The Pandemic Remade Every Corner of Society. Now It's the Climate's Turn
On her third day as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Marcia Fudge phoned the White House. She had taken over an agency with a role to play addressing a range of crises as the lack of affordable housing in U.S. cities has left hundreds of thousands homeless and millions more in financial straits. She connected with Joe Biden’s climate team. Fudge and Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser, talked about addressing climate change and the affordable-housing shortage at the same time. Three weeks later, the Administration announced plans to provide for more than 1 million resilient and energy-efficient housing units. “People are actually, from every agency, knocking on our doors,” says McCarthy, “wondering how they can be part of what is essentially a hopeful future.”
From her perch in the West Wing, McCarthy has been charged by Biden with overseeing a dramatic shift in the way the U.S. pursues action on climate change. Instead of turning to a select few environment-focused agencies to make climate policy, McCarthy and her office are working to infuse climate considerations into everything the Administration does. The task force she runs includes everyone from the Secretary of Defense, who is evaluating the climate threat to national security, to the Treasury Secretary, who is working to stem the risk that climate change poses to the financial system.
The approach “affords us the opportunity to be more than greenhouse-gas accountants,” says Ali Zaidi, McCarthy’s deputy. “We can tackle the breadth of the climate challenge and the opportunity if we map the intersections with housing policy, and the intersection with racial justice, and the intersection with public health.”
For decades, the idea that climate change touches everything has grown behind the scenes. Leaders from small island countries have pleaded with the rest of the world to notice how climate change has begun to uproot their lives, in areas from health care to schooling. Social scientists have crunched the data, illuminating how climate change will ripple across society, contributing to a surge in migration, reduced productivity and a spike in crime. And advocates and thinkers have proposed everything from a conscious move to economic degrowth to eco-capitalism to make climate the government’s driving force.