American Climate Policy Needed Biden

What is so striking, in immediate retrospect, about many of Joe Biden’s accomplishments as president is how many of them depended on him.

Democrats had tried and failed for 30 years to pass a climate law through the Senate. Biden succeeded.

Now Biden, the 46th president of the United States, is dropping out of the presidential race. He announced the news today on the social network X, endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris, who will now presumably take over the party’s nomination.

Biden has not done everything climate activists wanted. He has not declared a “climate emergency,” a legally controversial maneuver that could let him order individual companies to change their behavior and spend funds without Congress’s approval. And he has seemed flummoxed by how to sell his decarbonization program to the public without ignoring the economy’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. During his presidency, American oil and natural gas production has hit an all-time high, and the country has become the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter. Biden has not really advertised that fact, which would be popular, but he hasn’t run away from it, either — America’s achievement of energy dominance has sat in an odd, under-noticed spot in the discourse.

But Biden will leave office with easily the strongest climate record of any president — and one of the stronger environmental records, generally, in decades. Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in clean energy and decarbonization in American history. It is the first U.S. law that ties clean electricity incentives directly to the country’s carbon emissions, ensuring that tax credits will remain in place until the country hits its goals. But more broadly, he oversaw a revitalization of American industrial strategy, passing the bipartisan infrastructure law and CHIPS and Science Act, which both funded or expanded climate-friendly programs.

His administration also moved quickly to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using executive authority. In the past three years, the Environmental Protection Agency has begun to restrict heat-trapping emissions from power plants, cars, trucks, and oil and gas infrastructure. He also paused the government’s approval of new permits for liquified natural gas export terminals, although that pause has since been overturned by a federal court.

Could another president have accomplished as much? Even though the Inflation Reduction Act is largely the product of a Democratic Senate — of lawmakers drafting text on the issues that they know best — making that into law required Biden’s personal credibility with the labor movement and the party’s cadre of older, working class voters. It is difficult, if not impossible to imagine Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia — one of the chamber’s decisive votes in 2022 — negotiating and voting for the IRA without Biden’s persona. Biden could talk about the law’s aims to revitalize labor, could cast infrastructure and clean energy as jobs programs, without projecting the condescension or cross-class voyeurism that younger Democrats might have summoned.

His sense — which seemed to be held too by his most successful chief of staff, Ron Klain — that politics is above all a game of coalition management meant he was able to keep the fragile Democratic Party in line through the process. Biden often seemed, as his biographer Franklin Foer, put it, a man from a different time — “the last politician.”

But a tension between policy success and political setback has also defined Biden’s presidency. Again and again, he would pull off some difficult domestic policy — and then fail to communicate it to voters. He was foiled, in part, by the high inflation that plagued the U.S. economy throughout the first years of his term. But as his presidency went on, Biden also seemed to struggle with communication specifically. He never successfully sold voters — and specifically young people — on the value of his administration or on his climate accomplishments. As I wrote earlier this month, even voters who say they prioritize climate change told pollsters that they knew little about the IRA. That was and remains a tremendous missed opportunity, especially since — regardless of what voters say or know — a Trump administration and a Republican majority would gleefully gut the IRA if given the chance.

Now the Democratic party and its politicians must pick up where Biden’s team leaves off and defend his domestic climate accomplishments. Many of the IRA’s investments — and the ultimate fate of the EPA’s crackdown on greenhouse gas pollution — will be left to Harris to fight for. Whether she can convince voters that they are worth supporting will determine the long term success of America’s most important decarbonization policy — and whether it, or any climate policy, can survive the country’s deteriorating politics.