The Color of Money

How Biden can take a different kind of climate action

First, a mea culpa: Joe Biden did not win Florida as I predicted he would this summer. I was far from the only person to get that wrong, but I want to say something briefly about why I got it wrong. The first and most obvious reason is that I underestimated the extent to which Latino voters in Miami would swing toward Trump. Like a lot of people, I was aware that there were a lot of warning signs for Biden with that group, and that a number of Democratic strategists had predicted it could cost him the state, but I didn’t appreciate the significance of the swing. More specifically, I assumed any swing toward Trump in Miami would be offset by a swing toward Biden among seniors and suburbanites in the rest of the state. To a certain extent that latter swing actually did happen, but it was a) smaller than polls suggested and b) blunted by generally high turnout among all demographic groups, including those most supportive of Trump. In many ways these two dynamics are the entire story of the election and many people smarter than me are already picking them apart, so I’ll leave it at that. Just want to own being wrong on that.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll turn to something I’m a little more qualified to comment about. As I write this, Joe Biden has announced the first climate-related appointments of his presidency: John Kerry is slated to serve as White House special climate envoy, and Janet Yellen will serve as Secretary of the Treasury. These are both profoundly so-so choices, though in very different ways.

First, Kerry. This is far from the most disappointing appointment thus far, but some progressives are already criticizing the choice because Kerry advocates a kind of big-tent climate movement. He wants to include progressives, moderates, and even Republicans on the journey to net-zero emissions, forming a broad coalition between those who advocate a Green New Deal and those who don’t even want to limit fracking, et cetera.

I’m sympathetic to this line of criticism: Republicans have never been honest brokers in the debate over climate action, and even those who say they believe the science don’t believe in doing anything the science suggests we do. But if Kerry’s role entails being an international climate mediator, the former secretary of state will be as well placed as anyone for the job, because the United States is the only country that has a Republican Party. Biden apparently also plans to appoint a domestic climate policy director, which is a much trickier job, not least because if the Democrats don’t take control of the Senate then I’m not sure King Solomon could get a climate bill passed.

Fortunately, we don’t need a giant piece of Green New Deal legislation to take immediate action on the climate crisis—that’s where Yellen comes in. As Aileen Brown has reported in The Intercept, a number of climate activists are pushing for the Treasury to take bully-pulpit action on fossil fuels by restraining the banks and firms that lend to major emitters. One proposal is that the Financial Stability Oversight Council, created by Dodd-Frank, should require that banks set aside some extra capital when they invest in fossil fuels, which would basically make those investments more expensive; another idea is to impose “stress test” those banks, requiring them to prove they could survive if the so-called “carbon bubble” ever bursts.

It’s not clear to me whether interested Yellen will be in pursuing these avenues. She appears supportive of more fiscal stimulus and her Fed did acknowledge that climate change poses a financial risk, but these moves would be very controversial among corporate leaders. On the other hand, many banks have reduced climate exposure of their own accord in recent years, so the window is opening very fast. There’s no telling what will happen in the next four years, especially if we start to see near-term evidence of a climate shock in vulnerable housing markets.

Even if Kerry and Yellen both prove useless, though, there are still concrete ways that a Biden administration can change the way we tackle climate change. In speaking with former Obama climate officials for the book I’m working on, it has become abundantly clear that the Obama White House was focused primarily on reducing carbon emissions, not on adapting to the actual economic damage caused by climate change. By the time members of that White House came to grasp the urgency of retreating from the water and adapting to a warming world, Trump was about to become president. Now Biden has an opportunity to pick up where they left off.

The simplest way to do that is by freeing up federal dollars for climate adaptation: FEMA, HUD, and the Army Corps of Engineers have all spent millions in recent years to buy out climate-vulnerable homes, help elevate or weatherproof flood-prone communities, and create “green infrastructure” that can accommodate increased heat and sea-level rise. The money spent through these programs may not decarbonize our energy system, but it does help save lives and protect against future disasters—most estimates claim that every dollar of resilience spending pays for itself sixfold by averting future losses.

Most importantly, there already exists bipartisan support for expanding these avenues of funding. This money flows through otherwise innocuous initiatives like the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities fund and the Community Development Block Grant, neither of which sound like they were invented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These programs enjoy broad bipartisan support, in large part because Republican legislators who oppose “climate action” in the abstract also need to bring recovery money home to constituents who are hit by disasters. It’s for that reason that a historically divided Congress managed in 2018 to pass a disaster relief law that created BRIC and opened up millions of dollars for climate resilience spending.

By the same token, the projects that are funded with this resilience money are far more climate-forward than you would expect. In some cases, like the FEMA and HUD home buyout programs, the money pays for the kind of “managed retreat” that Republicans and most Democrats don’t want to touch; in other cases, like living shorelines and home elevation, the money helps create the cities and towns of the future, nudging us toward truly future-oriented planning. This is all possible because these entities have a legal requirement to evaluate projects in terms of cost-benefit analysis: if climate adaptation looks cheaper, and it always will, then that’s what these departments will fund. It’s already happening, we just need much more of it.

Even if it doesn’t make headlines (and maybe because it won’t), a Biden administration will have ample opportunity to push for increased resilience funding. He can push Congress to fund this kind of adaptation in the spending and relief bills that Republicans cannot block, and his appointed heads of HUD and FEMA can free up more money on the executive side as well. In this way, even as he tries to put the U.S. on track for net-zero emissions, Biden can save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in the short-term, helping to blunt the devastating cost of the climate crisis we have already created.

What I’ve Been Writing

My column in this month’s New Republic is on Fox’s plans for the Biden era, featuring an old friend of mine. (The New Republic)

What I’ve Been Reading (Abbreviated Edition)

Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, David Guterson’s Snow Falling On Cedars, now Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

How the pandemic tore apart a diverse shopping strip in suburban Atlanta. (New York Times Magazine)

Dubai oil is clobbering American and European oil, a sign that Asian oil demand might permanently outstrip demand in the West. (Wall Street Journal)

Wildfires are pushing California’s insurance industry over the edge. (Bloomberg)

Bonkers longform story about a decades-long treasure hunt…just read it. (New York)

The real story of hydroxychloroquine, somehow worse than you think. (Wired)

Charlotte Shane on TikTok in the new issue of Bookforum…not online yet, but great.