How Joe Biden can Reach out to Red States on Climate Change | Opinion

Earth Day comes every year, but this time it was just one more day in a busy year of climate diplomacy. Boris Johnson will convene a climate-focused G7 summit in the U.K. this June. A formal follow-up in Scotland to President Joe Biden's rejoining the Paris Climate Accord is scheduled for this November. The U.S. chief climate negotiator, John Kerry, will need every diplomatic skill he learned as secretary of state to restore economic growth while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Amid all this international climate diplomacy, my plea to the new administration is to adopt an equally intensive "domestic diplomacy" at home. Our democracy demands the same principles of fairness, the same concern for investment and jobs, the same diplomatic "listening" to find common courses of action on climate and energy in the United States as abroad.

We don't have a common course yet. To find one, this new administration needs to hold back a command-and-control, Washington-knows-best impulse and attempt to build a practical, state-by-state consensus on the future of energy. Doing so will not only better meet the needs of the citizenry; it will also better protect the climate itself.

While he has at times shown hostility to oil and gas, President Biden leads a nation that depends on those fuels for jobs—not to mention heat, boats, jets, cars, trucks, light, power, industrial feedstocks and more. Energy tax revenue pays for schools, clean water, environmental protection and homeland and national security. Acknowledging and respecting these needs goes a long way toward finding alternative ways to meet them.

My state, Alaska, knows the effects of climate change—including thinning sea ice, eroding coastlines, acidifying oceans, changing wildlife and wildfire patterns. We have fought for environmental justice by bringing jobs to our rural areas and using oil revenues to invest in sanitation, health, education, cheaper energy and telecommunications. We have taken the lead in testing renewable energy and cleaner fossil energy technologies—while producing oil and gas—for more than a generation.

We care about our environment—and we get very upset when Washington, D.C., or overreaching courts, take our livelihood off the table unilaterally.

Just recently, a small exploratory drilling program in Cook Inlet near existing gas wells which provide heat and light to more than half of Alaska's population—myself included—was halted by a federal judge on the theory that tug traffic serving the rigs might impact beluga whales.

The decision was "command and control" at its worst. Other countries' tugs, fishing vessels, cruise ships and oil tankers don't even need a permit to sail in these waters. Global efforts are being made—efforts we support—to identify best practices and institute rules to mitigate ship noise affecting marine mammals. Indeed, the exploration work that the judge halted was trying to find replacement sources of gas so we don't have to import energy from polluters such as nearby Russia, a country that just last year had the world's largest Arctic oil spill.

Alaskans want to keep the money—and the jobs—here at home, as we explore other Cook Inlet-area alternatives in tidal, wind, geothermal and hydro energy.

To clean up our energy sources, our country needs to make winners and winners, not winners and losers. We must avoid turning our climate efforts into a war on the country's west, where energy underlies many states' economies. We need to understand the role U.S. energy production can have in leading the world to cleaner fuels. We need to acknowledge that U.S.-produced energy, consumed here and abroad, helps keep nefarious nations at bay. Our push to improve clean-energy technology from fossil fuels should be just as strong as our impulse to include a greater share of renewables in our energy mix.

"Domestic diplomacy" by the Biden administration on energy and climate might go this way:

First, ask governors to come together. Each state has unique ways to reduce greenhouse gases in oil and gas production and consumption. We can produce hydrogen, biofuels and ammonia to substitute in domestic and global markets, and some of that will come from fossil fuels we still use.

Second, further enlist and incentivize our universities, tech entrepreneurs and yes, oil and power companies, to push forward technology for carbon capture and sequestration. Low-hanging fruit includes exploring ways to decarbonize natural gas and ways to improve forest and ocean biological absorption. Our pioneering in this field can lead the world.

Third, work with American miners to produce the rare-earth minerals that would break China's monopoly—as well as minerals like zinc, nickel, lithium and graphite that go into the batteries needed for electric cars, trucks and, someday, airplanes.

Fourth, help us all, here and abroad, to reduce emissions from short-term forcers of climate change. In states where production and pipelines leak a lot of gas, there's work to be done. Policies to reduce forest fires and soot or "black carbon" that helps melt sea ice and northern glaciers can also buy us time.

Fifth, understand, as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in her confirmation hearing, that America's growing exports of liquefied natural gas have already helped dramatically reduce carbon output from global energy production. Avoid breaking the financing system that helps make these projects happen.

Finally, recognize that, while we should use less oil over time, we also shouldn't cede the oil and gas markets to other, less environmentally friendly countries like Russia. Even as late as 2050, in any energy mix scenario that moves us toward net-zero emissions, fossil fuels will still have some role. States spend considerable efforts promoting foreign trade and investment, and the administration should support states where oil and gas are to be part of the picture.

Most Americans forget that even Joe Biden and John Kerry voted, with 93 other Senators, against the Kyoto Accord in 1997 because they believed the sacrifices to the U.S. economy were greater than those asked of developing nations like China. Today's domestic efforts to protect the environment should meet the same standards of fairness Senators Biden and Kerry voted for then.

While many reject climate diplomacy as fostering globalism, most can agree the climate is a global problem. Leveling the playing field across the world is a good goal. The Harvard Business Review reports "companies, which are the biggest contributors of CO2 emissions, emit less CO2 at home when domestic environmental regulations are strict. However, these companies also emit more abroad, particularly in countries with laxer environmental standards."

But that does not mean the Biden administration can ignore climate cooperation between U.S. states. Treating climate as if it exists in a vacuum is not wise or productive. Neither is making domestic policy without conducting diplomacy at home.

Mead Treadwell served as the Lieutenant Governor of Alaska from 2010-2014 and as chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006 to 2010. He is an investor in both fossil and renewable energy companies.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.