How Green Is Joe Biden?

Here’s a bit of trivia: The first sen­at­or to in­tro­duce a bill deal­ing with cli­mate change was none oth­er than Delaware’s Joseph R. Biden Jr. Biden’s 1986 Glob­al Cli­mate Pro­tec­tion Act didn’t pass nor did it ig­nite a stam­pede of con­gres­sion­al ac­tion to stem what was then a less-known threat. (NASA sci­ent­ist James Hansen’s land­mark testi­mony on the top­ic wouldn’t even come un­til 1988.) But it has be­come a handy ref­er­ence point when Biden touts his cli­mate leg­acy. On Wed­nes­day, Biden made ref­er­ence to the pro­pos­al in a speech at a sol­ar-power con­fer­ence. He re­called that at the time, he warned, “Real­ity has a way of in­trud­ing,” and now real­ity had made its way. As Biden con­siders a run for the White House, that’s a memory that could be brought up over and over again. All of the Demo­crat­ic can­did­ates have made en­vir­on­ment and en­ergy a pri­or­ity, and with big money com­ing from en­vir­on­ment­al­ists like Tom Stey­er, it is nearly im­possible for a can­did­ate on the left to ig­nore cli­mate change. So the ques­tion then be­comes, how green is Biden? Biden’s plat­form over the last six years is, by nature, in­dis­tin­guish­able from Pres­id­ent Obama’s. Giv­en that it in­cludes the biggest steps any ad­min­is­tra­tion has taken to tackle cli­mate change, it would seem to be a strong start­ing point. But des­pite the in­creas­ing in­terest in him as an al­tern­at­ive to Hil­lary Clin­ton, en­vir­on­ment­al­ists don’t seem to have much in­terest in hav­ing Biden build on an­oth­er term of the Obama cli­mate agenda. “I know very little about his re­cord oth­er than as an Obama spokes­per­son,” said R.L. Miller of the Cli­mate Hawks Vote su­per PAC. “And there’s not much in­terest in it. There’s just no chat­ter at all.” In a state­ment, Si­erra Club polit­ic­al dir­ect­or Khal­id Pitts said that Biden “has helped lead the fight to pro­tect our com­munit­ies and fam­il­ies from tox­ic pol­lu­tion, so we can be sure that any pub­lic de­bate he is a part of is guar­an­teed to in­clude a ro­bust and thor­ough dis­cus­sion of cli­mate ac­tion and clean-en­ergy is­sues.” But groups fur­ther to the left say that Biden is go­ing to have to prove he would be more than just a third Obama term to get any sup­port. Greens have been left want­ing by the White House when it comes to fossil-fuel pro­duc­tion, say­ing that Obama has been too eager to em­brace nat­ur­al gas and has done too much to open up off­shore areas to oil-drilling, es­pe­cially after Shell was gran­ted a per­mit to drill in the Arc­tic this sum­mer. “The next pres­id­ent is go­ing to have to do a lot more than Barack Obama on cli­mate change,” said Karthik Ganapathy of 350.org. “So the ques­tion be­comes, will Joe Biden be an ex­ten­sion of the Clean Power Plan and an am­bas­sad­or of the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion, or is he ready to out­line an ag­gress­ive agenda?”...more