Wake Up, Grow Up, Get to Work, and Stop Blaming Biden
Some of my greenie friends express their frustration with insufficient climate action by forgetting who their friends are and forming circular firing squads. We need to be able to act strategically and distinguish enemies from allies. Oftentimes, like in a Marriage, we have to compromise to keep a coalition together. Sometimes, the enemy of our enemy is our friend. And, all too often, we make the Perfect the enemy of the Good.
A famous, perhaps apocryphal, story about Franklin Roosevelt goes that FDR listened to arguments from progressives, and then responded, ““I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.”
True or not, it’s an insightful story about the realities, and limitations, of Presidential power.
As the election approaches, the lesson needs to be kept firmly in mind. Democrats too often seem to think they can elect an omnipotent Executive who can make everything suddenly Perfect – and turn on anyone who does not immediately blow rainbows and unicorns out their behind. Political realities are that, while a Chief Executive is a critical piece of making change, turning the ship of state requires a lot of effort by a host of folks, and a lot of squirrels on treadmills in the engine room. The main thing wrong with the Democratic Party right now is that we have not elected enough of them to make one Coal State Senator irrelevant.
Old enough to remember when we were told “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between George Bush and Al Gore”. As a result, a critical number of lefties and greenies voted for the guaranteed loser, third party candidate Ralph Nader, a onetime idol and role model for me, who I met, and was awed by, as a college student. I think time there’s a million or so Iraqis that would respectfully question the wisdom of that vote, but they can’t. Because they’re dead. Also, by the way, that botched election helped give us the most regressive Supreme Court in a century.
On Sunday, tens of thousands of demonstrators protested in Manhattan, blaming President Biden for the shortcomings of U.S. climate policy. Echoing them, Lydia Millet called America “the colossus that stands in the way of a planetary crackdown on emissions,” and demanded that Mr. Biden take decisive, unilateral action against fossil fuels.
Yes, Mr. Biden could declare a climate emergency, ban fossil fuel exports, cancel oil leases and stop fossil fuel investing abroad. After being immediately halted by conservative judges, those emergency actions would go down in flames on 6-to-3 votes in the Supreme Court.
Presidents have cultivated the image that they are all-powerful. But critics are fooling themselves if they think that Mr. Biden, acting alone, could be the solution. In reality, his options are very limited.
Dan Farber Oakland, Calif.
The writer is a law professor and faculty director at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of “Contested Ground: How to Understand the Limits of Presidential Power.”
On Wednesday, the Biden Administration plans to offer leases for sale to oil and gas companies allowing drilling on 67 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico – a large swath of the outer continental shelf stretching from offshore of Texas to the Florida Panhandle.
The lease sale had been previously planned by the Trump Administration, then put on hold by President Biden. Then it was resurrected and mandated by law as part of Biden’s compromise with Senator Joe Manchin to pass Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, which included subsidies for clean energy as well as requirements for more oil and gas leasing in the Gulf.
The U.S. oil industry hit a legal roadblock in January when a judge struck down a $192 million oil and natural gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico over future global warming emissions from burning the fuels.
It came at a pivotal time for Chevron, Exxon and other industry players: The Biden administration had curtailed opportunities for new offshore drilling, while raising climate change concerns.
The industry’s setback was short-lived, however. The climate measure President Joe Biden signed Tuesday bypasses the administration’s concerns about emissions and guarantees new drilling opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. The legislation was crafted to secure backing from a top recipient of oil and gas donations, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, and was shaped in part by industry lobbyists. –
The Inflation Reduction Act is without a doubt the largest and most important piece of climate legislation ever enacted – which does not mean that I love every part of it – but compromises were made to get past the roadblocks set primarily by one man, Senator Joe Manchin. It’s worth remembering that while Senator Manchin may indeed be a bastard and a tool of the fossil fuel industry, his seat in the Senate is a thin line between us and a fossil fuel dominated shit show, and has allowed the confirmation of a steady stream of solid, young. competent and fair judges that we are going to desperately need in this ongoing battle to save democracy.
All that said, sometimes protesters do choose the right target.
One sore point for a lot of enviros has been Conoco Phillip’s proposed Willow Project in Alaska, which the administration reluctantly approved in March. The reflexive greenie reaction is, “we knew it, the bastards are selling us out.” Reality, as always, is nuanced.
Ultimately, the administration made the internal calculation that it did not want to fight ConocoPhillips, the company behind the Willow project.
ConocoPhillips has held leases to the prospective drilling site for more than two decades, and administration attorneys argued that refusing a permit would trigger a lawsuit that could cost the government as much as $5 billion, according to administration officials who asked not to be identified in order to discuss legal strategy.
“The lease does not give Conoco the right to do whatever they want, but it does convey certain rights,” said John Leshy, who served as the Interior Department’s solicitor under President Bill Clinton. “So the administration has to take that into account. I would not say their hands were tied, but their options were limited by the lease rights.”
The leases are essentially a contract and if the Biden administration denied the permits, essentially breached the contract, without what a court considered a valid argument, a judge would likely find in favor of the company, Mr. Leshy said. It would be unusual for a court to simply order the government to issue permits; more likely a judge would award damages, he said.
That figure could include not just compensation for investments ConocoPhillips has already made but also profits that the company could have gotten if it had been allowed to drill, Mr. Leshy said, putting a potential judgment into the billions of dollars.
Ms. Murkowski said she believed the legal argument was the turning point for Mr. Biden. “There was no way around the fact that these were valid existing lease rights,” she said. “The administration was going to have to deal with that reality.”
To try to minimize the fallout, the Biden administration demanded concessions. It slashed the size of the project from five drilling sites to three. ConocoPhillips agreed to return to the government leases covering about 68,000 acres in the drilling area, which lies within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. And the administration said it would put in place new protections for a nearby coastal wetland known as Teshekpuk Lake. Those measures would effectively form a “firewall” that would prevent the Willow project from expanding, the administration said.
Mr. Biden also intends to designate about 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean near shore in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska as off limits for future oil and gas leasing. And the Interior Department plans to issue new rules to block oil and gas leases on more than 13 million of the 23 million acres that form the petroleum reserve.
A whole lot of outrage being expressed on social media about a newly approved Arctic drilling site. Everyone needs to chill.
No, it’s not a betrayal, it’s a tough choice among limited options. Key in this case is to continue working to lower demand for fossil fuels, and make this a bad investment and a stranded asset for Big Oil.
I’m reminded of the heat the Obama Admin took when it approved Shell oil drilling in the offshore arctic – a decision I thought was actually wise and well advised.
My information at the time, from folks like the late U of Manitoba’s David Barber, was that, contrary to the CW that drilling in the arctic was supposedly getting easier – in fact, the break up of reliably frozen areas in the arctic ocean was actually making things dicier, more difficult and unpredictable in the area. I suspect that Obama was getting this advice as well.
The outcome was that an expensive, high tech Shell drilling rig, after dodging and fleeing from massive icebergs for weeks, ended up aground on a remote island, and Shell abandoned 7 billion in arctic investments as oil prices could not support the continued effort.
The obstacles today are not rocky arctic shores, although they clearly remain formidable. There are legal rocks and hurdles as well, that a wily, veteran, battle-hardened executive might well foresee.
In addition, there is a chance, that by passing even an imperfect climate bill, that the gap between what oil companies want to do, and what they can afford to do, yawns even wider. File this under “I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.”
In documents filed Tuesday in Anchorage, international oil company ConocoPhillips said an ongoing federal court case is likely to make or break Alaska’s largest planned oil development in decades.
If Alaska District Court Judge Sharon Gleason cancels required federal approvals, “the Willow project is highly unlikely to proceed at all,” said Connor Dunn, vice president of Willow for ConocoPhillips.
Dunn’s statement came as ConocoPhillips filed a legal reply to several environmental groups who sued the federal government earlier this year and asked Gleason to overturn existing federal approvals as inadequate.
The plaintiffs include the Alaska Wilderness League, Sierra Club and Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic. A similar lawsuit, filed in 2020, overturned a previous federal approval and forced regulators to restart their process, and new approval was granted this spring.
The federal government is opposing the environmental groups’ lawsuit and is backed by ConocoPhillips, the state of Alaska, the North Slope Borough and a variety of companies and industry groups who hope to see the project developed. – If the case isn’t resolved by then and ConocoPhillips can’t work this winter, there is a risk that the company could fail to meet the requirements of its land lease with the federal government. – It’s possible that the federal government allows a lease extension, he said, but that’s not guaranteed. –
“It could take years, depending on market conditions, to reassemble the right team to execute the project safely and efficiently,” Dunn said. “This is a real, practical consequence of a vacatur order, and it would weigh heavily against ConocoPhillips moving forward with a project that faces a risk of lease expiration.”
The exponential growth of electric vehicles (EVs) means that ICE (internal combustion engine) sales and gasoline demand have already peaked and will be in freefall by 2030. So the end of the ICE age has begun, putting at risk half of global oil demand. This is the subject of RMI’s latest report: X-change: Cars.
1. EV Sales are growing exponentially up S-curves
EV sales growth is on an S-curve, and one country after another is taking a similar path. In broad terms it is taking about six years for countries to go from 1 percent to 10 percent market share and then another six years or so for leading countries to get to 80 percent. Globally, nearly one in five car sales in 2023 will be an EV, up from one in ten two years ago.
Exponential is the new normal
2. Forecasters keep underestimating the speed of EV growth
Each year forecasters revise their EV market share projections upwards, as battery prices fall on learning curves, consumer preferences shift to EVs, and leading countries figure out how to upgrade grids and deploy charging infrastructure. Consensus is currently clustered around an EV market share of 40 percent in 2030, but that would require growth to slow down dramatically. Such a slowdown is of course possible, but that is a contrarian position, not a default one.
It’s just the greatest irony that the Republicans who want to blame high fuel prices on Democratic presidents would have frantic fits at the thought of the US nationalizing the oil&gas industry.
The politics blog I read has noted all of the media coverage and commentary that will blame the Democrats for not achieving something without mentioning that there is Another Party that is actively blocking attempts to address climate change, protect workers, improve public health, etc.
Murc’s Law
Only Democrats have agency or any causal impact on American politics.
I myself have been frustrated when NPR has a minutes-long report on the Democrats’ failed attempt to do something with their slim majority (as when negotiating with Manchin and Sinema) to, say, reduce child poverty without using the word “Republican” once in the story. (“The Elephant Not in the Room”)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6GRRLMUcAMYmmx.jpg
It’s just the greatest irony that the Republicans who want to blame high fuel prices on Democratic presidents would have frantic fits at the thought of the US nationalizing the oil&gas industry.
The politics blog I read has noted all of the media coverage and commentary that will blame the Democrats for not achieving something without mentioning that there is Another Party that is actively blocking attempts to address climate change, protect workers, improve public health, etc.
I myself have been frustrated when NPR has a minutes-long report on the Democrats’ failed attempt to do something with their slim majority (as when negotiating with Manchin and Sinema) to, say, reduce child poverty without using the word “Republican” once in the story. (“The Elephant Not in the Room”)