Even with a Biden win, America loses
Trumpism is part of our national identity. As we wrestle with that sobering reality, the international community has moved on.
“We did not win every battle, but we did win the war,” United States Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told her congressional colleagues Thursday, as former Vice President Joe Biden inched closer to winning the presidency.
But for environmentalists, it’s hard not to feel like we lost the most important fight — the one for our Planet.
Even if Joe Biden secures the presidency, this election wasn’t the green wave many environmentalists hoped for. The Senate will likely remain controlled by Republicans, who will prevent Biden from rolling out any significant climate measures, including his $2 trillion climate plan.
And Republicans have little motivation to change their tactics. After all, despite largely ignoring or denying climate change, they fared well across the board, even in states hit hard by climate-fueled disasters this year. It didn’t seem to matter that voters were increasingly concerned over climate in polls before Election Day.
That’s not to say there won’t be progress. A Biden administration would undo many of the rollbacks Trump put in place. And it would appoint heads to guide agencies back toward science-friendly policies and initiatives (though Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has already said he’ll make this difficult).
But with climate, everything is urgent. And without sweeping legislation that cuts our carbon footprint, these changes are too little, too impermanent, and possibly too late to prevent us from an unraveling climate apocalypse.
The bitter coincidence, or perhaps cruel irony, of all this is the timing of the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. As votes were still being counted on Wednesday, the U.S. became the first country to formally leave the international agreement, which aims to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels.
That same day, Biden reaffirmed his commitment to the agreement in a tweet. But stymied by a gridlocked Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, there’s not much his administration could do to deliver on international targets, even if it wanted to.
Rejoining the Paris Agreement is possible, but Trump’s isolationist “America First” policy has badly damaged the country’s reputation. The U.S. has now exited two international climate agreements (the first was the Kyoto Protocol in 2001), and countries are getting used to moving on without them.
France President Emmanuel Macron struck this tone in September, when he insisted that Europe and the rest of the world would operate with or without America on board, in a passionate speech at the United Nations General Assembly: “The world as it is today cannot come down to simple rivalry between China and the United States, no matter the global weight of these two great powers, no matter the history that binds us together, and especially to the United States of America.”
Biden may come in and repair some of the damage, but try as he may, the U.S. will no longer be at the head of the international table.
Not long ago, many of us dreamed of a different election outcome, one where Biden wins in a landslide, takes control of the Senate, and passes the most ambitious climate legislation in the nation’s history.
The election was supposed to be a repudiation of the racism, division, lies, and outright moral repugnancy of Trumpism. It was supposed to show how we can reclaim the unity, progressivism, and innovation that catapulted the United States to a world power in the first place. Now, however, it’s clear that Trumpism is part of our national identity.
As we wrestle with that sobering reality, the international community has moved on. They have made their minds up without the U.S. at the table, replacing the country’s seat with common sense and smart economics.
“Almost all countries would welcome a U.S. return to the table of global climate leaders, but major economies know this is an inevitable economic and societal shift, and have shown they will stand together to move international climate cooperation forward under either [election] outcome,” said Laurence Tubiana, an architect of Paris Agreement, in a statement.
With this year’s election, the U.S. missed the mark again, failing to capitalize on the international shift toward green policy. The country is left alone at its own table, which, perhaps above all, is what Trumpism was always about.