Climate legislation is failing under Joe Biden because the Green New Deal strategy was ignored from the beginning. We need to link decarbonization directly to material gains for the working class, not technocratic clean energy policies.

The election of a Democratic president and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress raised hopes among climate activists. In the summer and fall leading up to a historic meeting of the United Nations Convention of the Parties (COP), the major US environmental organizations and the president got behind a legislative strategy to win a transformative climate policy.

But as time wore on, and the president refused to use executive action to spur decarbonization, it appeared the quicksand of Washington politics would again doom any meaningful climate action. Climate activists were left to hold their breath for yet another round of international COP negotiations, where the largest historic emitter would again act more as a barrier than leader in the climate struggle.

I’m referring to president Barack Obama’s first term in 2009 — but I could just as easily be describing president Joe Biden in 2021. In 2009, the policy du jour was the Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” bill, which would have set up an emissions cap and emissions credit trading system. Today, the policy of the hour is the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), which we recently learned is likely dead due to the opposition of coal state senator Joe Manchin. While the planet is screaming that we need bold action, the White House press secretary is saying, “Compromise is not a dirty word.”

With the CEPP off the table and the COP meetings ongoing, climate wonks and administration officials are now trying to argue that a revised Build Back Better Act (BBB, the budget reconciliation bill) can still accomplish their ambitious climate goals. Promoters tout its historic size ($550 billion in climate initiatives), yet a massive proportion ($320 billion according to one estimate) is in the form of “tax credits”: government incentives to try to nudge the private sector into action.

Tax credits represent a full 86 percent of all spending in the energy portion of BBB. The bill lacks any measures to force investor-owned utilities (or any other businesses) to rapidly transition from fossil fuels.

Progressive climate activists who pursued the “inside strategy” to push Biden left will no doubt tout the remaining measures as the most ambitious climate policy passed in US history. But this is a very low bar. As climate journalist Kate Aronoff recently put it, the BBB is “a world-historic abdication of responsibility.” Even the central priority of the Sunrise Movement, the Civilian Climate Corps — part of the group’s public jobs vision of a Green New Deal — would receive $30 billion (or 9 percent of the tax credits). It appears more like a recharge of AmeriCorps than FDR’s original CCC.

So, what happened? Many progressives and climate advocates have attributed the new impasse to the depredations of one coal-money-soaked individual, Joe Manchin. But in truth, there was something wrong with the strategy from the beginning. Despite all evidence from the Obama years, Democrats and climate advocates have continued to put their faith in a legislative strategy rooted in a technocratic policy fix.

There was another option. Call it the Green New Deal (GND) strategy — the same Green New Deal Joe Biden flatly denounced in his campaign. The GND strategy is deceptively simple. Tie decarbonization directly to public investment and visible material benefits for the working class — and in doing so, stitch together the majoritarian bloc required to both pass a climate agenda and stave off the advance of the Right.

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