Tag: special envoy for climate

Culture Wars Go to College

By Todd Lassa

A bit like an NCAA football rivalry, the Culture Wars have stumbled onto the battlefield of the college and university alumni of presidential candidates’ staff and cabinet. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., fired an early shot as the former vice president began announcing his choices to staff the White House. Rubio expressed concern about people who received degrees from Ivy League schools, presumably in an effort to appeal to the Trump wing, as one of Trump’s biggest demographic constituencies consisted of non-college educated white males.*

Then the Biden transition team launched a trial balloon, or canary in the Senate coalmine if you will with Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, nominated to become director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden was a longtime confidant of Hillary Clinton tipped to potentially be her chief of staff, background that has drawn some opposition from supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who believe she helped torpedo his 2016 Democratic nomination bid. When Trump won instead, she took to Twitter with the “#Resistance” hashtag. Since Biden announced his intention to nominate her, she has deleted more than 1,000 tweets from over the last four years, according to the New York Post.

Her tweets’ alleged nastiness has drawn the ire of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, both Republicans, though one might presume that as far as Rubio is concerned, she won’t be among the “polite & orderly caretakers” of the nation’s decline. 

What’s more, Tanden has a law degree from Yale.

The other intended cabinet are mostly ivy leaguers. They include Ron Klain (chief of staff; Georgetown University and Harvard Law), Janet Yellen (Treasury; Pembroke College of Brown University and Yale), Antony Blinken (State; Harvard and Columbia), John Kerry (special envoy for climate; Yale, though he had “low grades”), Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security; University of California-Berkeley and Loyola Law), Linda Thomas-Greenfield (United Nations ambassador; Louisiana State and University of Wisconsin-Madison, a “public ivy”) and Jake Sullivan (national security advisor; Yale). [Hat tip to Wikipedia and New York magazine’s Intelligencer.]

Biden will be the first non-Ivy grad to take the White House since Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ’84. He attended the University of Delaware and Syracuse University for law. Trump is an Ivy League grad with an economics degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Reagan? Eureka College. According to Lou Cannon writing in a piece for the UVA Miller Center (https://millercenter.org/president/reagan/life-before-the-presidency) “He majored in economics but was an indifferent student, graduating with a "C" average in 1932.”

Sounds like Rubio’s kind of guy.

*It should be noted that Rubio (along with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson) is considered a lead Republican candidate for president in 2024, assuming the party remains centered on its Trump populist wing and that no members of the outgoing president’s family—Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner—announce they’re running (which could explain the rumored pre-emptive pardons). To say nothing of Trump himself announcing another run in ’24 (which could also explain the rumored self-pardon).

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Business Community Pivots from Trump

By Todd Lassa

General Motors CEO Mary Barra (pictured) has announced that by the end 2025 there will be some 20 electric vehicles available to customers in the U.S. — 40 percent of all products on offer in its showrooms — which will go a long way toward the automaker meeting strict 2026 California fuel economy standards. But Barra waited until Michigan certified its 16 Electoral College votes would go to President-elect Joe Biden, to announce the automaker would separate from President Trump’s three-year plus legal proceedings to end the state’s special waiver allowing its own emissions laws.  

The California standard eases the Obama administration’s federal 54.5-mpg average by 2025, to about 51-mpg by 2026, while the Trump administration has sought a 40-mpg standard instead. GM, Toyota Motor and Fiat Chrysler signed on with the administration. Toyota, which built a reputation for low emissions and high fuel efficiency with its Prius hybrids, had said it joined Trump’s legal efforts because it prefers a single federal standard, no matter what the level.

Historically, until now, the standard set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has been tougher than the federal standard. California has had a waiver from the federal government to set its own rules since the late 1960s, and 16 high-population Eastern states long ago signed on. It must be noted that the corporate average fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards, whether 40 mpg or 54.5 mpg, do not literally mean automakers must meet those numbers – there are very complicated formulas for determining each car or truck models’ average. 

But with its fleet of zero-emission EVs on the way over the next few years, GM could reasonably have joined Ford Motor Company, BMW, Volvo, Volkswagen Group (which has aggressive plans for a fleet of its own EV models) and Honda (which is partnering with GM on EV projects) when they signed on with California on its 51-mpg average. 

Legal efforts to lower the future standard undoubtedly will end with Biden’s inauguration Jan. 20, when the president-elect will add a special envoy for climate to his cabinet. Biden has chosen John Kerry, Obama’s second secretary of state, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement on climate change (another accomplishment that Trump reversed), for the post. 

Trump often attacked Biden as beholden to the Democratic Party’s progressive wing and a commitment to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal.” In the second presidential debate, held in late October, Trump predicted that Biden would lose Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for his commitment to turn the United States into a net-zero producer of climate-warming pollutants by 2035, and to cut total emissions to zero by 2050. For the time being, at least, Biden appears to be carving out a middle road between climate change activists and the fossil fuel industry.

Barra’s announcement Monday coincided with the administrator of the General Services Administration, Emily W. Murphy, acknowledging nearly two weeks after the fact that former Vice President Biden had won the election, which in turn allowed the transition process to commence. It also coincided with the efforts of  “160 top American executives” who signed a letter to the Trump asking him to acknowledge Biden’s victory and begin an orderly transition, The New York Times reported Nov. 24. Some of the signatories also threatened to withhold campaign contributions to Sens. Kelly Loefler and David Purdue, two incumbent Republicans seeking re-election in a January runoff in Georgia. If they both lose, the Democrats will gain majority control of the Senate. 

It seems fairly clear that the business world has moved on from Trump and his policies.

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PHOTO CREDIT: General Motors