Joe Biden has made progress toward satisfying the demands of liberal activists to strengthen his agenda to tackle climate change, symbolized by his move to solicit the advice of Sen. Bernie Sanders and add Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a campaign panel.
But in winning over progressives, Biden risks alienating moderates who helped him secure the Democratic nomination for president.
“At some point, there will be disappointment,” said Barry Rabe, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. “There is no one position Biden can take that is completely unifying. It’s going to be very hard to put that broad coalition together.”
Biden this week named Ocasio-Cortez, the liberal champion of the Green New Deal, to be co-chair of a joint climate change policy task force he started with Sanders.
Also joining the task force is Varshini Parkash, the leader of the youth-driven Sunrise Movement that helped bring attention to the Green New Deal. Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement endorsed Sanders in the primary and have not committed to endorsing Biden.
Seeing an opening, the Trump campaign Wednesday called the inclusion of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez proof that Biden is listening to America’s “two leading socialists.”
Biden was already facing attacks from the Trump campaign accusing him of seeking to eliminate fossil fuels in swing states such as Pennsylvania, where natural gas drilling is prevalent.
While Biden does not support banning fracking for oil and gas like Sanders did, the former vice president is nonetheless focused on pleasing liberal climate activists in the early stages of the general election campaign, initiating a process to hear them out.
Biden earned the respect of liberal activists by committing, on Earth Day, to expand his climate plan in the coming months with an eye toward setting new goals for the next decade toward weaning off fossil fuels. Biden, after securing the endorsement of the League of Conservative Voters Action Fund, a major environmental group, pledged to engage with ”environmental justice” leaders and unions while unveiling “more investments in a clean energy economy.”
“The vice president and his team do really care about defeating the climate crisis and understand the next president will be a climate president because that’s what the science demands,” said Maggie Thomas, a former climate adviser to the campaigns of Jay Inslee and later, Elizabeth Warren. Thomas told the Washington Examiner she was “impressed” with the strides Biden has made.
Thomas is now the political director of Evergreen, a policy group launched Thursday, that is encouraging Biden to establish standards, or mandates, to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in various economic sectors while setting earlier timelines to get off fossil fuels.
Center-left climate activists say they are not offended by Biden’s outreach to liberals.
“He’s doing this in an inclusive way that listens to progressives and moderates, which is why Democrats are more united than they’ve been in years,” said Josh Freed, clean energy director for the think tank Third Way.
Rabe said he sees little political risk in Biden soliciting the ideas of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez with the shared task force, which is also expected to help shape the Democratic National Committee’s climate agenda for the convention.
“It’s hard to see AOC serving on a task force influencing a lot of swing voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin,” Rabe said. “What would change is if there are major new initiatives that Biden would introduce in terms of policy that could alienate him to the Left or Right.”
Nat Keohane, senior vice president of climate at the Environmental Defense Action Fund, an environmental group that has not endorsed a candidate, said he sees only a political “upside” in catering to liberal activists.
He noted that major federal initiatives to address climate change are popular across the Democratic Party and an issue of concern in swing states such as Florida, a state vulnerable to sea level rise, and among suburban women, an important general election constituency.
“There is nobody who is gettable for Biden who doesn’t want climate action,” Keohane said. “People opposed to climate action on ideological grounds are opposed to Biden anyway.”
Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University, said Biden risks upsetting his success at “walking a fine line between satisfying progressives and the establishment” if he overly focused on appeasing young people, a group with a poor turnout record, even for Sanders.
“Bernie found out you can’t get young people to come out in sufficient numbers, now the idea is the progressives are going to bring those people to vote for Biden? It’s a dream,” Schmidt said.
A key for Biden is how he decides to frame the push for aggressive federal policies to curb climate change, analysts and activists say, especially because the campaign season will coincide with the nation facing economic devastation from the pandemic.
“It’s really important that Biden emphasize the job creation aspects of any clean energy policies ahead of the climate benefits,” said Paul Bledsoe, an adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute, who worked on climate change for the Clinton administration. “Otherwise, it’s going to get poor reception with most American voters during this crisis.”
Biden could be well-positioned to make that pitch, Democrats say, given his work as former President Barack Obama’s vice president helping implement the Recovery Act of 2009, legislation dedicating $90 billion to clean energy programs that lowered the cost of wind and solar.
“There are similarities to 2008 and ’09 when we were also amid an economic downturn,” said Dan Reicher, an energy policy professor at Stanford University who was co-chair of the energy and environment transition team for Obama. “When we are facing a deep economic crisis, there is a very strong united agreement that part of the response to that is accelerated development and deployment of clean energy.”
Reicher now helps lead the group Clean Energy for Biden, which held a virtual fundraiser with the former vice president on Earth Day.
Sam Ricketts, co-founder of Evergreen, the new climate policy group that has advised Biden, is urging the vice president to not back down in the face of certain attacks from President Trump and a Republican Party already geared to tag Biden as a socialist no matter what.
“We know the Republican tactics, and we know they are going to deploy them shamelessly,” said Ricketts, who was climate director for the Inslee campaign. “The Trump administration and the Republican Party are going to say things are too expensive, that the clean energy economy we literally need to build can’t be built, and we will just have to flatly reject those arguments.”
