Copping out? Biden skips UN climate conference

This week, the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate, or as it's better

known COP28, kicked off in Dubai.

I pray with all my heart that COP28 will be another critical turning point towards genuine

transformational action at a time when already, as scientists have been warning for so long,

we are seeing alarming tipping points being reached.

Over the next week or so, leaders from around the world, senior ministers and officials

from 198 countries will come together to hash out deals and compromises with the intended

goal of tackling the climate emergency.

But there will be one big name missing from the attendees list, President Joe Biden.

envoy John Kerry.

Earlier this week, the White House announced President Biden is skipping the event.

security experts.

They all tell us this is code red.

So what message does it send to Americans and to people around the world that the president

of the United States is not going to cop?

With U.S. oil and gas production set to reach record highs this year, has Joe Biden done

enough to tackle the climate emergency?

And for the second time in as many months, has Biden angered enough younger voters that

many will abandon him?

I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.

an option.

They don't have the ability to breathe clean air, in a sense, because.

ever White House adviser.

it and thinking about nature as a refuge and a place for escape and where time feels endless.

But for young people, the environment doesn't feel that way anymore.

And as a young person, I felt that very deeply and understanding that nature felt like something

that was a ticking time bomb and felt like every moment I had to grab onto because maybe

it won't be here next year.

And that is a very scary feeling growing up.

And I think that's what sparked my generation to say that we can't live like this anymore.

with a placard following in the footsteps of the likes of Greta Thunberg.

And then right after I ended my strike, the sun came right out.

At the time, there was only 10 to 20 young people that were climate striking.

And after a few weeks, I realized that this was something much bigger than I realized

and that it wasn't just me that was feeling these emotions, but it was a large percentage

of my generation.

With the fact that we were skipping school, we're saying our education is on the line

and that we will forego our future and our careers for making a statement like this,

it allowed us to be able to, as a generation, show the world that the world has to do something

about this and has to do something with urgency and decisiveness.

White House?

D.C. to join, I had launched an organization called One Million of Us, in which we worked

on the goal of mobilizing one million young people to register in China to vote by the

2020 elections.

And we had an entire coalition with other organizations in which we stopped at every

presidential stop on every presidential candidate's way through the country and said, you need

to prioritize climate justice.

And from that, we were able to mobilize over 1.8 million young people across the country

to turn out and to really show that we will put our votes where our words are.

And not even two months later, I got a call from the White House that they wanted me to

be a part of the Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

And I was 18 years old and I was just leaving a classroom college.

And they said we would actually be working to provide recommendations to the whole of

the federal government, of all federal agencies, and working on what we could do to advance

environmental justice in a way that isn't just about renewable energy, but it's also

about looking and restoring the past damage that the climate crisis has already wrecked.

And it was something we've been fighting for since 2016, I feel like, for young people

to actually be taken seriously in political spaces.

And for us to not just be something that they mention in a speech, but something that they

have accountability to within an advisory council like this.

And it was a moment of joy and also a moment of hope, in a sense, that we that we could

do a lot more.

And in that moment, you became the youngest ever adviser at the White House.

As you've said, you were just 18 when that call came.

Just briefly explain to us what that entails, what work you do on the White House Environmental

Justice Advisory Council.

And we should obviously stress here that you're not speaking to us today as a spokesperson

for the U.S. government.

These are just your own views.

But what does it mean to be on that council?

What work do you do?

And what that means is the first month that I joined in, I think, March of 2021, we were

working on the Justice40 initiative, which means that 40 percent of investment benefits

go to frontline communities and disadvantaged communities that are being impacted by the

climate crisis.

So what that meant is that we had to do a lot of structural work to make sure those

40 percent investments went to those communities where you could actually identify what a disadvantaged

community is on a very concrete level.

And we had very short timelines of sometimes two to four weeks where we had to write a

40-page recommendation sheet, and it turned into 100 pages and referencing and talking

to friends who were in the environmental movement about what recommendations we should send

and how they should send that money to communities so that it actually reaches them.

And it was sometimes nine hours of meetings that we'd go to.

My professor was very mad at me for not going to class, but it was something that I felt

was very important to do.

And basically every month from that March of 2021, we've been sending in recommendations

on what they should do with regards to funding communities, making sure that they aren't

investing and continuing to perpetuate the climate crisis.

I'm sure you get this from friends a lot, where they just assume you stroll into the

Oval Office, have a quick word with the president.

Do you ever speak to President Biden directly?

I think your laugh is telling me that no, you don't.

A lot of our work is just paper.

Like a lot of our conditions manifest their ways into paperwork and what the president

will see and review.

And we'll be on the kind of first paragraph that he'll read about what actions we recommend

he should take.

So let's dive into that a bit.

Some of the policies that the Biden administration has implemented.

Can you just give us two or three examples of actual policy changes you and your colleagues

on the council have actually implemented, made happen, thanks to being there?

which I talked about the Justice for Initiative, in which we're making sure that 40

percent of investments go to frontline communities.

We have to first identify what is a disadvantaged community so that federal agencies

can't distort that.

So it continues to go to wealthier and wider communities that have historically received

funding for the climate crisis to be to be able to be insulated from it.

Really, what it's supposed to be is that if you log onto a website, you can see in your

zip code where the funding is going.

There's more examples of that within how we've asked the federal government to cap old

oil wells that have been indigenous and in black communities that have been sitting there

for sometimes 50 to 70 years.

We've also been working with communities on making sure they have cleanup projects within

military industrial sites, which have had chemical spills in communities at highest risk

of cancer because of the government's lack of care for their cleanup and caring for the

environment.

environment is, as you're defining it there in the White House, is not just a matter of

bringing down carbon emissions.

It touches on all these other kind of justice issues, including poverty, including, as

you said, discrimination with minority areas that have been less well served.

But a lot of attention has gone on big policies like, for example, the Build Back Better

Act and famously the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever in climate

change, ever.

several of them have incorporated elements that address the climate crisis.

And Joe Biden himself talks about them a lot in that context.

Can you give us just a couple of examples of how those big set piece pieces of

legislation, particularly the Inflation Reduction Act, have helped in terms of climate

and environment?

something that's very crucial in the work that we do.

And understanding that when we look at the future, a lot of what the legislation like

the Inflation Reduction Act and the other big legislations like that do is oftentimes

in tackling ways in which we can decarbonize our existing infrastructure and giving

subsidies for people to be able to transition to electric vehicles and speed up that

transition to reach a very equitable timeline in which it is realistic for us to be able

to reach that 1.5 degree target that we must reach.

And that's the future aspect of it.

But within the climate crisis and understanding solutions to it, we have to think

about the past and the present and that for us to have gotten here as a society, we had

to have certain mechanisms in our economy that allowed us to be able to prioritize.

The exploitation for profit over the existence of nature, and we've come from a

society in which slavery was the beginning mechanism in which we thought about

exploitation, where we could think we could exploit people and cultures limitlessly with

no cost. But now we're exploiting nature limitlessly and thinking there's no cost and

thinking that the forest is only valuable for the wood that it produces, but not for the

oxygen that it gives us.

And thinking about that the world has something greater than an economic value, but a

social and health and well-being value that we don't take into account often at all.

It's about rebuilding the communities that have been impacted by natural disasters and the

government had done nothing to rebuild them in a meaningful way.

around $340 billion in investment and tax breaks, which could and is meant to make the USA

world leader in making the stuff that leads to renewable energy and clean energy.

And so that's, you know, many people say that's a game changer in the business of getting the

whole world onto cleaner technology.

Now, what about those decisions that the Biden administration has made that maybe you don't

agree with? I'm thinking here about, for example, the Willow Project.

And just explain to our listeners what that is and why that was something you wished had not

been passed. Yes.

be equivalent to increasing the US's emissions by 4 percent.

And with the US committing to getting to net zero within the next few decades, it is

completely counterintuitive to their actions.

And the Willow Project has been the largest oil and gas leasing on US federal land.

My strong inclination was to disapprove of it across the board.

But the advice I got from counsel was that if that were the case, I may very well lose in

And then not be able to do what I really want to do beyond that.

they are mad about President Biden continuing to be on the side of fossil fuels and only

really paying lip service and giving cheap talk to what he promises to do.

There's a massive groundswell of people on TikTok who showed their concern.

And then the counsel, we said, why don't we use that power and send a letter to the

president? This isn't what we should be doing.

We should be changing our actions and we should be changing the status quo, not

continuing in ramping up, going into battle with the fossil fuel industry.

That has led to a decrease in the size of the Willow Project.

But we don't want that. We want a complete and utter reversal of their action to permit

this oil and gas project, because it's so insidious in thinking that you can have it both

ways in which you can go into battle with the fossil fuel industry and then go and make a

speech about how the climate crisis is destroying entire communities.

You have to be on what side?

And the question to Joe Biden is, what side are you on?

Of course, other U.S.

officials will be there. We know that attending minister, they'll be attending meetings,

they'll be giving talks, but not the president himself.

And we've yet to see an official explanation as to why he's not going.

There've been some rumours that it's because he needs to focus on the ongoing conflict in

the Middle East. But then there's another adviser saying that wasn't the case.

Whatever the reason, to you, Jerome, how does it look that Joe Biden is not going to be

there?

president, who is representing a country that has historic responsibility for

decarbonizing because they have been the largest emitter for so many years, even though the

second largest emitter, they have been the first for so long.

And I feel like it's a moment of understanding that he has a responsibility at COP28.

resign your place on the White House Council?

And I think the U.S. has good intention within the individuals that work within the

country. And I think actions like the Willow Project and him not attending COP28 and him

continuing to lease oil and gas, that is something that we have to continue to fight

against. And if we're not in these rooms, then we're back at the position in which we're

clamping, striking in front of the White House and begging for them to listen to us.

But now we have real kind of leverage to be able to demand change.

That is something we haven't had before.

And I think that is why we have to continue pushing, continue to be loud and aggressive

within our ask for them to really be the climate president like he said he will be.

It's shaping up that he isn't being that if he continues down this path.

because a crucial constituency in Joe Biden getting elected in 2020 was young

voters. Young voters may, you know, in some ways made the difference.

And yet there's research now from the Pew Research Center polling of Americans earlier,

taken earlier this summer before the blow, as it may be seen of this decision not to go to

COP 28, where a majority of Democrats aged between 18 to 29.

That's right. The group that you fall into saying that the Biden administration could be

doing a whole lot more on climate change as an issue.

We, you know, one suspects they will now say that in even bigger numbers now that he's

staying away. In terms of the political price that the president will pay for some of

these decisions, like choosing to stay away.

What do you think? Do you think this decision of the president will ultimately hurt him?

And I mean it particularly in terms of your age group.

understanding that it's not just about giving a speech, it's about the actions that he

makes. And it feels very hurtful for our generation.

It feels like it's a deep cut because we put our trust and we put our vote into him.

A lot of us voting for the first time, like myself, in a president that said he would do

something. And this is a heavy political toll because he should be doing a lot more.

All their calls to actions have gone ignored and they continue to go ignored, even

though he had countless, countless years to do something.

I think over this next year, we'll really see what happens and we'll see that he must

fulfill on his promises.

I think that's the one thing that any president must do is fulfill their promises and

understand and give the people a sense of assurance that he has their back.

And young people don't feel like that at the moment.

I think that is what has to radically change, is him showing some authenticity within his

with younger voters for his position on the current Middle East conflict.

You've now told us why there is a price to pay for not seeming to do enough on the

climate. Is it your sense that there will be enough younger voters disenchanted by all

this that they will even consider, well, you tell me, but voting Republican, backing

potentially Donald Trump or someone like Jill Stein, who ran in the past for the Green

Party? There are other third party independent candidates, Cornel West.

Do you see younger voters not just perhaps staying at home and that could cost Biden

dearly enough, but actually voting for another candidate?

How likely do you think those scenarios could be centrally related to this position,

this stance, as you've been sketching out on the environment, on climate?

with young people. I think you have another year to do some good.

And I think that is what will change everything in that the other candidates, other

people have a track record of just speaking and spewing hatred and vitriol that is more

divisive than ever. And I think it is more important for him to understand that he has

the opportunity to make change and not just worry about, well, is it too late for me to

take action? It's not too late.

You have a year to make good on these promises.

Stop this continual of making 10 steps forward and then making 30 steps backwards in

which he is kind of playing both sides.

And no one, no one is going to be pleased when you're not authentic to any side or any

people because you have to be very centered in the fact that young people need climate

action for their own sake, for their own future, for their own children's future.

And I think that's very important for him to know that that he must make good on these

promises in that next year to really make an impact.

For more on COP28, do listen to Thursday's episode of our sister podcast, Politics Weekly

UK. My colleague John Harris is joined by the Green MP Caroline Lucas and the former

Conservative Energy Minister Chris Skidmore.

And they'll be looking at the UK's road to net zero and how much difference COP summits

can really make. And if you have a couple of minutes to spare and you do like this

podcast, please do us a very big favor and rate or review it wherever you find us.

It really does help us a lot.

But for now, it's goodbye.

The producer is Daniel Stevens, the executive producer this week, Max Sanderson.

I'm Jonathan Friedland.

Thanks as always for listening.

This is The Guardian.