WASHINGTON — In the past three weeks, President Biden’s administration has proposed regulations to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, pledged $1 billion to help poor countries fight climate change, and prepared what could be the first caps on greenhouse gas emissions. greenhouse gases from power plants.
And yet many young voters alarmed by climate change remain angry at Mr. Biden’s decision last month to approve Willow, an $8 billion oil drilling project on pristine federal land in Alaska. As the president prepares to announce his bid for re-election, it is not at all clear that the voters who helped him win in 2020 because of his commitment to climate action will reappear.
Alex Haraus, 25, said he and other young people felt betrayed by the Willow decision after Mr Biden pledged as a candidate to end new oil drilling on public lands “period, period, period”.
Mr Haraus, whose videos on TikTok of him opposing the Willow project garnered hundreds of millions of views, described his reaction as “crazy and frustrated and disappointed”.
About a dozen young climate activists interviewed said they were not reassured by the Biden administration’s other actions, even as they significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the planet, Mr Haraus said. What they want, he said, is for the president to rein in oil and gas companies, which posted record profits last year.
“I don’t think all of those things are driving people to forgive the Biden administration for projects like Willow,” said Mr. Haraus, who lives outside Chicago. “Young voters see our future being thrown out the window. We need Biden to tackle the industry or we don’t have much to hope for.”
Predominantly young voters — about 62 percent — support a complete phase-out of fossil fuels, said Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew Research Center. There is broad support among registered voters from both parties for a transition to a future where the United States no longer pumps carbon emissions into the atmosphere, Tyson said. But most are not ready to break away from fossil fuels altogether, he said.
From his earliest days in office, Mr. Biden has marked climate action as a top priority. Shortly after moving to the White House, he rejoined the United States under the Paris Agreement and set an ambitious goal of reducing the country’s emissions to about 50 percent below levels by the end of this decade to be reduced by 2005.
He signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $370 billion in incentives to expand wind, solar and other clean energy and electric vehicles. He has proposed rules to ensure that by 2032, two-thirds of new cars and a quarter of new heavy-duty trucks sold in the United States will be all-electric. Within weeks, he is expected to demand that coal and gas plants, responsible for 25 percent of the country’s greenhouse gases, significantly reduce their emissions.
Still, lawmakers and activists said they feared regulatory action wouldn’t capture voters’ imaginations and that the Willow project would cast a long shadow.
“He takes one step forward with the IRA and two steps back with the Willow project,” said New York Democrat Representative Jamaal Bowman, who along with more than 30 other progressive lawmakers have urged Biden to revoke the drilling license .
Young voters are also angry that Mr. Biden is allowing language in the climate bill that makes it easier to drill for oil offshore, and by this month’s approval of expanded liquefied natural gas exports from Alaska. On Monday, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm applauded the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a partially constructed pipeline that would carry natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia but has been strongly opposed by environmentalists and repeatedly stopped by courts.
In a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Ms. Granholm stopped short of approving the pipeline, but said it would “improve the country’s critical infrastructure for energy and national security.” The pipeline is a top priority for Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a coal and gas producing state.
“The Biden administration is trying to reassure swing state Democrats like Senator Manchin that despite the new power plant rule coming later this week, natural gas will still play an important role in the clean energy transition,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton administration. climate official who now works at the Progressive Policy Institute. “The timing is anything but accidental.”
But Mr. Bowman said Mr. Biden sent a mixed message to young voters and they rejected it.
“Young people are connected and more informed than ever before about climate change,” he said. “Now they feel stabbed in the back.” If Mr Biden doesn’t reverse course, “young people stay home in 2024, that’s the consequences,” Mr Bowman said.
Nationally, 61 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, while 36 percent voted for Donald J. Trump, according to an analysis by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), the nonpartisan youth engagement research center at Tufts University. That’s higher than the level of youth support Hillary Clinton received from young voters in 2016.
A March poll by Data for Progress, a liberal research group, found that Mr Biden’s approval ratings fell 13 percent when it came to his climate agenda among voters aged 18 to 29 in the wake of the Willow decision.
But government officials said they had seen no evidence the president had lost ground among climate voters, or even young voters. They pointed to YouGov and Morning Consult polls taken after the Willow decision that showed about half of Americans supported it. The Morning Consult survey found that about 30 percent of young voters had never heard of the Willow Project.
“President Biden has delivered the most ambitious climate agenda ever with the support of labor unions, environmental justice and climate leaders, youth advocates and more,” White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said in a statement.
The International Energy Agency has warned that countries must stop new oil and gas drilling to prevent the global average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. Beyond that point, the impacts of catastrophic heat waves, floods, droughts, crop failures and species extinctions would become significantly more difficult for humanity to handle. The planet has already warmed more than 1.1 degrees.
At the same time, the agency predicts that global oil demand will continue to rise to peak and level off sometime around 2035.
John Holdren, who served as chief science adviser to President Barack Obama, opposed the Willow project. But he believes that reducing demand for oil and gas — as the Biden administration is trying to do by expanding clean energy and encouraging electric vehicles — is more effective than blocking drilling. The theory is that if everyone drives electric, there will be less need for petrol.
“The enemy is us,” he said. “Fossil fuel companies are producing something that society has eagerly gobbled up. We need to drastically reduce demand.”
That thinking was part of the White House decision-making when it came to the Willow project, several people with knowledge of the discussions said. Most government officials strongly believed that the impact of aggressive regulation and clean energy investments would outweigh any climate damage caused by Willow.
Oil burned from Willow is expected to release nearly 254 million tons of carbon emissions over 30 years. The Biden administration has estimated that the 2021 Climate and Infrastructure Act will lead to a reduction of more than a billion tons of carbon emissions over the next 10 years.
There were other considerations, including advice from government lawyers that the Biden administration could face a multibillion-dollar court order if it denied the drilling permits because the applicant, ConocoPhillips, had leases in that region for more than a decade.
And finally, political advisers believed that if the White House blocked Willow, Republicans could argue that the Biden administration was hurting US energy supplies after pleading with oil companies to ramp up production to lower gas prices in the aftermath of Russia’s war against Ukraine, according to those familiar with the decision-making process.
The Willow Project remained under the radar of the public for many years, including environmentalists. When social media campaigns objecting to Willow sparked millions of activists early this year, it surprised government officials, several people involved in the campaign said.
Mark Paul, a political economist at Rutgers University, said that while the Biden administration has a strong plan to cut demand, it needs additional policies to cut production.
“We already have enough fossil fuels to meet our needs as we transition,” he said. “The government is afraid to use the pulpit as a bully against oil and gas. It tries to play both sides.”
Michele Weindling, election director of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led environmental group, said young people want to see Mr Biden fight.
“This was a cultural moment for my generation,” Ms. Weindling said of Willow.
“It was a huge moment to say ‘no’ to the oil and gas industry,” she said. “It was a moment for President Biden to show us, which side are you on? He chose the wrong side. That makes our job a lot harder, Generation Z and young voters say Biden will deliver on his climate promises.”
