blood. As a former journalist, I find the superficiality of much of our national media to be an embarrassment to the profession.
I don’t give a damn about the debates. As someone who has been researching, analyzing, and writing about energy, climate, and related federal policy issues for over a decade, I don’t learn anything new regarding the essential issues from these televised spectacles. I have been watching the Biden Administration’s actions closely for the past four years, just as I monitored the actions of the Trump Administration, and the Obama Administration before that.
And what I’ve learned has led me to the conclusion that Joe Biden is easily the best president that we’ve had since FDR. In this essay, I’ll explain why, by detailing what I think are his most important policies in the realm of climate, energy, and related industrial policy.
Priorities
In any assessment — including making big claims about the performance of a president — you have to decide first what you are measuring.
I’m going to make this easy for you. There is nothing more important in the early 21st century than mitigating the climate crisis. Period. While we face a number of other serious issues in America today, there are basically no other issues which pose the existential threat to humanity that the climate crisis does.
The only other issue even close in magnitude is the danger of nuclear war. But while the future use of nuclear weapons is an if, the climate crisis is a certainty. We are already beginning to suffer the effects of a loss of equilibrium in the global climate system, which includes catastrophic floods, droughts, more intense wildfires and storms, and the most predictable effect: heatwaves. It’s only going to get worse from here, but we are still very much able to influence how much worse it gets, and to buy ourselves time to mitigate and adapt to some of the more serious outcomes.
So don’t get me wrong — Joe Biden has done a number of other good and useful things as president. Topping my list is enabling the best economy in recent history (housing crisis aside), cancelling student loan debt, and vigorously supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression. But these considerations, as important as they are, are ultimately minor compared to his work to mitigate the greatest threat to our global health, wellbeing, security, and civilization.
Also, I must note that my assessment of Biden’s accomplishments is framed by two tenets of my analysis. First, I care more about tangible actions to prevent the worst effects of the climate crisis by reducing emissions in specific sectors than grandiose statements, goals or fear-reaching but ambiguous policies. Second, we will successfully get off fossil fuels not by cutting off fossil fuel supplies, but by transitioning end-uses to clean energy. Therefore, I pay a lot more attention to policies that transition our economy to clean energy than pyrrhic, empty gestures.
Progress, Part 1: IRA Deployment Policies
The charge has been leveled that the Biden Administration has struggled to communicate the work that it has done on climate. This is a fair critique, despite the work of capable communicators such as Jennifer Granholm and Jigar Shah at the U.S. Department of Energy.
But this is also not an easy task. Energy and climate policy is inherently wonky stuff, and some of the most important actions don’t exactly grab the headlines.
It doesn’t help matters that Biden’s biggest action on the climate front came in the form of a bill with a name that exemplified what writers call burying the lede — the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (shortened to IRA, it also manages to have an acronym with problematic associations, but I digress).
Whether or not it reduced inflation is anyone’s guess, but it’s also irrelevant. The IRA was not only Biden’s biggest move, but easily the most ambitious set of climate policies to ever pass the U.S. Congress. It was a bill that deftly combined industrial policy with climate and energy policy, by incentivizing both U.S. deployment and manufacturing of clean energy.
On the deployment side, extensions of the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) and the Production Tax Credit (PTC) through at least 2032 are continuing to stimulate the transition to solar and wind. This is a breath of fresh air (pun intended) for a U.S. wind industry that has been starting and stopping on an annual basis due to the on-again, off-again renewals of the PTC. And the seven years of consistent support could be critical for our nation’s nascent offshore wind industry.
Thanks to the IRA, the ITC can now also be used to incentivize battery energy storage, whether or not it is combined with solar or wind. This is a particularly strategic move given the critical role that batteries play in allowing for solar and wind to meet more of our power demand — including at times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
But the IRA goes well beyond solar and wind. A revamped federal tax credit for electric vehicles (EVs) removes the per-manufacturer cap that prevented models by successful EV makers like Tesla from claiming the credit. It also turned the EV tax credit into a rebate, and created new tax credits for commercial EVs, leased EVs, and even used EVs. These moves all incentivize more rapid electrification of transportation.
And finally, there is the Home Energy Rebate program. Through this program, homeowners who make less than 80% of the area median income can get point-of-sale rebates for the full cost of installing heat pumps, induction stoves, and other devices to transition their homes off of fossil fuels. Homeowners who make less than 150% of area median income get a 50% discount.
If you haven’t heard of this last program, there’s a good reason. The way the law was written requires states to design and roll out programs to implement the rebates, and so far New York is the only state to launch a program. The federal government has approved applications for the programs in five other states, and thirteen additional states have submitted applications.
Together, the ITC,PTC, Clean Vehicle tax credits, and Home Energy Rebate programs cut to the root of the problem by accelerating the shift away from fossil fuels in electricity, transportation, and heating — three of the four largest sectors for greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Due to the combined effects of the policies in the IRA, researchers estimate that the United States will reduce emissions 43%-48% below 2005 levels by 2035.
Progress, Part 2: IRA Industrial Policy
But the IRA did far more than incentivize deployment of clean energy and electrification. The United States is seeing a massive build-out of solar and battery factories. This is primarily due to the IRA’s new Section 45X Manufacturing Production Tax Credit, which supplies targeted incentives for solar, wind, and battery manufacturing at multiple distinct steps in the supply chain.
This is not the first U.S. policy to incentivize renewable energy manufacturing; Obama provided up-front incentives to building clean energy factories through multiple programs in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the “Stimulus Act”).
But the difficulty the United States has in competing in clean energy manufacturing doesn’t just come from how much it costs to build factories here. A fundamental problem is that is costs more to run them here than in other countries. The Section 45X incentives address that by providing operating incentives based on the capacities factories produce and sell on an annual basis. The sharp increase in solar and battery factories that have followed the passage of the IRA suggests that this approach may be far more effective than previous efforts.
IRA goes beyond even that. The ITC and PTC now contain a Domestic Content Bonus, which provides higher incentive levels for projects that use U.S.-made components. And it includes an Energy Communities Bonus, which provides extra incentives for building clean energy projects in communities that have suffered from the loss of fossil fuel jobs.
This is the first real clean energy industrial policy that we’ve had in the United States, and it is rebuilding U.S. manufacturing decades after cities in the Midwest and other regions were hollowed out by a combination automation and factories moving overseas. Between the Biden Administration’s clean energy industrial policy and its investment in chipmaking through the CHIPS Act, spending on the construction of new U.S. factories has tripled over the level seen during the previous decade.
The fact that most of these new clean energy factories are in red states makes these incentives particularly durable to shifting political winds. No politician — Republican or Democrat — wants a factory in their district to shut down and lay off workers.
This mixing of industrial policy with clean energy policy can be complicated, and it doesn’t always lead to greater deployment, at least in the short term. As a notable example, Senator Joe Manchin’s loading on layers of requirements for the sourcing of battery minerals and components may offset much of the gains in deployment brought by making EV tax credits more widely available to consumers.
Merging clean energy and industrial policy did open up our decarbonization policies to sabotage by those who are pushing for energy isolationism and autarky. But this new union of interests may still be worth it in the long run, as it should lead not only to broader benefits from the transition to clean energy, but also broader acceptance of the changes this transition brings.
NEXTracker CEO Dan Shugar noted this at a recent clean energy conference, observing that a lot of the opposition to clean energy is coming from groups funded by the fossil fuel industry. And as he says “It’s a lot harder to do that when your neighbor is working at a clean energy factory.”
Progress, Part 3: IIJA & EPA Standards
As big of a deal as the IRA is, it isn’t the only piece of important legislation to be signed by Biden. While less dramatic, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, also called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) covered several strategic areas that the IRA didn’t.
These include very large investments in Amtrak, our struggling national passenger rail service, the largest ever federal investment in mass transit, and a new program to build electric vehicle charging stations in all 50 states.
The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program tackles a problem that may be a bigger barrier to EV deployment than the cost — the lack of public charging stations. By requiring states to come up with a plan to build EV chargers every 50 miles on the interstate highway system — and funding these — this program could provide major improvements in an area where private industry has fallen behind the pace of EV deployment.
The IRA and IIJA cannot be credited to Biden alone — Congressional Democrats helped write and passed IRA, and politicians from both parties contributed to IIJA. Like any president, Biden is more limited in what he can do through executive actions, but he has done plenty here as well. Two of the more notable contributions are the Biden EPA’s rules on methane emissions and pollution standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of methane standards. Methane is around 84–87x as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2 over a 20-year period and according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change it is responsible for around 1/3 of all man-made warming to date.
As for the vehicle standards, this adds a stick to the IRA’s carrot for electric vehicles, by pushing automakers to make more efficient vehicles, including shifting to EVs. Given the sociopathic penchant of U.S. automakers to push onto the public ever-bigger gas guzzling SUVs, more federal regulation was overdue.
Conclusion: Finish the Job
As noted, this is just a sample. When it comes to climate and energy, there are too many relevant policies implemented by the Biden Administration to fit into one article. This is because Biden is the first U.S. president to treat the climate crisis with the seriousness that it deserves.
You would not know this from his detractors. The Sunrise Movement, which complains that Biden has not declared a national climate emergency, seems to have missed that the IRA is the Green New Deal that it was demanding six years ago, and which seemed at the time to be impossibly ambitious. And while some journalists have done an excellent job in plumbing the details of policies, the headlines are often grabbed by those who treat presidential races like high school popularity contests.
Some may say that Biden is too old, and even warn that he may die in office. Those expressing that concern don’t seem to understand how executive power works. Top executives at massive organizations like the U.S. federal government don’t do much on their own. Their main actions are to appoint and empower people to implement their vision.
Biden showed that he makes very good choices about who to hire in his first administration, by appointing capable, experienced, principled, and visionary leaders at the Energy Department, Interior Department, EPA, and other agencies. The contrast could not have been more sharp with the lack of relevant experience, vision, or ethics shown by many of the appointees of Donald Trump when he was president. Biden clearly knows how to choose good people. and if we elect him again I have every confidence that he will continue to do so in a second term.
And if Biden were to pass away in office, well, that is exactly why we have a ticket that includes a vice presidential candidate. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that a vice president takes office, and Kamala Harris is far more suitable for the job than the man who tried to inspire a coup the last time he lost an election.
Biden’s actions haven’t been flashy — but for God’s sake — do we want a capable executive, or an entertainer in office? Biden has delivered on the most important issues. It’s very unfortunate that much of what he has done hasn’t reached the American people, but at the end of the day I want a president who gets things done, not one who runs his mouth.
It may be up to those of us who are closer to the Biden Administration’s policies to explain them to the broader American public. This piece is a first attempt to do that. Because it’s time that we start talking about what really matters.
This November is the most important presidential election in our lifetimes. For climate, we can’t afford to lose another four years like we did the last time we elected a failed businessman and reality TV star with delusions of being the second coming of Mussolini. We need Joe Biden to continue the work that he has done capably for the past four years.
I don’t give a damn if he stutters, or forgets his words sometimes, or isn’t great on the debate stage. Uncle Joe is the best damn president in our lifetimes, and we need him to finish the job.
Note: My articles on Medium reflect my personal views, not the views of my employer (or anyone else, for that matter). That includes this article.
