October 23<\/a> and that they\u2019d been backing Trump from the first day of his new administration \u2014 well, it\u2019s politically pretty clear that you have to dance with the one that brung you. Which is not to say you hang the building trades out to dry: Biden\u2019s call for unity is real and important, and any plan for the future needs to be very focused on making sure that people currently building oil pipelines have something else to build instead.<\/p>\nIn fact, the ability to figure out a \u201cjust transition\u201d is crucial to making progress at the speed we need to go \u2014 and it\u2019s entirely possible that a guy from Scranton, with deep ties to Rust Belt unionism, is better positioned to do precisely this than most people in the environmental movement. It\u2019s a place where he should be given some room to operate, especially since he\u2019s been willing to say the essential thing out loud: that we must transition away from the oil industry. Those words in the last debate were powerful, and they did not doom him \u2014 not in Pennsylvania or Colorado or in other places with lots of fossil fuel jobs. He\u2019s earned some credibility.<\/p>\n
The environmental movement will win any fight over Moniz, I imagine, but it won\u2019t win every fight. Biden doesn\u2019t have much margin \u2014 even if the Democrats somehow win both Georgia Senate seats and hence take control of a tied Senate, West Virginia\u2019s Joe Manchin has said he won\u2019t vote to end the filibuster \u2014 nor, likely, for anything that looks like a sweeping Green New Deal. And that\u2019s a bitter shame, because it\u2019s all desperately needed. But you live with the political reality you have while you try to build the political reality you need, and simply denouncing the Dems won\u2019t get you any closer to the latter, emotionally satisfying as it may be. Waging important fights while not damaging the Biden presidency, and Democratic prospects in the midterms, and the next presidential election will be incredibly hard \u2014 but since climate legislation (and support for all other progressive legislation) depends on just that, we better figure out how.<\/p>\n
I have a few memories of the last time we were in this position, when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. It was a very different scene, of course: Occupy Wall Street hadn\u2019t happened, Black Lives Matter had yet to be born, Bernie Sanders hadn\u2019t yet run, and AOC had just turned old enough to vote, so there was less of a progressive movement, and much less of a climate movement. The Obama administration was in the midst of the headlong expansion of the oil and gas industry that would eventually make America the biggest hydrocarbon producer on the planet. Climate activists knew what was happening was wrong, but we debated long and hard about whether to take on the Keystone XL Pipeline because we also knew that it meant challenging a president popular with Democrats, the first African American president.<\/p>\n
So when we went to work we didn\u2019t attack him \u2014 instead we explained that we were giving Obama the room to do what he\u2019d said he wanted to do. When 1,254 went to jail after anti-fossil-fuel demonstrations in D.C. at the start of that campaign in 2011, most were wearing Obama buttons, because that\u2019s what we\u2019d asked them to do. A few months later, when we surrounded the White House \u2014 people five-deep around a mile-and-a-half perimeter \u2014 we said he might want to think of it not as a house arrest, but as a group hug. I\u2019m not na\u00efve \u2014 I know Obama didn\u2019t really want protesters forcing his hand on what he thought was a secondary issue. (He was wrong about that, by the way \u2014 Keystone XL turned out to be a critical battle, demonstrating that it was possible to stand up to Big Oil, and hence helping spur crusades against every big new infrastructure project). But certainly it was better \u2014 and more tactically effective \u2014 to take him on in the spirit of unity, not the spirit of division.<\/p>\n
Opponents of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines hold a rally in 2017 as they protest President Donald Trump\u2019s executive orders advancing their construction.<\/span> Saul Loeb \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\nAnother way to keep the mood from turning impossibly bitter is to remember that Washington isn\u2019t all that counts. In the climate fight, for instance, it\u2019s clear that action from Wall Street is crucial too \u2014 the divestment push, now at $15 trillion in endowments and portfolios, has made a huge difference, as has the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, which has started convincing financial institutions to ditch fossil fuels.<\/p>\n
And here the Biden administration can provide massive help: Mitch McConnell can\u2019t stop the Treasury Department, the SEC, and the Fed from forcing banks to take climate risk seriously. People in the right positions who understand that risk, like Elizabeth Warren and former Federal Reserve Board member Sarah Bloom Raskin, will make that fight much easier by, say, requiring companies to disclose their climate risk, and by turning institutions like the Export-Import Bank away from fossil fuels. When Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, started down this path five years ago, it sent tremors through the fossil fuel financial complex, and those would be seismic if they came from Wall Street, not just the City of London. It\u2019s possible, in fact, that these could turn out to be the most important climate actions a Biden administration will ever take.<\/p>\n
This will always, inevitably, be a hard marriage. Denied action for so long, and in need of such deep change, the broad progressive movement will rightly demand a lot. Biden will have to deliver all he can. And we will need to figure out a way to keep it from turning into an ugly split that benefits no one.<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s note: Bill McKibben is a member of Grist\u2019s Board of Directors.<\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\n\nThis post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For four years the country has been governed by\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,109,110,4,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions\/282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}