By Kidus Desta
Since beginning his first term in January 2021, liberals have routinely heralded Joe Biden as America’s first climate president. Yet Biden’s policy record shows that he is thoroughly undeserving of that title. Take, for example, the president’s recent approval of the Willow Project.
Centered in the remote tundra on Alaska’s northern coast, the new drilling venture’s scope is appalling. It includes 200 oil wells connected by multiple pipelines. Experts estimate that the Willow Project will, by itself, generate total emissions equivalent to the entire country of Belgium within 30 years. And Belgium — for the record — is far from green, ranking within the bottom septile of the Sustainable Development Index.
More recently, Biden decided to auction off over “73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico” for oil and gas drilling. For comparison, the country of Italy is about 74 million acres. Estimates state that this would lead to emissions of about “21.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.” That is more than the entire nation of Bolivia.
Biden approved the auction in partial fulfillment of a deal party leadership made with Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). To secure Manchin’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats inserted “requirements for new oil and gas leases” into the bill. They also added a stipulation preventing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland from “issuing a lease for offshore wind” until the oil and gas sale goes through.
The administration has failed to deliver on campaign promises of tackling climate change as it continues leading initiatives that will worsen this global emergency. And their concessions to conservatives like Manchin were unnecessary. Rather than forming a deal with the opposition on the uncompromisable issue of climate change, the Democrats could have instead pressured more conservative Democrats through acts such as removing them from committees. Instead, Manchin continues to serve as Chair of the Senate Energy Committee without any repercussions. The Democratic Party continues to immediately concede on many issues rather than applying pressure to the opposition which results in nothing positive ever getting done.
The Biden administration’s actions with respect to the climate have thus been extremely reckless in the midst of an unprecedented ecological crisis. On March 21st, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yet another stark warning about just how bad things have gotten. Their report found that we are on track to surpass the dreaded 1.5-degree tipping point by the early 2030s. With this, we can expect “climate disasters… so extreme that people will not be able to adapt.”
“Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered,” the Panel’s scientists continued. “Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by the century’s end.”
Despite this, Biden seems committed to accelerating humanity’s race toward the precipice of climate doom. In that crucial respect, the Democratic president bears stunning resemblance to his Republican opponents. When it comes to climate change, perhaps Democrats and Republicans are not so different after all.
The rhetorical strategies of each party tend to obscure this reality. Whereas Democrats often gesture toward ecological justice, Republicans just deny climate change — and, therefore, the need to address it — altogether. But, ultimately, both parties are united in their commitment to worsen — or, at the very least, not improve — the situation.
This is obviously bad news, since preventing total environmental destruction will take an extraordinary policy response. New research in The Lancet states that ensuring a climate-safe future and decent living standards for all would require massive reductions in global inequality. Crucially, the global Gini coefficient might need to fall below those of even the most egalitarian European nations.
This becomes a problem when accounting for the innate characteristics of capitalism. Because the economic system inherently prioritizes capital and profit over human needs. Anthropologist Jason Hickel writes eloquently on this topic in his book Less is More.
He describes the “self-reinforcing cycle” that turns profit into capital in pursuit of endless growth. To recoup their investments, corporations must continue to grow. This leads them to “scour the globe” for any sign of potential growth.
Without growth, businesses will fail as they lose their investments and are consequently outcompeted by other firms. Even companies in a dominant market position cannot afford to just maintain. As Hickel explains, capital that sits “loses value” due to factors such as inflation and depreciation. These “pressures of growth” are so strong that corporations will disregard long-run environmental consequences, even if they’ll prove personally injurious. Capitalism demands that endless growth and accumulation be the top priorities.
But how does this drive lead to environmental devastation? To grow and enrich themselves, corporations must produce. This often requires the “extraction of fossil fuel,” the “razing of forests and draining of wetlands,” and so on.
These acts contribute to the destruction of the environment through climate change, soil depletion, and the creation of ocean dead zones lacking the oxygen to support biodiversity. The United Nations even estimates that the extraction capital demands is “responsible for 80% of total biodiversity loss.” While this may seem counterintuitive due to billionaires living on the same planet, the drive towards growth is a logical outcome within a capitalist framework.
Given the moment’s growing urgency, we must recognize the failures of our current systems. It has exacerbated the climate issues we face. In the United States, it is clear that both the Democratic and Republican parties have prioritized capital over the well-being of the planet and the people who inhabit it. Global capitalism also does the same. To provide a better world for future generations, radical and systemic changes are needed to create a system that holds humanity and our planet as the priority.
Kidus Desta is a Hampton Institute intern and undergraduate studying political science and economics at Virginia Commonwealth University.
