Let’s hope that President Biden’s disturbing silence on climate change in his state of the union address was solely due to the emergence of the Ukraine invasion as the dominant narrative of the night. After all, just a day before his speech, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released yet another urgent report: this time, on how the impacts of climate change are being felt by human societies faster and more powerfully than anticipated, “so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt.” Such news created an obvious opening for the president to discuss the overwhelming need for action in his annual address.
Yet the omission makes even less sense when the same speech included assurances to the public that the Biden administration would do what it can do minimize the impact on U.S. energy prices from the Ukraine crisis. The obvious solution is to increase gas and oil supplies, including by opening up more American land for drilling — exactly the solution that some in the Republican Party are already advocating. Indeed, it’s not too much to say that the GOP sees this as a perfect opening to blunt the momentum towards transforming the energy sector in a sustainable direction; as Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch notes, Republicans are “using the crisis [to] advocate for their donors’ pet projects like the Keystone XL pipeline — killed, for now, by the White House because of its climate impact — or opening up more drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Now, the GOP can claim that fossil fuels are key to economic stability and even defending freedom itself.
Without a doubt, the Russian invasion is a true crisis, the handling of which will likely have enormous repercussions for the future of international relations, the world economy, democracy, and the global fight against authoritarianism. Biden does need to shield the U.S. against its impacts. But there is an inevitable tension between the goals of maintaining our gas and oil supplies, and pursuing the even more important long-term fight against climate change, which just as surely holds the potential to destabilize our economies, undermine free societies, and empower authoritarian leaders eager to spin environmental chaos into justification for strongman rule. Indeed, the Russian invasion will not be the last crisis where such conflicting needs must be balanced — yet balanced they must be.
This is particularly the case when the very leverage Vladimir Putin holds through control of large oil and gas supplies is key to his ability to wield power and sow chaos. A powerful, overlapping response to both authoritarianism and climate change is possible: weaning the world off fossil fuels, as fast as possible. As Bunch reminds us, “Dictators like Putin or Saudi Arabia’s murderous monarchs have used their control of the oil spigot to extort other nations and bend them to their will. In the present crisis, Putin’s leverage on the West would amount to a hill of beans if Europe had started earlier and more aggressively to move away from fossil fuels. Thus, building infrastructure that would lock us into oil and gas for another generation seems the height of madness.”
Rather than being at odds, then, the fight against climate change is inextricably twinned with the fight against authoritarianism. This is why it’s so disappointing that President Biden did not make this case when he had the nation’s attention focused on him last week. If nothing else, it would have been an instance of going on offense against the GOP’s completely predictable pro-fossil fuel response to the Ukraine crisis. Instead, Biden now must contend with the Republicans’ tendentious arguments for expanding drilling, having surrendered a prime opportunity to knock them off balance and make a case for actual energy independence, where we trade dependence on oil companies for the reliable, renewable power that come from the wind and the sun.