Biden shouldn’t let climate activists hijack pragmatic plans
Left-wing activists already are showing their anti-market tendencies, piling pressure on President-elect Joe Biden to use obscure agencies to impose strident regulations rather than make room for innovation in solving the climate crisis.
An array of environmental groups is calling on the Biden administration to hamstring the fossil fuel sector so it slowly dies rather than allow it to evolve and rise to the clean energy challenge.
The recommendations mirror President Donald Trump’s use of those same agencies to boost coal, oil and gas projects and are no less foolish.
(Columnist’s note: If you thought I would fall into lockstep with a Democratic president, you have not been reading my work closely. I will call out bad decisions and policies, no matter who is behind them.)
The business community should condemn these progressive proposals with the same coordinated opposition they mounted against Trump’s market-distorting tactics. Governments should set milestones, not dictate roadmaps.
In this case, former campaign aides to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee have started a group called Evergreen Action. They have recommendations for how the Treasury Department can rapidly destroy the fossil fuel industry.
First, they suggest Janet Yellen, Biden’s nominee to lead Treasury, order the Financial Stability Oversight Council to use the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act to “to limit fossil fuel investments on the basis of their prospective risks to financial security, even to the point of forcing fossil fuel divestment by certain institutions.”
Where Trump wanted to make it illegal for investment advisers to avoid fossil fuel investments routinely, Evergreen Action wants to force banks, pension funds and others to bail on them.
The group’s paper argues that since climate change is hurting
the economy, no entity should invest in fossil fuel companies.
Evergreen Action also recommends Biden appoint financial regulators “who share the understanding of climate risk and show willingness to act to remove it from the system.” Never mind that Congress never intended those laws to be used in that manner or that destroying those companies could do more harm than good.
Radical environmentalists would pre-empt companies like Occidental Petroleum from transforming from an oil company to a carbon management firm. CEO Vicki Hollub says Oxy can capture more carbon than it produces by injecting CO2 into oil wells while extracting the petroleum the world always will need.
The Trump administration amply demonstrated what happens when you place political lackeys in key government posi-cause tions. His Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Andrew Wheeler, just relieved oil and gas companies of having to demonstrate the financial wherewithal to deal with a major oil spill, leaving taxpayers on the hook.
Biden has promised Americans he would bring normalcy and professionalism back to the federal government. Appointing partisan activists does not fulfill that commitment.
Policies like these are what infuriate conservatives and business people who have spent their careers supplying consumers with the affordable energy the public needs. Such steps are a sure-fire way to turn hundreds of thousands of people against more practical solutions to mitigating climate change.
I understand the latest science should increase our urgency to do anything and everything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But for Biden to bring transformational change, we need to bring people to the through consensus, not exclusion or ham-handed bureaucracy.
To be fair, Evergreen Action does offer some good ideas.
Corporations that sell stock in U.S. exchanges should explain to investors how a changing climate will affect their businesses. Shareholders should know whether the executive team has a plan for coping with a warmer world operating in a low-carbon economy.
The Biden administration also should ensure that whatever steps the U.S. takes to mitigate climate change, the rest of the world follows suit. Americans will not quietly carry most of the financial burden.
Biden should remember activists are responsible for identifying problems, proposing solutions and campaigning for them. They are not paid to compromise; they are paid to make aspirational demands.
Liberals and conservatives both like to vilify the other side’s activists, but really, they are harmless as long as they are kept out of power.
So far, Biden’s appointments suggest he will do what politicians usually do: take incremental steps built on compromise to anger as few people as possible. Hopefully, he will disappoint the folks at Evergreen Action as much as he frustrates the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Most Americans understand the climate is changing. What we need now is a political strategy that will unite us in slowing global warming, not a campaign that will divide us more.