Joe Biden’s debate performance could not be described as senile. Donald Trump’s could not be described as (exceptionally) erratic. Yet the president, flailing under an unprecedented global pandemic and rivaled by an opponent extraordinarily less loathsome than Hillary Clinton, may have found a lifeline to bolster his final fortnight of campaigning for reelection.
Biden, who has led Trump by an unusually stable margin not just nationally but also in key swing states, closed out an otherwise well-done debate committing to combat climate change not by maximizing the fracking operations that have helped the United States reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than other nations in the Paris climate accords or by embracing GHG-neutral nuclear power. Instead, he decided to obliterate his potential odds in Pennsylvania, perhaps the single most important battleground on the map.
“Transition from the oil industry? Yes,” Biden said. When asked why, he noted, “Because the oil industry pollutes, significantly.”
Based on the broad polling, Biden is the clear favorite to win the election. But plenty of states that Biden has made highly competitive, such as North Carolina and Iowa, still provide Trump the benefit of popular down-ticket races. In the end, it’s fully possible that 2020 comes down to the three Rust Belt states that gave Trump the White House, plus Florida and maybe Arizona. From there, and thanks to the mess that will be pandemic-fueled absentee and early-voting ballots, either candidate’s fate may rest on a rounding error. For Biden to give Trump a clear path to reclaim the 20 crucial Electoral College votes granted by the Keystone State is political malpractice.
According to the American Petroleum Institute, more than 300,000 of some 6 million Pennsylvanians in the workforce are employed by jobs supported by oil or natural gas. That’s 5%, or 1 in every 20 workers there, who rely on those related industries.
In a vacuum, Biden could make an extremely compelling case to kick off his presidency with a nuclear power initiative to transition energy workers to clean and higher-tech forms of energy while rapidly reducing our GHG emissions. But although Biden has touted nuclear power as part of the solution, he has allowed left-wing U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a supposed climate activist who claims no nuclear or market-oriented solution is acceptable, to sit on his climate panel. Meanwhile, during running mate Kamala Harris’s tenure as California attorney general, the Democrat saw her allies all but destroy California’s nuclear power grid.
Biden’s concession opens a very clear window into the reality of his promise. He would shut down our domestic oil industry with little plan of how to replace it on American soil, leaving us with another incentive to return to the forever wars of the Middle East. It’s a gift from God for Trump and one that could have given him an eleventh-hour reprieve.
