Al Gore putting pressure on Joe Biden’s climate push, says report

Former vice president and longtime environmental campaigner Al Gore has apparently been lobbying Joe Biden not to give ground on his climate change goals as he negotiates an infrastructure deal with Senate Republicans.

The news comes as Mr Biden attends the G7 conference, where climate change is rivalled only by Covid-19 as the top agenda item.

According to a report from the Washington Post, Mr Gore and Mr Biden discussed the state of the president’s climate policy in a private phone call briefed to the paper by anonymous sources.

The vice president’s call was apparently meant to press Mr Biden into making sure his behemoth infrastructure proposal is not stripped of its various measures intended to pivot the US away from fossil fuels and curb carbon emissions. Among those are an expanded network of charging points for electric cars, $1 trillion in clean energy tax credits, and major green jobs programmes.

The paper quotes sources describing how Mr Gore, a former Tennessee senator, put particular pressure on Mr Biden to halt the construction of a pipeline that would transport crude oil for export through predominantly Black neighbourhoods in Memphis.

Mr Biden earlier this week ended his negotiations with West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito, the Republican deputised to help find a compromise that could secure bipartisan support. He is now trying to forge a way forward with a bipartisan group of centrist senators who could theoretically deliver enough backing to overcome the 60-vote threshold necessary to overcome opposition from the Republican minority.

The worry for Mr Gore and others in the environmental movement is that Mr Biden may give away too much on the climate front in order to secure compromise on other measures, passing up one of his best chances to make a major impact on the US’s environmental policy before the 2022 midterms. And there are rumblings on the Democratic left that if an infrastructure deal light on climate provisions is brought to the floor, they will withhold their votes to stop it.

Mr Gore was a well-known advocate for environmental protection well before he was elected vice president alongside Bill Clinton in 1992. From that position, he was able to help orient the US towards meaningful action on climate change. But when he lost the 2000 presidential election to George W Bush, the US’s environmental policy took a sharp turn away from multilateral climate action to the benefit of entrenched fossil fuel interests.

Where the Clinton-Gore administration had signed but not yet ratified the Kyoto protocol, a major treaty meant to combat greenhouse gas emissions, the Bush administration backed out of the deal altogether, complaining that its requirements would harm the US economy while leaving poorer countries exempt.

And while the Obama administration made some headway in committing the US to domestic and international climate goals, Donald Trump used his four years in office to pull the country out of the Paris Climate Agreement while also appointing climate change sceptics and figures from the fossil fuel industries to federal agencies.