The Ministry for No Future: Biden Undermines His Own Climate Pledges
By Jim Miller
President Biden undermined his own climate pledges last week by approving the Willow Project in Alaska for the most pedestrian of reasons: politics as usual. As the New York Times reported “High gas prices, a looming election, and fears of a costly legal battle seem to have shifted the political calculus for the President.”
So, just as “the most pro-union President in American history” stuck his finger in the wind last December and decided that betraying the railroad workers and undermining the right to strike was a viable political strategy to avoid economic disruption, here Biden was moved yet again by his signature “pragmaticism.”
Perhaps, the Times story mused, this move might even help him with moderates and independents. Surely, somewhere, James Carville is smiling.
Climate activists, on the other hand, were clearly not pleased. In a Green New Deal Network email message urging voters to call the White House to protest Biden’s decision they put it this way:
Yesterday, hundreds of activists across the country joined the call to express outrage at President Biden for his decision to approve the Willow Project — handing over another win to the fossil fuel industry by opening up more oil drilling across Alaska’s arctic.
The science is clear: oil, gas, and coal are driving the climate emergency, and there is absolutely NO room for new fossil fuel projects if we are to keep global warming below 1.5C to avoid utter catastrophe.
The Biden administration committed to implementing new protections for the Arctic to prevent future drilling elsewhere in Alaska; unfortunately, these protections do nothing to prevent the climate devastation and environmental destruction guaranteed by the administration’s approval of Willow — and it won’t help the people and wildlife who will be upended by this massive expansion of fossil fuel development.
It’s important in times like this to continue to remain steadfast and unified in our collective opposition. Together, let’s flood the phones of the White House and the Department of the Interior to make sure Biden feels the full weight of our movement and support for the frontline communities who will suffer because of yet another oil drilling project in Alaska.
Over at the Guardian, Oliver Milman, noted that with the approval of this gift to the fossil fuel industry, Biden was keeping pace with Donald Trump when it comes to granting drilling leases.
This horrible decision also negates much of the progress on climate Biden and the Democrats in Congress made with the Inflation Reduction Act and other recent policy changes. As Milman points out, the Willow project is massive and will do a lot to speed us on the way to catastrophic climate change:
The scale of Willow is vast, with more than 200 oilwells, several new pipelines, a central processing plant, an airport and a gravel mine set to enable the extraction of oil long beyond the time scientists say that wealthy countries should have kicked the habit, in order to avoid disastrous global heating . . . the brutal reality of Earth’s climate system doesn’t recognize political expediency or future good intentions. The International Energy Agency, among others, has warned that no new oil and gas fields can be developed if the world is to avoid breaching temperature thresholds that scientists say will tip the planet into increasingly dangerous heatwaves, flooding, wildfires and other impacts.
For all of the new wind and solar projects spurred by last year’s climate bill, and Biden’s enthusiastic promotion of electric vehicles, Willow is a sobering reality check – the project will wipe out the emissions cuts provided by all renewable energy developments over the next decade, adding the equivalent of 2m new gas-guzzling cars to the roads.
As I wrote last November in this space, David Wallace-Wells, author of the seminal The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, had recently observed that most folks studying possible climate futures have concluded that the “business as usual” projections of apocalyptic warming now seem unlikely due to several factors such as the decline of coal and the rapidly reduced costs of renewables. This means the worst of the worst is unlikely, even though we have surely blown our chance to meet the targets set in Paris for 1.5 degrees of warming.
Thus, the future, Wallace-Wells argues, will be darker than the present but not as bleak as previous worst-case scenarios might have suggested. The question for the politics of the future will consequently be not of survival, but of climate justice. Who will fare well and who will be worse off?
One wonders, though, how many more Willow projects it will take to change that calculus.
The great science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, whose novel Ministry for the Future addresses the dire consequences and potential hope for humanity in the world after warming, sees himself as an anti-dystopian writer in that he seeks to face our challenges head-on, honestly, but with the belief that it is morally untenable to surrender to despair. In a New York Times piece on his work he observes:
“As a utopia, it’s a very low bar,” Robinson said. “I mean, if we avoid the mass extinction event, we avoid everything dying, great, that’s utopia, given where we are now.”
When Robinson is asked to forecast the future, as he often is, he usually hedges. He has argued that “we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together” — but he’s not sure if it’s going to be a utopian or dystopian one.
During his recent lecture at the University of San Diego, Robinson echoed those thoughts and appeared to lean toward the hopeful with the young people he was addressing.
It is worth pondering, however, what this latest chapter the Biden administration is writing will bring. If this kind of visionless political calculus is all we get from Democrats elected promising to address the climate crisis, the road to dystopia will be paved by feckless compromise. They will be remembered as the last crop of leaders who had a chance to do the right thing but sold out the future for the next election.
Lead image courtesy of Protect the Arctic