Climate change means that America can’t afford to let Biden fail

“American Patriotism or anti-Americanism” is the choice President Biden must make after losing the Governorship in Virginia to the Republicans this week, said Daniel Johnson in a column in these pages. He argues that calls by Black Lives Matter to “defund” the police and the introduction of critical education about race into schools, are signs of a “takeover by the Left” of the Democrat Party. Against this he pits the “traditional Democratic ideal” of realising the “American dream” for all citizens. Many Americans would agree that choosing between the two is the political choice that matters. But Joe Biden’s dilemma is deeper and more complex than that.

Recent Gallup polls put Biden’s positive ratings at 42 per cent, the second lowest yet at this point in any previous presidency. Trump dropped to 37 per cent. Psephological wisdom has it that going below 50 per cent in the ratings means losing 37 Congressional seats next year. Biden’s immediate problem, though, is two maverick Democrat Senators, Joe Manchin, senior Senator for West Virginia (the second poorest State in the Union), and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona (where Sinema is the first Democrat Senator for twenty years and where in 2020 Biden narrowly won the State’s delegation to the National Electoral College).

Each individual senator matters. The Democrats in the Senate are up against a 50-50 split with the Vice-President, Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate, presiding over its proceedings and currently holding a tie-breaking vote. Senator Manchin, who has considerable political funding from oil and gas companies, is delaying Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better social spending and climate change Bill, known as the Reconciliation Bill — whittled down in negotiations with the Republicans from $3.5 trillion and to be spent over ten years. Sinema won’t support getting rid of the filibuster, a key weapon in the hands of the Republicans who are determined to block Biden’s social and climate plans. The Democrats have got a bi-partisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure Bill through the Senate, and despite some delays, it was finally passed yesterday. With the US economy not rebounding fast enough, Biden remains under enormous pressure.

A core plank within traditional Republican ideology, like that of the old-style Conservative Party here in the UK, is “small state good, big state bad”. But the 2008 financial crisis and the 2019-2021 COVID pandemic proved that major government intervention in times of crisis is essential. The same is true of climate change if we are to contain global temperature rise to liveable levels and avoid catastrophe. This is the context in which Brandeis University Professor Robert Kuttner asks in the New York Review of Books (18 November 2021) if Biden is “ready to insist that full-on planning and explicit targeting of vital industries” is urgently needed. Indications are that he is.

In February, with his feet barely under his desk in the Oval Office, Biden issued Executive Order 14017 tasking the National Security Council and National Economic Council to undertake reviews of the vulnerability of the US’s supply chains for, amongst others, semi-conductors and electric car batteries. What he received in June was a far ranging Keynesian recipe for a replay of Roosevelt’s New Deal, coupled with a vision of “government led scientific advances as the main engine of growth”, following the prescription of the former Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). The implications of such an approach to Climate Change are not difficult to discern. Biden is trying to marshal substantial government financial support to realise economic change in pursuit of this vision. This is not some minor battle in the culture wars, but a well-defended front manned by diehard Republicans, a potential Stalingrad for Biden.

You could argue that getting to net-zero by 2050 will need the sort of command economy created during the Second World War. Think of the production of Spitfires in Britain, recently celebrated in BBC documentaries. Think of the female labour drafted onto the land and into munitions factories. In the US no cars for civilian use were produced between February 1942 and October 1945. Fordist production lines were all converted to war production. For military vehicles and aircraft then read electric cars, wind turbines, solar cells, and carbon capture technologies now. In a future planet-saving economy, the alternative to a full-blown command economy could be substantial sector-specific government investment in key technologies and support for transformations in the life of the poor — a route taken by several East Asian economies in the 1990s.

Decisive action by government itself to shape economic activity seems to be taking second place in Glasgow. Instead we have the impressive pledges by corporations and financial services to invest in climate friendly production aimed at reaching net-zero. Recognition of their power and potential for good is welcome. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England until 2020, has done an outstanding job in putting a case that supply and demand, the market, will direct the money where the action needs to be. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope against hope so. But Adam Smith was not facing runaway climate warming.

If ever there was an issue of national security, as Biden recognised by involving his National Security Agency in his economic reviews (they are moving on to energy in 2022), it is climate change. And national security, in Republican terms a good thing, requires national planning and targeting of substantial amounts of public money to mitigate climate change, in Republican terms a bad thing. Ideology is doing more than getting in the way of a bi-partisan solution. It threatens national and global security.

Can Biden convince American voters and both Houses of Congress that half-measures are not enough, that a Republican victory, with or without Trump, spells a terrible setback that will cost lives in the US and around the world? Can he make a divided society understand the really important choices? Some journalists have taken to calling him “Poor Old Joe”. It’s poor old us if he doesn’t succeed.

Turning to the UK with Biden’s dilemma in mind, can the British Government turn rhetoric into concrete national plans, commensurate with the threat of global warming? Can it take the public with it during such a radical transformation? These are the choices that will profoundly alter the lives of the next generation. If patriotism means seeking to provide a secure future, whether for British or US citizens, it is time to finally drop longstanding economic taboos.