Pix credit here |
In a quite remarkable, though unremarked, remarks addressed to the assembled press organs in 11 November 2024 at the Climate Change Conference (COP 29) held in Baku, Azerbaijan, John Podesta suggested both the character of the transition from the Biden to the 2nd Trump Administration, and the nature of the sort of approaches those who will after 20 January 2025 will be in opposition will undertake. During the course of a set of remarks in which he outlined the normative principles and applied efforts of the outgoing Biden Administration, he also took the time to sketch out his sense of the antimonies between the vision and operational policies he serves and those he expects from the successor Administration of Mr. Trump.
Pix credit here
"It’s clear that the next Administration will try to take a U turn and reverse much of this progress. Of course, I am keenly aware of the disappointment that the United States has at times caused the parties of the climate regime, who have lived through a pattern of strong, engaged, effective U.S. leadership, followed by sudden disengagement after a U.S. presidential election. And I know that this disappointment is more difficult to tolerate as the dangers we face grow ever more catastrophic."
"But that is the reality. In January, we will inaugurate a President whose relationship to climate change is captured by the words “hoax” and “fossil fuels”. He has vowed to dismantle our environmental safeguards— and once again withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement."
"This is what he has said, and we should believe him."
"The United States is a democracy. And in a democracy, the will of the people prevailed. Our administration is working with the incoming Administration to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition of power. "
"But what I want to tell you today is that while the United States federal government under Donald Trump may put climate action on the back burner, the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief. As President Biden said in the Rose Garden last week, setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable. This is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet. "(Remarks as Delivered by John Podesta Press Conference at the 29th UN Climate Change Conference (COP 29) in Baku, Azerbaijan)
Mr. Podesta would know. He has been serving as Senior Advisor to President Biden for Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation since September 2022 And in a similar role during the Obama Administration). He also served as chairman for Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 campaign for president and as chief of staff for Mr. Clinton during his Presidency(here). The entirety of the remarks are worth reading. They are worth reading not solely for what Mr. Podesta says, but more importantly, for the normative stance that serve as the foundations for those remarks, its principles and most importantly--from the perspective of climate change sensitive policies--for the choice of fundamental principle of what and who ought to be guiding ad leading climate sensitive policies and how that guidance and leadership ought to be undertaken. In that sense Mr. Podesta represents the American version of an emerging orthodoxy with respect to climate sensitive policy and a further orthodoxy respecting how that policy ought to be realized.
Mr. Podesta's unhappiness, echoes that of the political-normative class that has been at the vanguard of shaping narrative and policy since before the start of this century, a narrative and policy orthodoxy that has been injected into mass perception through press and academic organs. The UK's Guardian provides an excellent example of the state of thinking on the cusp of a return of Mr. Trump to the presidency:
Experts say Trump’s second term could be even more destructive, as he will be aided by an amenably conservative judiciary and armed with detailed policy blueprints such as the Project 2025 document published by the rightwing Heritage Foundation. Trump’s incoming administration is already reportedly drawing up executive orders to erase climate policies and open up protected land for ramped-up oil and gas production. “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world,” the president-elect said on Wednesday. Staff at the US Environmental Protection Agency, which was targeted the last time Trump was president, are already bracing for a mass exodus. Swaths of work done by the EPA under Biden, such as pollution rules for cars and power plants, as well as efforts to protect vulnerable communities living near industrial activity, are set to be reversed. (US climate envoy says fight against climate crisis does not end under Trump)
Mr. Podesta's warning to the global magisterium of like minded techno-bureaucracies along with the political leaders that these bureaucracies manage, expose in a quite useful way, both the boundaries of orthodoxy and the possibilities of a counter-orthodoxy (now heresy) even among those committed in some form or another to climate change sensitive policy (and consequential action).
Those boundaries are important, but not in the useful and banal ways. The boundaries suggest a presumption of an inevitable and unbreakable connection between an issue (sensitivity to the realities of climate change) and a specific set of objectives (minimizing, or eliminating at its limit, human contribution to climate change), and the apparatus necessary to connect issue and objective (the state, law and the techno-bureaucratic complex). That is neither unusual nor unnecessary in the current stage of the historical development of governance in social relations. But it does create a set of hard presumptions that do not invite consideration of other starting or ending points, even when these may be committed to the same objectives. The cluster of presumptions that are woven into Mr. Podesta's remarks, then, are as important for signalling allegiance to a core set of starting presumptions (structural orthodoxy) and a commitment to the regulatory class that has embraced them. That is an important element of the remarks--the description of the orthodoxy in which Mr. Podesta and the Biden Administration have been invested; one that aligns with what is meant to be an international consensus.
Yet consensus ought not to suggest identity, even among the broad groups that adhere to some variation of consensus around the core components (issue, objectives, apparatus). Going forward, both the incoming administration and those who still adhere to the reigning orthodoxy ought to at least be sensitive to these groups. They will, each in their own way, play a role in the movement from vanguard driven orthodoxies to a naturalization of orthodox consensus, and with it, the cluster of objectives implemented through an apparatus developed or deployed for the purpose). Four broad groups may be particularly worth noting:
But beyond orthodoxies--an inverted phenomenology in which ideology drives experience which is then interpreted in ways that affirm ideology, over and over--require an object. And the great actors on the stages of climate change sensitivity all appear to focus on the engines through which preferred forms of performing climate sensitivity toward even more preferred ends--public and private bureaucracies, the propaganda departments of the great institutions (however styled in accordance with the vocabularies of distinct political-economic systems), and social collectives whether to not they are attached to great institutions, primary among them are states and the instrumentalities of state collectives. It is easiest this way--top down, "expert" driven" and designed to lead their objects toward proper attitudes and behaviors. And they will (learn to) like it.
And yet there lies the problem--the problem of the indifferent masses. It might not be unreasonable to assume that a large number of people are indifferent to issues of climate change. There are any number of reasons. Many people are concerned about survival, with respect to which climate issues may be at best a peripheral and long term factor. The exception is where survival is impacted by climate change--those are the stories that are widely publicized and then consumed by vanguard forces as objects that might move forward their political projects in political and judicial bodies at every level of regulatory institutions. Others may just not care. For those who do care these are the great object of narrative strategies, and the large body of actors whose preferences will drive compliance. That compliance can be demanded through public regulatory structures, commands, and nudging. Or it can be driven through markets and autonomously applied individual action guided (or dialectically evolved) by social actors that may or may not be the state.
Whether (1) one wraps climate sensitivity and shared objectives within the hierarchies, and cocoons of institutional (usually public) apparatus, or (2) manifests it through guided (or unguided) markets lead by (sort of) autonomous decision making (within the constraints and expectations of markets and its (eminently teachable) framework for valuing things), or (3) whether the object is to reject climate sensitivity in whole or in part leaving the masses to the whatever awaits (the vanguard tends to always figure out and privilege a means of self-preservation), the masses must be made to care. Some approaches to collective perception might suggest that mass perception--and its choices of caring or indifference--ought to be driven by the masses themselves. Contemporary approaches tend to belittle that starting point, preferring instead to feed the illusion of free will , exercised only under the guidance of those who know better, And perhaps they do. To shape perception is to shape the arena within which choice cane be rationalized. And the construction of the perception of the consequences of choice become the foundation for the management of inclinations toward caring or indifference. It is that to which much effort has been devoted already. And that will continue. What Mr. Podesta reminds us, though, is that where consensus exists only within different social collectives, and within factions of such social collectives, one moves from perception to politics. And in 2024, at least in the United States, politics has now produced a potentially great shift away from Mr.Podesta's vanguard elements to those of another, to clusters of groups fundamentally suspicious of the controlling role of the State and its instrumentalities that power
The text of Mr. Podesta's Remarks follow below. They may also be accessed HERE.