The New York Times - USA (2020-11-15)

4 SR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020

I

T’S HARD to tell whether Donald Trump is

attempting a coup or throwing a tantrum.

Crying voter fraud, his administration

has refused to begin a presidential transi-

tion despite his decisive electoral defeat. Some

Republicans have floated the idea of getting

legislatures in states that Joe Biden won to dis-

regard vote totals and instead appoint pro-

Trump electors to the Electoral College. The

president has decapitated the Pentagon,

putting fanatical loyalists in some of its high-

est ranks. Anthony Tata, who called Barack

Obama a “terrorist leader” and tweeted a lurid

fantasy about the execution of the former

C.I.A. director John Brennan, is now the Pen-

tagon’s policy chief. This is all supremely

alarming.

But there’s cause for comfort, of a sort, in

signs that the president is preparing for life

outside the White House in exactly the way

one would expect — by initiating new grifts.

Trump has been sending out frantic fund-rais-

ing requests to “defend the election,” but as

The New York Times reports, most of the

money is actually going to a PAC, Save Amer-

ica, that “will be used to underwrite Mr.

Trump’s post-presidential activities.” Axios re-

ports that Trump is considering starting a dig-

ital media company to undermine Fox News,

which he now regards as disloyal.

These moves suggest that while Trump may

be willing to torch American democracy to

salve his wounded ego, at least part of him is

getting ready to leave office.

When he finally does, some political observ-

ers and Republican professionals assume he’ll

remain a political kingmaker, and will be a fa-

vorite for the party’s nomination in 2024. The

Times reported, “Allies imagined other Repub-

licans making a pilgrimage to his Mar-a-Lago

estate in Florida seeking his blessing.” Sena-

tor Marco Rubio told The Daily Beast’s Sam

Brodey, “If he runs in 2024, he’ll certainly be

the front-runner, and then he’ll probably be the

nominee.”

Maybe. There’s no doubt that Trump has a

cultlike hold on his millions of worshipers, and

a unique ability to command public attention.

But there are reasons to think that when he is

finally ejected from the White House, he will

become a significantly diminished figure.

Once Trump is no longer president, he is

likely to be consumed by lawsuits and criminal

investigations. Hundreds of millions of dollars

in debt will come due. Lobbyists and foreign

dignitaries won’t have much of a reason to pa-

tronize Mar-a-Lago or his Washington hotel.

Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch could com-

plete the transition from Trump’s enabler to

his enemy. And, after four years of cartoonish

self-abasement, Republicans with presidential

aspirations will have an incentive to help take

him down.

“His whole life he’s been involved in a bunch

of litigation,” said the superstar liberal attor-

ney Roberta Kaplan. But post-presidency, “I

have to assume that, given the amount of civil

litigation and potential criminal exposure, it’s

going to be at a completely new dimension.”

Kaplan is fighting three high-profile law-

suits against Trump, including the writer E.

Jean Carroll’s defamation case. Carroll, you

might remember, accused Trump of raping her

in a department store dressing room during

the 1990s. Trump called her a liar, and she’s su-

ing him for damaging her reputation.

Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the De-

partment of Justice has tried to shut down the

suit, arguing that Trump was acting in his offi-

cial capacity when he said Carroll had made up

the story to sell books. In October a judge re-

jected the department’s theory, but had Trump

been re-elected, Kaplan expected an appeal.

Once Biden is president, Kaplan told me,

“it’s hard for me to imagine that the D.O.J.

won’t change its position.” So the case is likely

to proceed. Kaplan expects it to go into discov-

ery shortly after Biden’s inauguration. She an-

ticipates deposing Trump and collecting his

MICHELLE GOLDBERG

D

URING the months that Joe Biden and

President Trump were campaigning

against each other, vast sections of the

American West caught on fire. More

than five million acres burned, and the air in

California, Oregon and Washington was some-

times more harmful to breathe than in the pollu-

tion-clogged cities of India.

In the Atlantic Ocean this year, there have

been more big storms recorded than in any pre-

vious year — 29 thus far, so many that the group

that names storms exhausted the English al-

phabet and had to switch to Greek. Nine of those

storms became much more intense in the span

of a single day, an event that was rare before the

planet was as warm as it now is.

Worldwide, the month of September was the

hottest ever measured, and 2020 may end up be-

ing the hottest year. The Arctic is warming even

faster than the rest of the planet, and glaciers

are losing more ice each year than can be found

in all of the European Alps. Sea levels now seem

to be rising at an accelerating pace. In Siberia,

melting ice appears to be releasing gases that

cause gigantic explosions, leaving craters that

are up to 100 feet deep.

Climate change is a fantastically complex

phenomenon. It does not proceed at a steady

pace, and scientists are often unsure precisely

what its effects are and which weather patterns

are random. But the sum total of the evidence is

clear — and terrifying. The Earth is continuing

to warm, breaking new records as it does, and

the destructive effects of climate change are

picking up speed. Future damage will almost

certainly be worse, maybe much worse.

Yet there is also a major way in which 2020

has the potential to be a turning point in the

other direction. A president who has called cli-

mate change a hoax — whose administration

has tried to discredit government scientists and

has overhauled federal policy to allow more pol-

lution — has lost re-election. He has lost to a

candidate who made climate policy a bigger

part of his campaign than any previous winning

president.

The last two Democratic presidents, Barack

Obama and Bill Clinton, put a higher priority on

expanding health insurance than fighting cli-

mate change. Mr. Biden, by contrast, has said he

will accomplish his unavoidable short-term pri-

orities — controlling the coronavirus and re-

starting the economy — in significant part by

fighting climate change.

He has proposed spending $2 trillion on clean

energy over the next four years to put people

back to work, a sum that’s almost 20 times

larger than the clean-energy spending in Mr.

Obama’s 2009 economic-recovery package. Em-

bedding clean-energy measures into other pol-

icy areas is likely to be a theme of the Biden

presidency. His advisers have told me that dur-

ing almost every policy discussion, they ask

themselves how to incorporate climate.

The issue is simply more salient today than it

was in 2008, as Gina McCarthy, who ran the En-

vironmental Protection Agency under Mr.

Obama and has advised Mr. Biden, points out.

“The difference between then and now is that

the issue of climate change is so much more rel-

evant and personal now,” said Ms. McCarthy,

who runs the Natural Resources Defense Coun-

cil. “There is a real opportunity here that I think

Biden is capturing.”

What he can accomplish, of course, will de-

pend on Congress — and specifically on

whether Democrats manage to win both Senate

runoffs in Georgia in January. That won’t be

easy. If Democrats don’t win both, Republicans

will keep Senate control, and one of the world’s

few major political parties that rejects climate

science will be able to block large parts of Mr.

Biden’s agenda.

But even in that scenario, he is likely to shift

federal policy in a profound way. His advisers

have spent months thinking about how to re-

duce carbon emissions through regulation

rather than legislation. And Mr. Biden may also

be able to win over a few Republican senators —

which is all he would need — for an economic

recovery bill that included billions of dollars of

clean-energy spending.

The fact that Mr. Biden seems inclined to

make the climate a top priority does not stem

from a longtime personal obsession. He is not Al

Gore. But he has spent his career trying to un-

derstand where the center of the Democratic

Party is moving and then moving with it. And

both the Democratic Party and the country

have moved on climate.

For many young progressives and political

activists, who will have to live most of their lives

on a planet suffering from climate-related dam-

age, climate is the defining issue. “There’s so

much pressure from the outside, from young ac-

tivists — it’s very impactful,” said Kathy Castor,

a Democrat from the Tampa area who heads the

House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

Consider that Bernie Sanders made Medicare

for All his signature issue; Alexandria Ocasio-

Cortez has made the Green New Deal hers.

If anything, the attention on racial injustice

since George Floyd’s killing in May has put

more momentum behind climate policy. When

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey of

Massachusetts released the Green New Deal —

a statement of principles, rather than a detailed

piece of legislation — last year, some moderate

Democrats and climate experts criticized its

breadth. It called not only for stopping global

warming but also for addressing economic in-

equality and racism.

Now, though, that broad approach means that

climate policy feels like a crucial part of another

progressive priority: combating racial inequi-

ties, by reducing the disproportionate health

damage that pollution causes in Black and Lati-

no neighborhoods. Rhiana Gunn-Wright, who

helped write the Green New Deal and now runs

the climate program at the Roosevelt Institute,

said that she used to spend a lot of time answer-

ing questions about how climate change and ra-

cial justice were connected. “I don’t get asked

those questions anymore,” she added.

In addition to the activist energy, broader

public opinion seems to be shifting, as climate

change has gone from being a hypothetical fu-

ture problem in many people’s minds to an ev-

eryday problem. In a Pew Research Center poll

this year, 52 percent of Americans said that

dealing with global climate change should be a

top priority for the president and Congress. In

2009, only 30 percent did. In a New York Times/

Siena College poll during the campaign, 66 per-

cent of likely voters said they favored Biden’s $2

trillion climate plan, with only 26 percent op-

posed.

As Ms. Gunn-Wright said, “It’s getting harder

and harder to act like climate change is a long-

term issue that’s coming down the pike.”

Regardless of what happens in the Georgia

elections, Mr. Biden’s approach to climate

change will differ from Mr. Obama’s. Like most

of the Biden agenda, this change reflects a

larger shift in the party. In the case of climate,

Democrats have become more hardheaded

about the tricky politics of the issue. The change

has been subtle, and no politician has ever an-

nounced it. But it has also been fundamental.

Democrats used to focus their efforts to pass

a climate bill on the idea of raising the cost of

carbon emissions, through either a tax or a sys-

tem of permits, known as cap-and-trade. For all

of the complicated details, the basic idea was

simple: If dirty energy became more expensive,

people would use less of it.

Many economists favor this approach, be-

cause it harnesses the power of market incen-

tives to shift millions of people’s behavior. Mr.

Obama also hoped that the market-oriented ap-

proach might win enough Republican votes to

get it through the Senate. It did not.

Without bipartisan support, a price on carbon

has a huge political weakness. Because higher

costs are the central part of the plan, opponents

are able to brand it as a tax increase for hard-

working families. That criticism helped defeat

the Obama plan in the Senate and has also led to

the downfall (or weakening) of climate policies

in other countries. If a carbon price can’t pass,

its technocratic elegance and economic efficien-

cy are irrelevant.

Having learned this lesson, many progres-

sives changed their strategy. They have moved

away from a carbon price and now focus on the

two other major ways that a government can

address climate change. The first is to subsidize

clean energy so it becomes cheaper and, in turn,

more widely used. The second is put in place

rules — often called standards — that simply

mandate less pollution, leaving utilities and

other companies to work out the details of how

they will emit less carbon.

These two approaches are the core of the Bi-

den agenda. And the creation of standards will

be the most important one if Democrats fail to

win both Senate races in Georgia.

Crucially, a president already has the legal

authority to enact standards in the sectors that

emit the most carbon, like utilities and trans-

portation. Mr. Biden will not need new legisla-

tion to do so. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled

that the Clean Air Act applied to carbon emis-

sions, allowing the Environmental Protection

Agency to restrict them. Mr. Obama used this

power, and Mr. Biden will probably be even

more aggressive.

Standards can have a big effect. The Obama

policies, combined with technological advances

in solar and wind power, have helped reduce

coal’s share of the power sector to 20 percent,

from almost 50 percent in 2010. Thirty states

have created their own energy standards, in-

cluding California, New York, Arizona and Col-

orado, which has also helped. In some cases, the

state-based policies are the result of a referen-

dum.

The Post-

Presidency of

A Con Man

Remember Climate Change?

‘There is a real opportunity

here that I think Biden is

capturing.’

NEWS ANALYSIS

BY DAVID

LEONHARDT

A senior writer at

The Times.