Biden’s climate chief warns against ‘U-turn agenda’

President Joe Biden's top climate adviser said he understands young activists' impatience with the slow progress on combating climate change — but warned that the president's political rivals are preparing a "U-turn agenda" that would reverse all the administration's progress.

White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi’s comments Wednesday at the POLITICO Energy Summit come as the youth-led environmental group Sunrise Movement signaled it is withholding its endorsement of Biden, who has struggled to draw support from the young voters who were crucial to his election four years ago.

Zaidi said the administration needs to communicate the stakes of the policies. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, for his part, has blasted the Biden administration’s climate policies as a “scam” and vowed to roll them back..

A reversal of Biden’s policies “actually puts us on a U-turn trajectory. A U-turn to [a] less competitive economy. A U-turn to unsafe communities, a U-turn on jobs,” Zaidi said. “That's a really big deal. It's very problematic.”

Zaidi said the angst from young people reflects their experiences, with wildfires turning the skies orange and policymakers’ actions failing to meet the urgency their generation believes is needed to keep global temperature increases in check. But he said part of his role is ensuring the administration’s actions meet the call of science, and that Biden is committed to his goal of slashing U.S. emissions in half this decade, relative to 2005 levels.

“I’m impatient with the fact that it takes time to turn over infrastructure,” Zaidi said. “But you have a president that’s getting after every single, solitary aspect of how we get business done – and doing it in a time when he's also orchestrating the biggest economic comeback the country has ever seen.”

The Biden administration has staked its economic agenda on delivering a clean energy and manufacturing boom driven by the hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure law and CHIPS and Science Act. The laws have buoyed domestic manufacturing for solar power, electric vehicles and batteries, which administration officials said will position American workers for employment in growth sectors.

While the policies are popular with Democratic voters, most Americans say they are largely unaware of the administration’s actions and accomplishments, according to POLITICO and Morning Consult polling. Part of the reason for the disconnect: Much of the money has yet to hit the ground, POLITICO reported in a monthslong analysis.

Zaidi said the administration wants to move that money to recipients around the country, but has to follow processes to avoid misspending taxpayer dollars.

“It could go faster,” Zaidi said. “To do all of that well, you’ve got to tolerate a little bit of time.”

While many of the tax credits the IRA created have sparked clean energy projects, especially in Republican-leaning districts and states, many agencies are still working to deploy billions of dollars in federal spending. The Biden administration is racing to get that money out the door in case Trump wins the White House in November.

Republicans may have a tough time repealing all of the measures in the IRA or the infrastructure law, despite Trump’s promises to do just that. Many in the energy industry, including oil and gas, support elements of those laws, and some have even vowed to defend them, arguing the incentives are seeding new technologies that can spur new jobs and combat greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

“If you're in Dalton, Georgia, you used to make sofas. Those factories went away. Now you're making solar panels. You know Biden's tax credits are making a difference,” Zaidi said.

Meanwhile, climate activists from groups like Sunrise have expressed deep unhappiness with Biden’s support for a handful of major oil and gas projects, including a massive drilling project in Alaska and an Appalachian natural gas pipeline championed by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Many of those groups, including Sunrise, also object to Biden’s support for Israel during its war in Gaza.

“A second Trump term is an existential threat to our democracy and climate,” Sunrise said in a statement to POLITICO on Wednesday. It added: “But, to defeat Trump, Biden needs to re-assemble his 2020 coalition.”

Axios had first reported that Sunrise, which didn’t endorse Biden in 2020, has declined so far to do so again.

Zaidi said there’s been “a dereliction of duty for decades” on addressing climate change. He noted the Biden administration helped forge an agreement at the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, United Arab Emirates last year that for the first time got all countries to agree to begin accelerating the shift off fossil fuels. He noted the Energy Department in January followed that up with a pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export terminals, in part to assess the role they have on driving climate change.

Yet he said there’s a need to balance current energy needs and infrastructure — such as the fact most cars run on gasoline — with combating greenhouse gases.

“We've got to figure out — and this is not an easy task — how we accelerate the clean energy transformation while maintaining stability for the consumers, especially low- and moderate-income folks who depend on that infrastructure today,” he said.