Young people reject Biden after supporting an oil project – 04/28/2023 – Environment

In the past three weeks, President Joe Biden’s administration has proposed regulation to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, committed $1 billion to help poor countries fight climate change, and prepared what could be the first emissions cap. of greenhouse gases for power plants.

Still, many young voters alarmed by climate change remain angered by Biden’s decision last month to pass the $8 billion Willow Oil Drilling Project on pristine federal land in Alaska.

As the president announces his candidacy for re-election, it’s unclear whether voters who helped him win in 2020 for his commitment to climate action will return to show up.

Alex Haraus, 25, said he and other young people felt betrayed by the Willow Bill decision after Biden pledged as a candidate that he would end new oil drilling on public land, “period.”

Haraus, whose TikTok videos opposing Willow have amassed hundreds of thousands of views, described his reaction as “angry, frustrated and disappointed”.

About a dozen young climate activists interviewed said they were not appeased by the Biden administration’s other acts, even if they significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the planet, Haraus said. What they want, he explained, is for the president to control the oil and gas companies, which made record profits last year.

“I don’t think any of those things encourage people to forgive the Biden administration for projects like Willow,” said Haraus, who lives outside Chicago. “Young voters see our future going out the window. We need Biden to stand up to the industry, otherwise there’s not much to look forward to.”

The overwhelming majority of young voters — about 62% — support a complete phase out of fossil fuels, said Alec Tyson, associate director of the Pew Research Center.

There is broad support among registered voters of both parties for a transition to a future in which the United States does not release more carbon emissions into the atmosphere, Tyson said. But most are unwilling to move away from fossil fuels entirely, he said.

From his first days in office, Biden has highlighted climate action as a priority. Shortly after moving into the White House, he put the US back into the Paris Agreement and set an ambitious goal of reducing the country’s emissions by about 50% below 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

He signed the Inflation Reduction Act (LRI) into law, which provides $370 billion in incentives to expand wind, solar and other clean energy and electric vehicles. It proposed rules to ensure that two-thirds of new cars and one-quarter of new heavy-duty trucks sold in the United States by 2032 are fully electric.

Within a few weeks, it is also expected to require coal and gas plants, responsible for 25% of the country’s greenhouse gases, to significantly reduce their emissions.

However, lawmakers and activists alike said they feared the regulatory measures would not capture voters’ imaginations and that the Willow bill would cast a long shadow.

“He takes one step forward with the LRI and two steps back with the Willow bill,” said Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, who, along with more than 30 other progressive lawmakers, urged Biden to cancel the drilling permit. .

Nationwide, 61% of 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Biden in 2020, while 36% voted for Donald Trump, according to an analysis by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan engagement group. youth at Tufts University. That’s more than the level of support Hillary Clinton received from young voters in 2016.

A March poll by liberal polling group Data for Progress saw a 13% drop in Biden’s approval ratings when it came to his climate agenda among voters aged 18-29 following Willow’s decision.

But administration officials said they saw no evidence that the president had lost ground with climate voters, or even young voters.

They pointed to polls by YouGov and Morning Consult, taken after Willow’s decision, which showed that about half of Americans supported her. The Morning Consult poll found that about 30% of young voters have not even heard of the Willow bill.

“President Biden has delivered on the most ambitious climate agenda to date, with support from labor groups, pro-environmental justice and climate leaders, youth advocates and more,” White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said in a statement.

For years, the Willow project remained under the public radar, even among environmental activists. When social media campaigns against Willow galvanized millions of activists earlier this year, it came as a surprise to the authorities, said several people involved in the movement.

Mark Paul, a political economist at Rutgers University, said that while the Biden administration has a strong plan to reduce demand, it needs complementary policies that cut output.

“We already have enough fossil fuels to meet our needs during the transition,” he said. “The government is afraid to use aggressive speech against oil and gas. It’s trying to play both sides.”

Michele Weindling, election director for the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led environmental group, said young people want to see Biden fight.

“This was a cultural moment for my generation,” Weindling said of Willow.

“It was a great moment to say ‘no’ to the oil and gas industry,” he said. “It was a moment for President Biden to show us whose side he is on. He chose the wrong side. It makes our job of telling Gen Z and young voters that Biden will deliver on his climate pledges that much harder.”

_{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}