Welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet.
If you’re new to Planet Days, every other week I send out a three-minute read on what it means to go green — ranging from topics on air-conditioners and lawns to college football and baseball.
📉 President Joe Biden’s approval rating this week dropped to 37%, a near-record low for his administration. But I have a way he can boost those numbers, and it starts with — you guessed it — climate change.
A supervisor once told me that what you do only matters if others know about it. That’s the challenge that the Biden administration faces this coming year.
A new Washington Post–University of Maryland poll finds that 70% of Americans know little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act — the most significant climate law in United States history. The kicker is that after being told about the IRA, people overwhelmingly support the law.
How the White House bridges this gap will be key to President Biden’s, and his party’s, success in next year’s election.
The Inflation Reduction Act, along with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act, are three of the White House’s most significant legislative achievements — and each massively invests in climate. That’s particularly important as more and more people support government investments in green technologies and jobs.
Yet despite Biden being the greenest president in U.S. history, the same WaPo-UMD poll finds that most Americans (57%) disapprove of Biden’s handling of climate change.
Part of that disapproval is due to the steep uphill battle on climate that any modern politician faces. Because previous administrations and generations have repeatedly kicked the climate can down the road, the task of drastically slashing decades of carbon emissions falls on whoever’s in power.
But because the climate has been so politicized, one can’t simply fire up a Green New Deal and watch it go. So a lot of Biden’s climate success is a fine balance of appeasing liberals without pissing off conservatives. And that balance has left us with imperfect laws.
More importantly, however, is that these laws even exist. Both the infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act would not have passed without bipartisan support, while the IRA required a prolonged courtship with the right-leaning, fossil fuel–backed senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin.
Biden’s willingness to work with political opponents is important as we enter the next phase of legislation: implementation.
So far, local opposition to the IRA has blocked some green projects from getting permitted. And at the state level, Florida, South Dakota, Iowa, and Kentucky refused to apply to climate money in the IRA.
This is all important because of how the law may or may not slash nationwide emissions. A July 2023 analysis finds that the Inflation Reduction Act alone could lower U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 29% to 42%, compared to 2005 pollution levels — a huge range, especially since the U.S. is the second-highest global emitter of greenhouse gasses.
For all its divisiveness and politicization, however, the current state of domestic politics can also help the president. For the first time in history, the House ousted its speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), because of his willingness to work with Democrats to prevent a government shutdown.
McCarty’s removal shows the downside of clinging to an ideologically pure mindset, one that refuses to concede anything to the opposing party. Rather than use the speakership to advance conservative priorities, Republicans have presented themselves as a bastion of messy incompetence.
Such an approach makes it impossible to govern and could even cost the Republicans their House majority, writes The New York Times:
“In a democracy, victory requires winning enough votes to take power, which in turn requires persuasion. That doesn’t mean winning over most of your opponents. It does often mean winning over some of them. And it’s difficult to persuade others if you stop listening to them.”
Conversely, by working across the aisle, Biden presents himself as someone who gets stuff done, and his three signature climate wins are proof of that.
Now it’s time to tell everyone about it.