By pushing for more oil production, the US is killing its climate pledges
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has driven home just how dangerous the climate crisis is. Faced with this unprecedented and unique challenge, the central question is: can we change course rapidly enough to contain the damage and preserve a halfway liveable planet? If the stark findings of the IPCC were not alarming enough, they are all the more so given the mounting evidence that the impetus for large-scale climate action may be ebbing.
Given the onrushing disaster, we may be forgiven mood swings. Earlier this year, it seemed that the balance of political and economic forces might be swinging in favour of rapid decarbonisation. China, Japan and South Korea had all made net-zero pledges. Trump, the climate-denier-in-chief, had lost the White House. The new Biden administration was pushing what was billed as a major green infrastructure programme. The NextGenerationEU stimulus package was raising ambition. First the Bank of England and then the European Central Bank (ECB) took on the climate issue. The German Green party was riding high in the polls. Investors and financial markets were dumping dirty assets. Even a lobby like the International Energy Agency, once created to represent the interests of oil consumers, was charting a course to net zero. On 14 July, the EU announced its Fit for 55 plan, which implied, among other things, an end to the sale of new internal combustion engine cars by the early 2030s.
That was a high point, but was it also a turning point – in the wrong direction? Horrifyingly, as we digest the IPCC findings, the sense of momentum is flagging. The G7 in Cornwall in June could not agree on an end to coal. The EU and US are at loggerheads over carbon tariffs. The fractious meeting of G20 environment ministers in Naples last month showed how little goodwill there is ahead of the Cop26 summit in November. In the UK, which will preside over the meeting, the Tory party is engaged in bitter infighting over climate. In the US Congress, the climate component of Biden’s infrastructure bill has been reduced to a pale shadow. Meanwhile, as the global economy recovers so too are energy prices, stoking fears of increased fuel costs. In Germany, the Greens have been dogged by agitation around petrol prices. Finally, on Wednesday, in a statement issued from the White House by the national security adviser Jake Sullivan, these tensions exploded into the open.
Sullivan’s statement reads as follows:
“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic. While Opec+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that Opec+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough. President
Biden has made clear that he wants Americans to have access to affordable and reliable energy, including at the pump. Although we are not a party to Opec, the United States will always speak to international partners regarding issues of significance that affect our national economic and security affairs, in public and private.”
Yes, you read that correctly. One of the most senior figures in the Biden administration, the administration that promised climate was “everywhere” in its policy, is declaring that an increase in petrol prices to $3.17 per gallon is a matter of national security and that the US reserves the right to cajole Opec and Russia into flooding the world with more oil.
We should not mince words: if this is the stance of the Biden administration then its decarbonisation agenda has been well and truly buried. According to no less an authority than the IEA, if we are to reach net zero by 2050, we need to end fossil fuel capacity expansion now. In Europe, the likes of Shell are being told by the courts to make plans accordingly. To fill the gap, Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producing company, has let it be known that it is expanding its capacity. Biden’s national security adviser has just given it the green light.
It isn’t only oil markets. Gas prices too are surging and there are calls to expand capacity. There is a power play at work. If politicians get serious about
decarbonisation, the oil and gas industry will stop new investments. Since, as things stand, economic activity and fossil fuel consumption are hardwired together, rising demand running up against inelastic supply will produce spikes in prices. Consumers will pay that price and will vent their frustration on politicians. And there is a social justice dimension. Surges in fuel prices hurt low-income consumers most. The Biden administration is committed to a foreign policy for the American “middle class”. On Sullivan’s interpretation, that means pushing the oil oligarchs of Opec and Russia to expand production. It is completely at odds with the IPCC’s message, published only days before.
The US is unique among western powers in having true geopolitical heft. If the EU or Japan squeal, Opec and Russia shrug, which is why this is such a critical test for the Biden administration. If the US is serious about tackling the climate crisis it must use its unique geopolitical leverage not to sustain fossil fuel production, but to curb it.
If prices rise, let that serve notice to affluent consumers that it is overdue for them to shift from giant SUVs to electric vehicles (EVs). To help lowincome Americans what is needed is not an Opec production push, but a broad range of measures to ensure that fuel bills do not press so severely on family budgets. That is why Biden’s agenda on jobs, wages, families and the care economy is so crucial. If fuel poverty as such is an issue, adopt targeted relief including, for instance, a national cash-for-clunkers programme, whereby incentives are offered to trade old cars in for new, fuel-efficient ones. Meanwhile, push harder for EV infrastructure and transformative research and development to make low-carbon alternatives affordable for everyone.
The halting progress of Biden’s infrastructure plans and Sullivan’s reactionary oil policy are joined at the hip. Only if the US can set in motion a just transition at home can it credibly lead on climate on the global stage. Until it does, like the fossil-fuel addict that it is, whether governed by Republican or Democrat, it is fundamentally unreliable. Bear that in mind in assessing the scenarios of the IPCC.
Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University. His book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook The World’s Economy, is out on 7 September
one of the leading voices for ethical, accessible healthcare in the US. With unvarnished scenes of caregiving and a heaping dose of Barkan’s sardonic wit, the film, directed by Nicholas Bruckman, traces the central paradox of his life post-diagnosis: the weaker he gets, the louder he becomes.
In the face of declining motor skills, a terminal prognosis (most ALS patients survive three to five years postdiagnosis, though some, such as physicist Stephen Hawking, live decades with the disease), and an eventual tracheotomy, Barkan pleaded a case for universal healthcare fueled by his personal experience. “He used his story as a weapon,” Bruckman told the Guardian, to become, as Politico Magazine called him in a March 2019 profile, “the most powerful activist in America”.
Not Going Quietly observes roughly two years of Barkan and his family’s life as he uses his illness to draw attention to numerous healthcare issues in the US – the exorbitant costs of chronic healthcare, potential cuts to homehealth funding, the risk that insurance companies could deny coverage for “pre-existing conditions”. Following his diagnosis at 32 in 2016, Barkan, a lawyer and progressive organizer who had gained limited national attention for focused policy campaigns, took his motorized wheelchair on the road.
In December 2017, he met another organizer, Liz Jaff, while waiting for a flight from Washington DC to Phoenix. Arizona’s Republican senator Jeff Flake happened to be on board. Barkan confronted Flake and urged him to vote against the Trump tax cuts that would probably make healthcare costs balloon. “What should I tell my son, or what should you tell my son, if you pass this bill and I can’t get a ventilator?” he pleaded, while Jaff filmed. “You can be an American hero,” he added. “You could save my life.”
The tactic was unsuccessful – Flake voted for the measure, which passed. But the video went viral, launching Barkan on to the national news circuit and, along with Jaff, a spitballing, indomitable cross-country campaign, Be A Hero, to flip the House in the 2018 midterms on the basis of healthcare reform.
Bruckman connected with Barkan shortly after the Flake incident, in early 2018, to film a brief promo for Be A Hero. Their initial meeting, at Barkan and King’s house in Santa Barbara, California, appears in the film’s first five minutes. Barkan is in good spirits, laughing as King changes his clothes and fluffs his hair. Shirtless, he jokes to the camera: “How about like this?”
“I realized that this is not somebody with even an ounce of self-pity,” Bruckman recalled of that moment. Barkan was “really using humor as a tool to fight back against this disease, in the same way that he was using his story to fight back against what was happening under the Trump administration and the fight that continues to erupt over healthcare in the US”.
By then, Barkan was already more than a year post-diagnosis and had only about six more months left with his natural voice; the pressure was on to record as much of his voice as possible, as Barkan “wanted to create a time capsule of who he was for his son”, said Bruckman.
“We were just all in to capture this chapter in his life,” Bruckman said. Still, Barkan’s declining condition presented Bruckman’s team with several thorny ethical issues – not in how vulnerable to be on screen, or how much of the caregiving process to show (one notable scene depicts Barkan’s best friend, Nate Smith, helping him shower at a campground bathroom on the Be a Hero tour). Rather, the question was how to direct Barkan’s waning reserves of energy. “A lot of days when we were with Ady away from his family, he only had about 30 minutes of voice in him for a whole day before his voice would give out,” said Bruckman. “So we had to decide: do we interview him and have him talk to us about this movie? Or should he call his son for what is one of their limited conversations on the road, and with only a few months left for his son to hear his voice?”
The team frequently chose the latter, opting for a cinema vérité depiction of Barkan’s chats with Carl, eating pasta on FaceTime, or the moments – at a speech, in the RV – when it becomes clear his speaking voice is giving out. The motor decline of ALS is shot through with bracing acceptance and dark humor – at one point, Barkan jokes that the 79-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders “becomes a raisin while I become a vegetable”. At another, he’s stoned in the RV, laughing uncontrollably as he attempts to eat an “ALSfriendly” s’more. Barkan’s final message with his natural voice? “Peace out, motherfuckers.”
“Ady really inherently understood that the nitty gritty, warts and all, the real, authentic, painful, funny, poignant moments of his life were what would make effective advocacy and political change,” Bruckman said. “The goal of these confrontations is not to get Jeff Flake to flip his vote, necessarily,” he said, citing the influence of lobbyists and corporations on lawmakers. “What we can do is we can show the impacts of their policies, we can document that through our stories, we can share that and we can build people-powered movements that win elections,” as in several House districts in 2018, “and gets the politicians replaced.”
Barkan and King, an English professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, continue to live in California with five-year-old Carl and their daughter Willow, born in 2019. Barkan remains a staunch proponent of Medicare for All and influential progressive voice who prodded all of the Democratic candidates on healthcare before the 2020 election. His endorsement of Joe Biden in July 2020, following the end of Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s campaigns, was a notable win for a Biden campaign eager for progressive figures to actively back the moderate nominee.
Not Going Quietly concludes before all that, before Biden’s victory in the 2020 election and Barkan’s current focus: the fight to pass a $3.5tn infrastructure package with provisions for childcare, healthcare subsidies and eldercare. But the lessons of the Be A Hero tour, and the amplification of one’s personal experience, carry forward. “Ady’s story asks this fundamental question of: well, if Ady can participate in our democracy, what’s my excuse?” said Bruckman.
“What do you do with the time you have left?” he added. “How could something that feels meaningless or painful or tragic or a loss be turned into a tool to make a better world, either for our democracy at large or for the people that you care about in your life?”
Not Going Quietly is released in US cinemas on 13 August with a UK date to be announced
advances across the country, female journalists have been forced to work in secret, using many pseudonyms to conceal their identity.
Funding is another challenge, says Joya. As an entirely self-funded initiative, it is hard to keep the project afloat, particularly as the situation in the country worsens.
“But I will try to keep it going for as long as I can. I see it as a source of hope for many women,” she says. “Afghanistan may not have much but it is our voice [of the media], and we must preserve it.”
• Now more than ever, Afghan women need a platform to speak for themselves. As the Taliban’s return haunts Afghanistan, the survival of Rukhshana Media depends on readers’ help. To continue reporting over the next crucial year, it is trying to raise $20,000.
If you can help, go to this crowdfunding page.