Ep. 90: 2020: The last chance to save our planet?

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We are now three months away from an election that could determine a lot, including what our future climate looks like. On this episode, we discuss the 2020 election through the prism of climate change.

Reid Fraizer talks with Marianne Levelle, a reporter with Inside Climate News, about Joe Biden's evolving climate policy. She says that while he's gotten more aggressive on the issue, it’s still not enough to limit the worst outcomes of runaway climate change.

And we also hear from Time magazine correspondent Justin Worland who recently wrote a cover story for the magazine titled, “2020 is our last, best chance to save the planet.”

Listen to the full episode or read the transcript below:

(these conversations have been edited for clarity)

Last Chance to Stop Climate Change?

Reid Frazier: Why is this election so important for climate change?

Justin Worland: Let's start with the science. The planet has warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The Paris Agreement says we should try to keep temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, we might experience some dramatic tipping points that could really alter life on this planet as we know it. So we really don't have much time.

Then you add the fact that we have this pandemic, which has obviously created so many health problems and economic problems, but also led to the spending of trillions of dollars to deal with the pandemic. That money can be spent in a way that rethinks the way we live, or it can be spent to reinforce our old way of living.

We're not going to get an opportunity like this again. If we don't take the opportunity, we're going to lock in a high carbon world. Around the world, this is a topic of discussion. In the U.S., under President Trump, it's highly unlikely that we're going to do anything to take on this issue. Under a different president, that might not be the case.

Frazier: So what is it about the timeline laid out by the Paris Agreement that makes this year or the next few years so important?

Worland: Before the pandemic, and apart from the election, this was supposed to be a critical year for climate change. Countries were supposed to come together in November 2020 and outline new plans to reduce emissions, to try to bend the curve. That summit has now been postponed by a year because of the pandemic. But the Paris Agreement did make 2020 a key year. There were a number of other key conferences that were meant to build momentum to this big international climate conference.

Frazier: So the world is positioning itself to ratchet up its climate commitments. Could you also talk about what effect the coronavirus could have on our timeline to act on climate change. Why would the coronavirus and the ensuing rebuilding package matter so much for climate change?

Worland: Well, this year, countries and financial institutions have spent some $11 trillion dollars. They're going to spend trillions more in the coming months. And that's money that otherwise would have been spent over the course of the next decade. These discussions are happening right now around the world.

"With a second Trump presidency, we're going to start to see climate change as an issue where countries are pushing each other in a more aggressive way."

But you go to a place like China where they're looking to expand their electricity generation, they're going to decide right now whether to build more coal-fired power plants or whether to build more renewable generating capacity. Once that money is spent, it's not going to be spent again.

China is a prime example because they had funding that was supposed to take place over a five year period and they're pushing to try to pull that funding forward. So these decisions are happening really quickly in response to the pandemic and I guess more precisely to the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Frazier: One really fascinating part of your story was this point about how the current climate crisis we're in was made, in part, because of decisions made during the past, obviously. But you're talking specifically about the aftermath of World War II, when the U.S. economy grew out of a wartime economy. We see the growth of the automobile and plastics industries and the Marshall Plan in Europe.

Talk a little bit about why that era casts such a long shadow in terms of climate.

Worland: I think it's really important to understand, everything that we do in this country, for the most part, runs on fossil fuels. I mentioned in the story, the biggest line item in the Marshall Plan was to support oil. It was a conscious decision when the U.S. built up the capacity to build plastics for wartime purposes, to then use that to build consumer products.

You look at the measure of GDP which came out of GNP, which was a measure developed during the war as a measure of economic output, which then prioritizes consumption, which is based, again, on having an unlimited supply of oil to continue powering our society.

So all of these decisions were made in that period. And they really sort of structure the way our society runs today. Undoing that requires some real deliberate thinking.

Frazier: We know that the U.S., under the Trump administration, has basically not done much intentionally about dealing with climate change. But what is happening in other countries?

Worland: Well, it's a really interesting mix that's happening around the world. The EU is leading the charge with hundreds of billions of euros committed to building back greener: renewable energy capacity; electric vehicle charging stations; a just transition in some of the coal-dependent states where they're funding measures to retrain people.

Look at a place like China, the picture is mixed and still to be determined. They're funding a lot of coal-fired power plants. But at the same time, building out the capacity to build for the clean energy economy -- prioritizing electric vehicles, prioritizing solar panel manufacturing, etcetera.

If you go to developing countries, these are places that are dependent on financing from elsewhere, there is this new-found commitment to climate action that is in large part driven by if they've received funding from the IMF. The IMF says, ‘we're going to give you this funding but we want to evaluate whether you're prepared to address climate change.’ You get these interesting things where countries are spending a lot of money to build greener because they're being pushed to do so.

Frazier: And in the EU, they're calling it the European Green Deal, right?

Worland: Right. It's funny because there's a lot of debate about it, but there's very little debate about whether they should have it. It's a question about what does it look like? It's not a controversial thing like it is here.

Frazier: Your article's premise is that if Trump is reelected, a lot of possibilities for reducing carbon in the atmosphere will go away, essentially. Am I right about that? And what is the outlook if Biden is elected?

Worland: You are right to say that a lot of possibilities for reducing emissions go away if Trump is reelected. The hope for a lot of climate activists is that a Joe Biden presidency would mean big climate legislation; stimulus that funds green initiatives; a restoration of a lot of the regulations that have been overturned and an expansion of those. The one thing I would say, obviously, if Trump is reelected, it's not going to be a priority. But this issue is not going away.

"Once you've crossed the tipping point, you've crossed it. The world isn't over. We're not all going to go extinct, but it's going to be a different world."

The one thing I always point to as a part of the European Green Deal is a carbon tax at the border, which means essentially they're going to be creating a tariff on goods for places that are not addressing climate change. And if you [want to] get Republicans in Washington anxious about climate change, saying that there is going to be a tax on their goods is a good way to do it.

I think that with a second Trump presidency, we're going to start to see climate change as an issue where countries are pushing each other in a more aggressive way. It'll be interesting to see how a potential Trump second term would deal with that.

Frazier: So you discussed in your article some of the tipping points in climate if we go over some of these thresholds. What are the tipping points and why are they important?

Worland: In my story, I reference a 2019 analysis in the journal Nature, which points to nine tipping points - anything from the melting of ice sheets in the West Antarctic to the breakdown of certain currents that regulate our weather patterns, to the loss of the coral reefs. All of these things are phenomena that would really trigger a much bigger change than we've experienced thus far.

To lose an ice sheet that would raise sea levels significantly very fast would be a very dramatic change in warming. To have a circulatory pattern breakdown that would then lead to rapid temperature change in certain parts of the globe -- these are all things that are potentially very close to happening and would dramatically change our world, pretty close to overnight.

Frazier: And you couldn't come back from them. You can't just refreeze the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Worland: That's exactly right. Once you've crossed the tipping point, you've crossed it. The world isn't over. We're not all going to go extinct, but it's going to be a different world.

Justin Worland is a Washington D.C.-based correspondent for TIME covering energy and the environment.

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Joe Biden’s Climate Plan

We know that climate change isn't necessarily a priority for President Trump, but we've been learning more lately about how much of a priority it would be for Joe Biden if he wins in November. Though he was given poor marks by climate groups during the Democratic primary, he's emerged in the general election with a much bolder plan to curb planet-warming carbon emissions. Marianne Lavelle is a reporter with Inside Climate News. She's been following Biden's climate plan. We've talked to her in the past and we wanted to bring her back on to give us an update. Here's our conversation:

Reid Frazier: When we last spoke this spring, we talked about whether Joe Biden could convince climate activists that he was one of them, that he understood the threat climate change poses. And he was promising to spend just a tenth of what Bernie Sanders was promising during the primaries. But since then, his policy has undergone a type of transformation. What happened to Joe Biden?

Marianne Lavelle: Well, Joe Biden saw that he really needs to energize every part of the Democratic electorate in order to win in November. And he really realized that climate was going to be a key part of that. He got together with Bernie Sanders, not only on climate, but on several issues, to come up with unity platforms. And these teams - folks appointed both by Biden and Bernie Sanders - met every week and came up with a new plan that really ratchets up Biden's ambition substantially.

Before Biden's climate plan was like $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Now he's talking about $2 trillion over four years, really accelerating the government's spending on climate and clean energy and transition to electric vehicles and electricity that's clean. One of the key things that Bernie Sanders folks got out of this was that Biden set a goal of 2035 to have 100 percent clean electricity in the U.S. That's a goal that's within striking distance of the timeline that people are saying is just so urgent.

The other thing about his climate plan is that he talks about having measurable goals within four years, which would be, of course, within his first term. That also is very important to the activists who are focused on this. They don't like everything about Biden's plan. But he definitely has moved in their direction.

Frazier: So what are some things that they didn't like about his plan?

Lavelle: Number one was that he doesn't do anything like banning fracking. That has become this fault line among progressives and moderates. And Biden has a very difficult job in negotiating this issue because he also cannot lose the support of blue collar labor moderates. And what happened during this whole process is he brought in Connor Lamb from western Pennsylvania to be one of the folks putting together this plan. And they didn't do anything like ban fracking. But first of all, there's a lot of economic incentives in this plan to reduce the demand for natural gas and oil.

I think the argument is going to be that if we work on it from that angle, that you're not going to have to take a stand like banning fracking. You're going to move the market in that direction. That's the argument.

Frazier: So if I'm to understand this correctly, Biden didn't want to ban fracking because if you need to win in Pennsylvania, you're going to need some people who might not hate fracking so much or might even like it. But his argument is, if we make the incentive structure a certain way, you won't really need fracking in so many years because renewable energy will actually be cheaper. Fracking has proliferated because it's been able to produce energy BTUs so much cheaper than other means, like coal mining?

Lavelle: Yes, natural gas has driven out a lot of coal. The other thing that Biden says in his plan is that he wants to take steps to really regulate fracking in a way that it hasn't been regulated before. And if you regulate things like the methane leakage from fracking and the impact on water, you begin to have these costs of fracking that make it not economic when renewable energy prices are just headed downward. Another really interesting thing about his plan is I think everyone sees that there is a risk for climate change to fall off the map when we're all just so consumed with the coronavirus crisis. He has called this Build Back Better. That is how he has framed action on climate change, as part of the response to rebuilding the economy.

Frazier: I'm wondering if you think this says anything, not just about Joe Biden or climate activists, but about the mood of the electorate on climate change, that Biden has adopted some of these more aggressive targets and not just a generic plan to put in a couple hundred charging stations and some solar panels and otherwise everything's kind of going to be the same. I mean, some of these changes, if they're enacted, could be pretty significant. I'm presuming that the Biden people look at polls and understand public opinion a little bit. Does this mean they feel safer going out on this ledge on climate?

Lavelle: Absolutely. You can guarantee that they have been polling on this. You can see from the plan that they've put forward that they feel that this is a winner of an issue. The Trump campaign has been calling it a socialist plan and has been saying he's the puppet of the far left. Some of the polling I heard about was it definitely is great for Biden for getting the progressives energized, but he doesn't lose moderates by showing concern about climate change as long as it is framed as being about jobs and economic renewal, which is exactly how he has put it. It's almost like a Green New Deal, although he doesn't use that term at all.

Frazier: This all came out during the whole month of George Floyd protests. And obviously these issues - systemic racism, environmental justice - are top of mind. How integral is the concept of justice in his plan?

Lavelle: Right. He would create a new office in the Department of Justice just to prosecute environmental justice cases, elevating it along with things like antitrust and civil rights. He has not rolled out fully the financing of this, although definitely raising taxes on the wealthy would definitely be a part of it. He hasn't talked in detail about carbon pricing yet, but any revenue would be directed, at least 40 percent of it, to environmental justice communities. So that would be a recognition that there are some communities that are dealing with a much worse burden of pollution.

Frazier: I've seen the Trump campaign throwing out attacks based on this plan, saying Biden's plan will kill jobs. They don't mention that it could also create clean energy jobs, that it takes away from the fossil fuel industry. But, you know, it's politics. Could this hurt him in a general election? Is he now vulnerable to being seen as sort of too eager to get rid of the oil industry or the coal industry?

Lavelle: Definitely. The Trump campaign is counting on that and they are going to do everything they can to frame it that way. One thing that is definitely true is the coal industry has not flourished under Trump even before coronavirus. The argument could be made that they would have benefited from more investment in a transition to cleaner energy. We really have not seen an investment in the communities where people would lose their jobs if there's less mining. Instead, we have bankruptcies and disruption without any sort of attention to the economic transition.

Frazier: Biden's plan seems calibrated to meet American politics right now? How calibrated is it to meet the physics and chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere? In other words, not to be too cute about it, but is it enough to limit the worst outcomes of runaway climate change?

Lavelle: I can say unequivocally no. The science is clear that we have to decarbonize really fast. Even the slow down in the economy that we saw in response to the coronavirus, that gives you a sense of how fast we need to decarbonize, because even that will not bring down the levels of carbon to the level they need to be at. Of course, we can't slow down the economy to that level. We have to decarbonize the economy. We have to have clean energy replace fossil fuel energy. This is going to be true whoever is elected. It's almost eternal vigilance. Those who care about climate change have to be in a permanent campaign for stronger action.