Sammy Roth -
The night Barack Obama claimed victory in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008, he predicted future generations would look back and say, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
That turned out to be wrong. Earth kept getting hotter, the oceans kept rising, and Donald Trump spent four years undoing many of the clean energy policies adopted by his predecessor. Tackling the climate crisis will once again take centre stage under Joe Biden, but with an important shift.
Although the energy politics of the last dozen years were defined by coal - with President Obama working to accelerate its decline and President Trump trying and failing to revive it - the fiercest battles of the Biden era are likely to revolve around another fossil fuel, natural gas.
The president-elect campaigned on 100 per cent climate-friendly electricity by 2035, a timeline that could squeeze natural gas -currently the nation’s largest power source - off the power grid in the next 15 years.
The short list of climate priorities on Biden’s transition website also includes “direct cash rebates and low-cost financing to upgrade and electrify home appliances,” which could mean replacing gas furnaces, water heaters and stoves with electrical alternatives.
It’s an ambitious agenda that’s sure to expose fault lines in the Democratic Party, between renewable energy advocates who see natural gas as no better than coal and establishment figures who say the fuel still has a role to play in reducing pollution. The battle is already under way, with rumours circulating that President Obama’s second-term Energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, is atop candidate to get his old job back under President Biden. Moniz is a controversial figure among climate activists. He was a leading figure in Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy, which celebrated US oil production and envisioned gas as a “bridge fuel”to cleaner energy.
Moniz later joined the board of Atlanta-based Southern Co, whose power plants are among the most polluting of any major US energy firm. He also founded the Energy Futures Initiative, a thinktank whose advisory board is chaired by the former chief executive of British oil giant BP.
In September, 145 advocacy groups sent Biden a letter urging him to”ban all fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives from any advisory or official position” in his government. The signatories included 350.org, whose co-founder, Bill McKibben, described Moniz as”probably the one person environmentalists would least like to see involved in a Biden administration.”
“If Biden wins, it will be an early test of his seriousness,”McKibben wrote. Two weeks before the election, Moniz offered a California-focused preview of the types of policies he might pursue. In a report co-written with Stanford University researchers, Moniz’s Energy Futures Initiative argued that the Golden State would have a much easier time meeting its ambitious climate targets if it invested in technology to capture planet-warming emissions from power plants and industrial facilities before they could reach the atmosphere. — dpa
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