6 NEWS Controversy of the week
Biden: Will his climate agenda make a difference?
“A new day for the climate” is coming, said
Elizabeth Kolbert in NewYorker.com. In the
first weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency, “a critical
threshold has been crossed” in the fight against
climate change. Biden immediately signed a
raft of executive orders recommitting the U.S.
to the Paris climate accords, canceling the con-
troversial Keystone XL pipeline, and pledging
a “clean energy revolution” that will bring the
U.S. to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by
2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
He followed this with “a second, even more
sweeping batch” of orders that halted the selling of new leases for
oil and gas production on federal lands; created a conservation jobs
program, the Civilian Climate Corps; and instructed federal agen-
cies to make the shift to zero-emissions vehicles. Biden campaigned
on a promise to make climate action a priority, said Justin Rowlatt
in BBC.com, but he stopped short of endorsing the “Green New
Deal” championed by progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez. But AOC said she was “extraordinarily encouraged” by
the scale and speed of Biden’s climate agenda, which has impressed
even the nation’s “deepest green activists.”
Biden has already achieved his primary climate goal, said
WashingtonExaminer.com in an editorial: to “signal virtue to the
rest of the world and burnish the new administration’s un-Trumpy
credentials.” This rebranding exercise will force consumers to pay
higher energy prices, and by canceling Keystone XL, Biden elimi-
nated 1,000 U.S. jobs with just a stroke of his pen. More fossil-fuel
jobs will be lost over time. Meanwhile, despite its empty promises,
China continues to bring dirty new coal plants online. Biden’s cli-
mate polices are “a gift to China.” Rather than pander to costly
“climate alarmism,” said Bjorn Lomborg in NYPost.com, Biden
should invest billions in green energy research
and development to achieve a technological
breakthrough. When renewables are cheaper
and as efficient as fossil fuels, “everyone
would switch” voluntarily.
Executive orders can get Biden only so far,
said Spencer Bokat-Lindell in The New York
Times. To effect lasting change, we need new
laws, but “getting buy-in from Congress is
likely to be extremely difficult.” With the
filibuster still in place, new legislation will
need 10 Republican Senate votes, not to
mention the vote of West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin,
who in a 2010 campaign ad literally shot the last major climate
bill with a rifle. (See The Last Word, p. 36.) If Biden wants new
laws, he could try to “build consensus,” said Kevin Williamson in
NationalReview.com. Instead, he seems determined to handle cli-
mate change the way Democrats tackle all problems: by ramming
through “massive spending schemes” without bipartisan support.
The politics of climate are changing, said Henry Olsen in The
Washington Post. Americans are witnessing and experiencing
prolonged droughts and heat waves, rampaging wildfires, more
damaging hurricanes, persistent coastal flooding, and extreme
weather of all kinds—just as climate scientists predicted. This is
“becoming an issue that the Right cannot ignore.” Biden’s execu-
tive orders won’t by themselves “make greenhouse gases go away,”
said Eugene Robinson, also in the Post. But they’re a clear state-
ment of intent. Biden believes that breakthroughs in green technol-
ogy should happen here in America, “and that the jobs from those
advances should go to U.S. workers.” Republicans will resist, “if
only for resistance’s sake.” But history is on Biden’s side, “and
history—eventually—always wins.”Only in America
QThe family of a Louisiana
sheriff’s deputy was unable
to bury him in their local
cemetery because it still had
a “whites only” policy. After
Deputy Darrell Semien died,
officials at Oaklin Springs
Cemetery told his family their
contracts restricted burials to
“white human beings.” That
policy has now been changed,
but the family buried Semien
elsewhere. “I couldn’t believe
what I was hearing,” said
Semien’s widow.
QAn 8-year-old Oklahoma girl
has been expelled from school
for telling another girl she
had a crush on her. Delanie
Shelton says officials at the Re-
joice Christian Schools told her
daughter Chloe that just ex-
pressing same-sex attraction
was a violation of the Bible.
Shelton said Chloe had been
“ripped away” from teachers
and friends, and asked, “Does
God still love me?”Making amends, after former QAnon adherent Jitarth Jadeja told
CNN’s Anderson Cooper he’d really believed that Cooper was among
the liberal elites who routinely murder children and drink their
blood. “I apologize for thinking that you ate babies,” Jadeja said.
Brave new worlds, with Elon Musk’s announcement that sci-
entists at his Neuralink startup have successfully given a monkey
a wireless brain implant that lets it play video games by the sheer
power of thought. “He looks totally happy,” said Musk.
Stopping the steal, after election officials in Georgia said they
were investigating Lin Wood, President Trump’s colorful election-
fraud lawyer, for allegedly voting in Georgia after he had moved to
South Carolina.Maturity, following the arrest of six people who altered the iconic
HOLLYWOOD sign above Los Angeles to read “HOLLYBOOB.”
The group claims to have been “raising awareness” of breast can-
cer, but as police Capt. Steve Lurie put it, “This was way uncool.”
Grape-Nuts fans, as a nationwide shortage of the iconic break-
fast cereal sent online prices soaring to $15 a box. “Grape-Nuts is
made using a proprietary technology,” the company said, “which
has made it more difficult to shift production to meet demand.”
Marketing, after federal investigators charged Troy Faulkner, 39,
with two felonies when videos circulating on YouTube showed him
breaking into the Capitol wearing a jacket emblazoned with his com-
pany’s name and phone number. “I was upset and wasn’t thinking
rationally,” Faulkner explained.Good week for:
Bad week for:
APA coal plant in Georgia: On the way out?In other news
New effort to reverse
family separations
The White House created a
task force this week to reunite
the 1,000 or so families that
remain separated as a result
of former President Trump’s
“zero tolerance” border policy.
More than 5,500 families in all
were separated in 2017 and
’18. Parents were held in U.S.
detention facilities or deported
back to their home countries
while children were placed in
the care of the Department of
Homeland Security or rela-
tives in the U.S. In about 500
cases, officials are still search-
ing for the parents—in some
instances, combing through
remote areas of Central
America. “It’s a daily horror for
us who are living without our
children,” said Maria, a Guate-
malan mother who has been
separated from her 10-year-old
daughter since July 2017. “It’s
an endless sadness.”