Biden Owes Young People. He's Selling Our Future to Fossil Fuel Executives | Opinion
President Joe Biden managed to secure a tight victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Despite sizable leads in the popular vote and electoral college, Biden ultimately prevailed thanks to 43,000 votes in a few swing states. His win did not come easy, and Biden largely has young voters to thank for narrowly escaping defeat.
According to research from Tufts University, in 2020, turnout among Americans aged 18-29 rose by 11 points compared to 2016. This bloc, who heavily leaned Democrat, "made the difference in key battleground states." The youth carried Biden to victory, seeking a new progressive chapter in American history following the horribly reactionary Trump years.
In return for delivering him the presidency, Biden owes young people—as well as LGBTQ folks and communities of color—policy that will materially improve our lives. So far the president has failed to deliver—thereby betraying the voters to whom he arguably owes the most.
This betrayal is particularly obvious on environmental issues. Despite some heralding Biden as the first climate president, preventing ecological breakdown doesn't seem to be high on his agenda. On March 13, Biden approved the Willow Project—an Alaska oil drilling venture of appalling scope. The development includes 200 oil wells connected by multiple pipelines.
Experts estimate that the Willow Project will, by itself, generate emissions equivalent to the entire country of Belgium. And Belgium, for the record, is far from green. A wealthy European nation home to almost 12 million people, it ranks within the bottom septile of the Sustainable Development Index.
Adding insult to injury, Biden's Department of Interior recently auctioned an Italy-sized chunk of the Gulf of Mexico for drilling. This move defied the president's "pre-election promise to halt all drilling on federal lands and waters." Reopening massive tracts of the Gulf for extraction also threatens to repeat the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.
Despite these and other missteps, the president has made some important steps toward environmental protection. As Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, noted, at times, Biden has "led on climate with transformative vision." The president took historic action by passing the Inflation Reduction Act. More recently, Biden promised to veto Republicans' Polluters Over People Act, which would further deregulate the oil and gas industry. These were correct policy decisions by Biden. But science doesn't compromise, and the future of all young people is not something the president can waffle on.
For decades, the world's top climatologists have been pounding the gavel calling for a transition to green energy. The Biden administration, like their Republican opponents, are choosing to ignore this warning and lean further into fossil fuel extraction. That is reckless, to say the least, amid an unprecedented ecological crisis.
On March 20, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yet another stark warning about just how bad things have gotten. Their report found that we are on track to surpass the dreaded 1.5-degree Celsius tipping point by the early 2030s. With this, we can expect "climate disasters ... so extreme that people will not be able to adapt."
The call to action is clear: We must stop fossil fuel extraction immediately to avoid catastrophic impacts on the living world. Approving new fossil fuel infrastructure will only catapult us into the most dire scenarios.
Yet Biden seems content to accelerate humanity's race toward the precipice of climate doom. His generation may not bear the brunt of this environmental mismanagement, but young people certainly will.
Biden's actions with respect to climate are bad enough. What he's not doing also matters.
There are at least four bills in Congress which stop short of a full-fledged Green New Deal but would nonetheless promote environmental justice considerably. H.R.6492, sponsored by Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), would mandate the creation of a national climate resilience plan and an Office of Climate Resilience within the White House. H.R.3923 would force Congress to address environmental racism. And H.R.2021—the Environmental Justice For All Act—covers similar terrain by mandating the creation of rules and advisory bodies "to address the disproportionate adverse ... environmental effects of federal laws or programs on" marginalized communities. Finally, H.R.4442—Representative Jamaal Bowman's (D-N.Y.) Green New Deal for Public Schools Act—earmarks $1.43 trillion in investment over the next decade to revamp "public schools and infrastructure to combat climate change."
President Biden hasn't used his bully pulpit to promote these bills—even as fellow Democrats clamor for their passage. It is clear where his sympathies lie—not with the youth who elected him, but the fossil fuel executives who desire windfall profits more than a livable planet.
Elias Khoury is a member of New Deal for Youth, an initiative of the Center for Law and Social Policy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
