CRONY CORNER
Biden's’ Neoliberal Climate Cronyism
They’ll have their climate cake and eat it, too — and the rest of us will pay for it.
by JORDAN MCGILLIS
December 7, 2020, 12:00 AM
The incoming Biden administration has made climate change a signature issue, deeming its importance on par with the COVID-19 recovery and racial inequality. According to the Biden transition website, climate change poses an existential threat to our environment, our health, our communities, our national security, and our economic well-being
...for all its rhetoric on these issues, Team Biden has already run afoul of the Democratic Party’s environmentalists. Because instead of rallying around the Green New Dealers and climate strikers, the Biden camp has turned instead toward the party’s climate neoliberals.
Personnel Is Policy
As goes the old Washington adage, personnel is policy. Three key Biden personnel decisions that have already been made public — John Kerry as presidential climate envoy, Janet Yellen as Secretary of the Treasury, and Brian Deese as top economic adviser — mark cumulatively an embrace of climate neoliberalism, the ideology that seeks to fuse the economic vitality of markets with centrist environmentalism.
In conjunction with their Panglossian view on the Paris climate agreement, climate neoliberals have a cronyism blindspot.
John Kerry, former Secretary of State, five-term Massachusetts senator, and 2004 Democratic Party presidential nominee... brokered the Paris climate agreement and is a known entity on the global stage.
Janet Yellen, Fed chair from 2014 to 2018... is one of the faces of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a carbon tax advocacy group that counts major corporations among its founding members.
Brian Deese, aide to President Obama and most recently head of sustainable investing at finance behemoth Blackrock, represents politically correct capitalism.
These picks and the neoliberal policies they augur will invite a populist backlash from both the political left and the political right.
Climate Neoliberalism
Climate neoliberalism deems business to be part of the solution to climate change, rather than a bogeyman. It eschews the hard-left, ban-everything approach to the environment, instead advocating the Sunsteinian nudge method by which the neoliberals allege we can have our cake and eat it too...
In conjunction with their Panglossian view on Paris, climate neoliberals have a cronyism blindspot. Yellen’s pro-carbon tax Climate Leadership Council is a case in point. Plenty of companies that readers would expect to favor the carbon tax — like Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs — are CLC founding members, but so are some oil and auto titans — like Shell, Total, Ford, and GM. While at first blush taxing your product or your product’s fuel would seem self-defeating, megacorporations like Shell and GM and fossil-fuel investors like Deese’s Blackrock have diverse portfolios that will enable them to absorb the costs of a carbon tax and still prosper...
The Climate Bubble Test
... Some on the political right are still straining to portray Kerry, Yellen, and Deese as eco-radicals bent on destroying America’s industrial prowess. The truth is more insidious. Kerry, Yellen, and Deese want America to succeed, but only in a form they and their corporate allies deem appropriate. The result will be an economy in which their preferred technologies — and those who can afford them — thrive. In the minds of climate neoliberals, this is paternalistic benevolence. “Who wouldn’t want to drive a Tesla?” they ponder, forgetting that for every yuppie in Cupertino who opts for a Model X on account of a gradually rising carbon tax, there is a family in Carson City that sees its household budget shrink each year and is forced to tighten the belt.
Climate and environmental justice will be on the tongue of every Biden appointee, but as Americans on the left and the right both recognize, climate neoliberalism is anything but fair.
