With Omicron and climate, Biden is one step behind
In both crises, the president has failed to learn from the past.
Welcome to Planet Days! As I wrote earlier this month, we’re now publishing biweekly articles to offer fresh context and analysis to an important climate story from the week.
Two weeks ago, we covered the car industry, and this week, we’re unpacking the president’s response to the Omicron variant.
If you have any feedback on the new format, simply reply to this email or send us a note at planetdaysnews@gmail.com. As always, thanks for reading, and if this was forwarded to you, smash that subscribe button:
Now, onto the story:
It’s been five weeks since the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus sent shockwaves throughout the United States.
As cases climbed to hundreds of thousands overnight, holiday plans were disrupted and travelers stranded. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued several confusing statements, leaving people unsure what a safe gathering means amid the busiest travel week of the year.
President Joe Biden has since committed to sending at-home tests to residences and making N95 masks available for free. But it’s too little, too late: Omicron may have already hit its peak, with millions of Americans infected.
This sounds eerily similar to another poorly managed crisis, one that requires proactive thinking and urgent action, though is often met with anything but: the climate crisis.
For years, the U.S. ignored climate change and threw a bunch of money at the problem only after climate-fueled disasters devastated communities. These impacts are now piling up: Last year saw 20 separate billion-dollar climate disasters, only two behind the record-breaking 2020.
We’ve had solutions like clean energy, transformed infrastructure, and carbon capture available for years. But we’ve also lacked the political will to cash in on them — not the least because of partisan gridlock and a leave-it-to-the-states mentality.
As Omicron continues to disrupt daily life, it’s hard not to see the parallels between climate and the latest COVID variant. In both cases, our responses are decentralized and dripping with partisanship.
Perhaps just as importantly, though, the president is instilling little confidence to properly handle either crisis. That comes down to Biden’s inability to learn from the past.
A majority-conservative Supreme Court was always likely to block vaccine mandates, just as it’s likely to block critical executive orders on climate. The Delta variant, which became the dominant U.S. strain six months ago, was replaced by an even more contagious variant, just as climate impacts are now compounding on each other.
In both cases, Biden failed to make informed, proactive decisions, despite all the data available.
The administration, for example, failed to take seriously the power of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who represents a soaking red state and once ran an ad where he shot a physical piece of climate legislation, while also boasting his lawsuits against the EPA.
Manchin is now the key holdout on Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which includes $550 billion in climate provisions. Despite his less-than-ideal background, though, Manchin last month reportedly sent the White House a $1.8 trillion proposal with more than $500 billion in climate funding. But alas, the White House rejected it, holding out for a more progressive bill that would never come.
Of course, Biden’s first year had many notable climate successes — a slew of executive orders, leadership on the international level, a sweeping climate-heavy infrastructure package. But if we look at his predecessors, many of his wins also have little staying power.
Like Trump and Obama before him, Biden is relying too much on executive actions, which can be reversed by future leaders, as well as in the courts (which is already happening). In short, he’s failed where it matters most.
"Without this [Build Back Better] bill, we really don't have a plan to tackle the climate crisis in the U.S.," Leah Stokes, a senior policy adviser at Evergreen Action, told CNN.
Like any politician, Biden is touting his wins, while failing to admit his losses: “Should we have done more testing earlier? Yes,” Biden said at a press conference last week. “But we’re doing more now.”
Should we have stopped funding the fossil fuel industry, banned offshore drilling, and quickly transitioned into a clean energy economy? Yes. But we’re doing more now.
This is the terrifying thing with Biden’s approach to both the Omicron variant and now climate change. “Now” is too late.
A year into his presidency, Biden is without his key climate law and even further away from its passage than ever before. After months of negotiations, Manchin recently said talks would “start with a clean sheet of paper and start over."
Meanwhile, the virus runs rampant, the Planet burns, and I’m still waiting on COVID tests in the mail.