How Joe Biden Outmaneuvered Donald Trump On Climate | Time - 0 views
-
President Donald Trump thought he had hit the jackpot during the final presidential debate when his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, declared that he would “transition away from the oil industry.”
-
“He’s going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?”
-
say his reaction points to a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of the electorate’s shifting views on climate change, but of how profoundly the issue has already shaped the presidential race
- ...20 more annotations...
-
the 2020 election is the first in history where climate change has played a pivotal role in a major candidate’s campaign, even if the issue wasn’t always in the headlines.
-
For the last two years, Trump has repeatedly played to his base with various rejections of climate science. The Biden campaign, in contrast, has used the issue to carefully build a broad coalition.
-
A landmark climate report in the final months of 2018 sparked a global awakening on the issue and, in the U.S., the Sunrise Movement pressed politicians on the topic in high-profile protests.
-
Last summer, Biden introduced his first full-throated plan, which proposed a $1.7 trillion federal outlay over ten years to tackle climate change.
-
Biden’s all-in strategy on climate may have already paid dividends: analysts say the youth vote has surged in early voting.
-
Biden leaned in rather than back down. Two-thirds of Americans support aggressive action on climate change, according to a Pew Research poll released in June, one of many showing heightened voter concern over the issue.
-
a growing group of Americans rank the issue among their top concerns and cite it as a motivating factor in their political engagement.
-
To activate these voters, Biden created a handful of task forces and committees to address the issue. Climate change played a key role in a “unity task force” composed of Biden and Sanders supporters. Meanwhile, Biden convened a separate “advisory council” made up of high-profile environmental, labor and environmental justice leaders as well as climate activists to develop a common-ground plan.
-
the campaign framed the $2 trillion program as an opportunity to create jobs, invest in protecting communities of color and decarbonize the economy. “It was not that they went off in a room and came up with it,”
-
In recent years, young people have been the most vocal activists calling for action on climate change, and Biden allies saw taking a vocal stance on the issue as a strategic move to push young people, who often stay home on Election Day, to the polls.
-
Historically, candidates track to the center to appear more palatable for a general election audience. Widespread voter concern over the spread of COVID-19 also could have bumped the issue from Biden’s agenda.
-
“If you go out and talk to most young people in America right now, the issue at the top of their list is going to be climate change.”
-
“They asked us questions—policy questions, personal questions: what are you dealing with? What are you hearing?” says Justin Onwenu, a community organizer at the Sierra Club in Michigan and a member of the DNC’s platform committee. “I think that went a long way.”
-
“I’m the first person I’m aware of that went to every major labor union in the country and got them to sign on to my climate change plan,” Biden said on Pod Save America on Oct. 24. The move to engage unions almost served a prebuttal of the Trump campaign’s primary climate talking point: that addressing the global warming would be too expensive and cost jobs.
-
In recent years, Trump’s climate policy has largely consisted of rolling back regulations and aiding fossil fuel companies, policies that remain deeply unpopular with American voters. This cycle, the campaign’s message — which was sometimes disrupted by off-the-cuff remarks from Trump — has shifted the focus slightly, asserting not that climate change isn’t real, but that addressing it would be too costly.
-
“Joe Biden has even admitted that he will be an anti-energy president,” said Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and President Trump’s first energy secretary on a call of journalists. “Biden’s radical proposal to eliminate oil and gas and coal from the US power grid by 2035 will have a devastating consequence on workers and families.”
-
Trump’s messaging may resonate in some parts of Pennsylvania where the fracking industry employs some 25,000 and indirectly supports many more jobs. Trump has hammered home the talking point in messaging in the state, including TV ads running there.
-
Biden clarified that move would be gradual and not be completed during his time as president. He would, instead, end subsidies for fossil fuels. At the same time, he reiterated his promise to create more jobs in clean industry.
-
There’s a sense among the activists and strategists who have spent months if not years plotting how to engage voters on climate that the acknowledgement of the oil industry’s long-term decline may not have struck the chord that it would have even a few years ago.
-
“I think [Biden] has been on the defensive a bit,” on fracking, said Michael Catanzaro, a former energy and environmental policy advisor in the Trump White House, before the debate. “But I think it’s actually working for him… he’s talking to union voters. He’s using his blue collar roots to push back pretty hard.”