Liberal climate change activists are demanding that Joe Biden pledge not to appoint Obama-era centrists with ties to the oil and gas industry to his administration.
The effort exposes strains in Democratic unity regarding climate change and the tactics used to combat it. It also signals that the party’s liberal base is not satisfied after winning concessions from Biden in his revamped climate agenda.
“There is a lingering distrust from the progressive wing of the party,” said Collin Rees, a senior campaigner with Oil Change U.S., an environmental group that advocates keeping fossil fuels in the ground. “There is real concern here if you are stocking advisers with fossil-fuel representatives, it will depress turnout, and it will make it hard for Biden to prove he is serious on these things.”
Centrist Obama administration alumni counter that it’s counterproductive to impose limits on the pool of talent who can provide counsel to Biden on a complex and technical issue such as climate change.
“The only litmus test should be that people who want to serve in the Biden administration should be 100% on board and supportive of the Biden climate agenda,” a former Obama administration official told the Washington Examiner, requesting anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. “Instead of spending energy on prosecuting and persecuting former Obama officials, people should focus their energy on winning the election, on fighting to include as much of their agenda in the Biden-Harris climate plan, and making sure competent, experienced people are selected to implement that policy.”
Biden straddles the old and the new
Liberals like Rees are agitating against two groups of people: those who served in top energy positions in the Obama administration and people who have gone on to work for fossil fuel interests or taken money from them. Sometimes, those groups overlap.
“There are some Obama energy and climate alums who have gone into the direct bosom of natural gas or work at natural gas-funded entities,” said Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the Revolving Door Project. “We are worried fracking has too much influence on Democratic politics.”
Hauser’s group is compiling a list of potential appointments “compromised by close financial connections” to agencies it would be regulating.
Two groups, the youth-driven Sunrise Movement and the progressive Justice Democrats, are circulating a petition urging Biden to “keep fossil fuel influence out” of his transition team, Cabinet, or campaign adviser roles.
Separately, more than 100 groups, led by Oil Change U.S., Sunrise, Public Citizen, Indivisible, MoveOn.org, 350.org, Data for Progress, and Greenpeace, plan to demand in a letter next week that Biden ban fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and representatives from working for him. They are trying to keep them out of any position that could influence climate policy — not just the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department, but also the Treasury, the Office of Budget and Management, the National Economic Council, and more.
Activists say the Obama administration, with Biden as its vice president, was slow to prioritize climate change and early on, advocated for an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy, looking to capitalize on the shale oil and gas fracking boom.
But Biden had his hand in some key accomplishments, former colleagues say.
On the campaign trail, Biden has touted his leadership implementing his former boss’s economic stimulus package, known as the Recovery Act of 2009, dedicating $90 billion to clean-energy programs credited with lowering the cost of wind and solar. He later helped lead negotiations of the Paris agreement.
“I get if you go backwards and say the Obama administration wasn’t green. Fine. But at the time, it looked extremely green,” said the former Obama administration official. “Anything you say today might not look the same five to 10 years from now.”
Since then, Biden has proposed the most progressive climate agenda in U.S. political history, promising to achieve net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050. In July, after winning the primary, he released an updated version of the plan after activists criticized the original as too conservative. His new plan pledges to spend $2 trillion on clean-energy initiatives over four years in order to eliminate carbon from power plants by 2035.
Biden earned widespread plaudits for the revised plan after he incorporated the input of disparate groups, including unions, “environmental justice” advocates, and liberal Democrats such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
‘All of the above’ vs. all or nothing
But some liberals remain unsatisfied, noting Biden’s plan focused primarily on curbing demand for oil and gas without restricting the supply of fossil fuels available to drillers. They also worry that Biden sees a role for fossil fuels and nuclear energy in achieving net-zero emissions. Biden supports investing in technologies other than wind and solar, including outfitting coal or gas plants with carbon capture technology, which has not been widely deployed, and small nuclear reactors, which are only in the development phase.
“Within the environmental community, there is a broad range of views about what it’s going to take to solve the climate problem, from a pretty narrow set of solutions that is largely solar, wind, and storage to a much larger 2020 version of ‘all of the above,’” a former Clinton and Obama administration energy official told the Washington Examiner. “Joe Biden comes from that ‘all-of-the-above’ approach from people who were intellectual leaders of it in the past administration.”
Some of the officials who led that effort, such as former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, continue to advocate for a more cautious approach to cleaning the energy system, even if they share the same goals as activists.
Moniz has called for a “Green Real Deal,” an alternative to the liberal Green New Deal that promotes using nuclear and carbon capture alongside renewables to cut emissions.
Moniz is on the board of Southern Company, a utility that generates most of its power from fossil fuels. He has recently said natural gas should continue as “part of the solution” to reducing emissions “at least for another 15 years or so,” contending wind, solar, and batteries are not ready to provide a reliable electricity system by itself.
Centrist Democrats defended Moniz.
“Biden needs both an energized cadre of younger people serving in his administration who will keep pressing for the most ambitious climate agenda possible and a few key veterans like Ernie Moniz, who are respected in the Senate and can actually achieve that agenda,” said Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute, who belongs to the executive council of Clean Energy for Biden, a group raising money for the Democratic nominee.
The target list
None of the Obama-era Democrats targeted by liberals and flagged by Rees and Hauser actually work for the Biden campaign (including Moniz), but are only informally advising it.
That includes Heather Zichal, a key architect of the Obama administration’s proposed regulations to cut emissions from coal plants who has since served on the board of Cheniere, a liquified natural gas, or LNG, company. Allies note Zichal currently works on ocean conservation issues and was previously a top official at The Nature Conservancy.
“What I find divisive and obnoxious is the fact that some factions now have chosen to vilify and exclude folks like Dr. Moniz and Heather Zichal, dedicated public servants, simply because they have different opinions or approaches. We are all in this together,” said Frank Verrastro, senior adviser of the climate and energy security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Verrastro said the Biden campaign invited him, Moniz, and Zichal to contribute to the first version of the candidate’s climate plan, which Verrastro called “ambitious yet pragmatic.”
Other Obama administration aides opposed by liberals are former White House energy adviser Jason Bordoff, State Department official Amos Hochstein, economic adviser Brian Deese, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
Hochstein is now senior vice president of marketing for Tellurian, an LNG company. Deese is global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock. Salazar is a partner at WilmerHale, a law firm that represents fossil fuel companies.
Bordoff is the founding director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, a research institute that brings together industry and policymakers from across the world to combat climate change.
Some of the center’s funding comes from oil and gas companies, including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, and Cheniere, but it also gets funding from climate groups and nonprofit organizations, such as Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Hewlett Foundation.
Bordoff was a key proponent of lifting the U.S. oil export embargo, which Congress did in 2015 as part of a deal extending renewable energy tax credits.
Since leaving the administration, he has argued exporting LNG improves U.S. energy security and can help developing countries use less coal. Bordoff has also called for a price on carbon, a tax on flaring gas, and strict emission standards for transportation to reduce the use of oil.
His Columbia University energy center is partnering with Oil Change International, the nonpolitical arm of Rees’s group Oil Change U.S., on a public database tracking whether countries are spending stimulus money from the pandemic on clean energy or fossil fuels.
“Throughout his career in government and academia, Jason has focused on the urgency of the climate crisis and worked towards more rapid and ambitious action to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050,” said Artealia Gilliard, the Center on Global Energy Policy spokeswoman.
Testing Biden’s ‘loyalty’
Jigar Shah, co-founder and president of Generate Capital who is on the executive council at Clean Energy for Biden, said the Democratic nominee should focus more on the ideas of potential appointees rather than where they’ve worked.
“I don’t have any problems whatsoever with people working at places that take oil money,” said Shah, who worked at BP in the early 2000s. “I don’t think it’s good to say certain people shouldn’t be hired. It’s better to hold people to a high standard that their mission in life is to unlock the full deployment potential of climate solutions.”
Rees acknowledged “it’s a tough hurdle” to convince Biden to banish former Obama administration colleagues.
But he said responding to climate change in 2021 requires “new voices,” and he finds solace in how Biden has already mollified some progressive demands, such as vowing to ban fossil fuel subsidies.
“This is a longer-term game,” Rees said. “Biden has a long history of loyalty. He also has a long history of being a politician and knowing which ways winds are blowing and responding to pressure.”
