Michael Grunwald’s Politico piece begins with Jigar Shah, a “green finance legend” who created Generate Capital, overseeing over 2,000 sustainable energy projects and co-hosts the top-rated iTunes climate podcast, but who nevertheless took a relatively obscure job doling out government energy loans because he wanted to be part of the Biden effort to confront the climate emergency which requires an “all-hands-on-deck” response.The piece continues:
“We’re in a unique time,” Shah said. “There’s a power of now, a real sense we need to get to work on the big things we haven’t done since FDR. And there’s a new sheriff in town.”
The sheriff has recruited a Who’s Who of veteran climate leaders along with a mission-driven posse of outspoken younger climate wonks and activists to help him take on global warming. Biden’s climate all-stars will help him as well as pressure him to keep his climate pledges, including a zero-emissions electric grid by 2035, a carbon-neutral nation by 2050 and the 2030 goals he plans to announce this week at his Earth Day climate summit.”
Grunwald describes the team that Biden has assembled, including his most senior White House climate aides:”all former managers of large agencies who are now content just to have the president’s ear.” This team also includes the Cabinet, selected with the climate in mind:
“And while it’s not surprising that a Democratic Cabinet would include committed climate officials like Michael Regan at EPA, Deb Haaland at Interior and Jennifer Granholm at Energy, Biden’s transportation, commerce and labor secretaries, Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo and Marty Walsh, sound just as climate-forward. Buttigieg ran for president as a climate champion; Raimondo pushed America’s first offshore wind farm as governor of Rhode Island, and Walsh, the former Boston mayor, took over the Climate Mayors coalition in November before he was tapped to join the new administration. Even Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who took a mostly traditional approach to the same job under Obama, keeps saying that climate will be one of his top priorities this time around.”
Even Biden’s chief of staff has climate credentials. “And a diverse array of next-generation voices from the worlds of advocacy, philanthropy, think tanks and government have moved from Climate Twitter to powerful roles throughout the Biden Administration.”
Grunwald sums up the import of all this:
It’s often said in Washington that personnel is policy, and it would be hard for the president not to push the climate envelope after hiring so many envelope-pushers. If Biden has recruited the climate equivalent of America’s 1992 Olympic “Dream Team” — as Ali Zaidi, McCarthy’s deputy, describes it — his Michael Jordans and Charles Barkleys will all expect to hoop."
The team leaves behind the slog of disputes that have kept meaningful efforts from being made. For example, as one participant said: “The assumption is that climate isn’t just aligned with the economic agenda, it is the economic agenda.”
Not everyone sees such clarity in the Biden team—at the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer worries that progress can’t get past contradictory analyses. But in concentrating on the people involved, Grunwald makes a good case that this is the make-it-or-break it team we’ve been waiting for, and building towards.
It may be too late, and they may end up accomplishing too little, too slowly. Events may well overtake these efforts, and other factors—such as the continuing power of such reactionary responses as white supremacy to weaken the kind of societal cohesion that may well be necessary to face both the causes and consequences of the climate emergency—may end up being fatal.
But fighting the good fight at the very least ennobles the present, and without these efforts, the future of the Earth is all but guaranteed to be tragic for life as we know it, and certainly for humanity. For those who love the Earth and will continue to participate in this society, this should be an exciting time.
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