Biden brings in Sperling to calm looming Detroit showdown

President Joe Biden is putting long-time Democratic adviser Gene Sperling in charge of helping smooth the upcoming labor contract talks between the auto workers’ union and Big Three automakers, a White House official confirmed Monday — a looming potential economic headache facing the president’s reelection effort.

In tapping Sperling, Biden is putting an economic power player and long-time manufacturing advocate in a position to win over a union that is openly skeptical about the White House’s push for electric vehicles. The effort could also shore up support for the president in Michigan — the state where Sperling was born and which played a crucial role in Biden’s election in 2020.

“As a White House point person on key issues related to the UAW and Big Three, Sperling will help ensure Administration-wide coordination across interested parties and among White House policymakers,” a White House official said in a statement to POLITICO. “Gene will work hand-in-glove with acting [Labor] Secretary Julie Su on all labor-related issues.”

The official was granted anonymity to discuss a matter not yet officially announced.

The United Auto Workers and its new leadership have chastised Biden for steering hundreds of billions of dollars toward incentives for electric vehicles, a policy that the union worries threatens its members’ jobs. Biden’s top Republican rival for the White House, former President Donald Trump, has preyed on those anxieties to court support from auto workers.

That leaves Sperling with a full plate. UAW’s collective bargaining agreement with Detroit’s major car companies ends Sept. 14. Should the talks turn acrimonious, a strike could damage the economy and give Republicans fresh ammunition in the 2024 campaign.

Sperling has spent months advising the White House, including overseeing implementation of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. He has recently begun incorporating engagement with auto companies and the UAW into his daily role.

Sperling, 64, was the national economic council director and national economic adviser to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and a member of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry from 2009 to 2010.

While auto companies received a taxpayer-funded bailout in 2009, UAW leadership contends workers made huge sacrifices to help the industry recover from the recession. That legacy colors much of what is animating UAW President Shawn Fain, who has taken the labor organization in a more aggressive direction since winning a runoff election in March.

The UAW cited its concerns about the jobs implications of electric vehicles when it said in May that it was not yet ready to endorse Biden. It represents a blemish for Biden, a self-proclaimed car guy who has fashioned himself the most labor-friendly president in modern U.S. history.

Biden has pledged to make half of new vehicle sales electric by 2030. But the UAW has pushed Biden to attach more strings to federal investment to ensure companies that receive taxpayer-backed subsidies provide sustaining wages and better working conditions. The fledgling U.S. battery manufacturing industry key to making electric vehicles — and to which the Biden administration has steered tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies — has little relationship with organized labor.

The UAW has often referenced a 2018 study it conducted that suggested moving away from internal combustion engines, which have more parts and require more workers, would cost its members 35,000 jobs. Fain last month slammed the Biden administration for issuing a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build three battery factories in Kentucky and Tennessee, where labor organizing is more difficult.

“They’re just raising an alarm,” Reem Rayef, senior policy advisor with BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental groups, said in an interview about UAW’s recent public comments. “That’s all great to put these jobs here. I think what we are hearing from UAW is, ‘That is great, but it’s not enough.’”

U.S. eyeing ways to include Europe in electric car tax breaks

The Biden administration may allow European companies to share in billions of dollars in U.S. tax incentives for electric vehicles if the two sides can reach a trade deal in the next few weeks, a senior administration official said Friday — a move that could help ease a major source of transatlantic friction.

No such concessions for Europe will be included in a long-awaited proposed guidance that the Treasury Department will release for the incentives next week, the official told POLITICO after being granted anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. But ongoing talks between the U.S. and EU could produce an agreement allowing vehicles that include European minerals to qualify for the full extent of the tax breaks, the person said.

Those vehicles would still have to be made in North America.

The talks address one of the central tension points of the massive climate law that President Joe Biden signed last year — its attempt to combat climate change by encouraging the use of carbon-free energy, while creating a host of mining and manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Automakers, who are eagerly awaiting the Treasury guidance, see the $7,500-per-vehicle incentive as a tool for achieving Biden’s goal of having electric cars and trucks make up half of all new vehicle sales by 2030. Allowing more types of vehicles to qualify for the tax breaks could also meet Biden’s promise to consumers to help make electric vehicles more affordable.

But keeping the door open to EU suppliers could anger some domestic carmakers, as well as U.S. mining companies and battery manufacturers that say the climate law’s “Made in America” provisions are crucial for creating a domestic supply chain for clean energy. Congress included those provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act in an effort to wean the U.S. off battery imports from China, which dominates the global industry.

The Treasury guidance on the tax incentives coming next week will spell out details of how the agency proposes to weigh the extraction and processing of minerals used in electric vehicles and their components. The initial version will exclude minerals extracted and processed in the EU, the official said.

The U.S. and EU have been negotiating for weeks over how the European industry could qualify for those incentives, but the talks have not produced an agreement yet. Treasury’s release of the proposal next week will start a 30-day comment period, after which the agency will issue a final version.

If the U.S. and EU can successfully conclude those discussions by then, the EU could be granted a special free-trade partner status for critical minerals under the climate law — an idea that was first laid out in a white paper released by Treasury late last year. The U.S. and EU do not now have a free trade agreement.

The administration also has to navigate potential objections from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a key negotiator of the climate law, who has lambasted Treasury’s past handling of the electric vehicle incentives, accusing it of undermining the IRA’s domestic content requirements. But Manchin in remarks on Thursday appeared open to extending the vehicle credit to European minerals.

“I don't have a problem with EU — our allies, I have no problem with that," he told reporters.

European leaders have expressed anger for months over the climate law’s domestic content provisions, contending they would effectively block their industry from the fast-growing U.S. market.

While European companies are already eligible for half of the $7,500 credit if they assemble cars in North America, the EU is fighting with the U.S. over the remaining $3,750 in incentives. That provision requires that 40 percent of the value of the critical minerals — which Treasury indicated in its December white paper would include the battery electrodes — must be extracted or processed in the United States or in a country with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement. That level increases to 80 percent by 2027.

The U.S. industry now relies on imports of those battery components from China, as well as South Korea and Japan. But several U.S.-based companies have announced plans to spend billions of dollars to build their own factories to produce them after Biden signed the climate law last summer.

The U.S.-EU talks got new momentum after Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met in Washington earlier this month, when they pledged in a joint statement to work through the matter.

In last year’s white paper, the administration said it believed it has authority to carve out a targeted free trade partnership through the climate law.

In contrast, some lawmakers have questioned whether the executive branch can unilaterally grant free-trade status even for limited purposes without Congress’ approval.

Biden expected to OK Alaska oil project — a blow to his green base

President Joe Biden's allies in the climate movement are bracing for their biggest setback from his administration as he moves closer to approving an Alaskan oil project that would pump as much carbon into the atmosphere as 60 coal-burning power plants.

The administration is expected to approve ConocoPhillips' plans to build its proposed Willow project on federal land in the Arctic tundra, according to three people at environmental groups who have talked to the White House and Interior Department in recent days about it. But there is no indication yet that Biden himself has signed off on it, and the administration appears to be still trying to decide how big the project would be, these people said.

The White House insisted Friday and Saturday that the administration has made “no final decisions” about the project. But administration officials have touted the importance of oil production in recent months, and people outside the administration said they had been expecting the approval to be announced this past Friday.

Biden pledged to halt new oil and gas development on federal land during his 2020 campaign, and he and Democrats in Congress passed landmark climate legislation last summer aimed at weaning huge swaths of the economy off of fossil fuels. But the surge in oil prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the administration into an awkward embrace of the oil industry, as Biden countered Republican accusations that his policies were to blame for the skyrocketing price at the gas pump that was stoking inflation.

Approving Willow would be just the latest shift by Biden toward the political center as he moves toward a potential reelection bid. He similarly dismayed liberals last week by saying he would not veto a GOP-led repeal of changes to D.C.’s criminal code.

The White House defended Biden's environmental record Saturday in comments to POLITICO, saying Biden's policies have made the U.S. "a magnet for clean energy manufacturing and jobs" with policies that help the U.S. come closer to meeting climate goals. A White House official said that using oil and gas is still consistent with Biden's near- and long-term emissions targets, which the official said the U.S. is on track to meet.

"This approach has not changed — nor will it. Our climate goals are cutting emissions in half by 2030 and reaching net-zero by 2050 — not 2023," the official said. "That has always meant that oil will continue to be a part of the energy mix in the short-term while we shore up domestic clean energy production for the long-term."

Environmental groups acknowledged Saturday that they were largely in the dark about the White House’s plans, but said they believed that the current discussions inside the administration were largely over whether to limit the number of drilling sites at the Willow project to two rather than three. Conoco had proposed building five well pads.

“It sounds like different groups in the White House are still discussing” the potential size of the project, said one environmental advocate who had been in contact with the administration late Friday.

“They told us they had nothing to offer” on the state of project deliberations, added the person, who was granted anonymity to describe internal White House deliberations.

But if the reports of the approval are true, Biden’s shift to the center on oil would threaten to demoralize the climate activists he needs to support him in 2024, said Jamal Raad, co-founder and senior adviser of the group Evergreen Action.

“It will be harder for us and climate activists to rally around this president come next year,” Raad said, explaining the action would detract from his many accomplishments, such as the $370 billion in climate and clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, while putting the onus on Biden to issue tougher environmental rules on cars and power plants.

Conoco declined to comment until it hears a decision directly from the administration.

Conoco Chief Executive Ryan Lance last week urged the administration to approve Willow, saying the project was in line with the Biden administration’s recent exhortations to the industry to increase oil production to help batten down prices.

“This is exactly what this administration has been asking our industry to do over the last couple of years,” Lance told an energy conference in Houston.

Regardless of the size, any plan would call for drilling oil and building miles of pipelines and roads, a gravel pit, an air strip and other infrastructure in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a 36,875-square-mile patch of federal land in the relatively undeveloped Arctic wilderness. It would produce as much as 600,000 barrels of oil over its three-decade lifetime.

The project would also add nearly 280 million tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere over that period, according to the Interior Department’s environmental analysis. That would be the equivalent of adding two new coal-fired power plants to the U.S. electricity system every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions calculator.

The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, originally set aside by the Harding administration for potential oil drilling in 1923, is outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, another swath of northern Alaska that Biden has declared off-limits for oil development. 

Environmentalists said they were still holding onto hope based on the administration’s denial that it made a final decision to OK the project, despite multiple news reports saying that an announcement of the approval would be made in the coming days. (Bloomberg News first reported Friday night that the administration had decided to greenlight it.)

“Great! Then there is still time to turn this all around!!!” Natural Resources Defense Council spokesperson Anne Hawke posted on Twitter after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denied on Friday that a final decision had been made.

Hawke also reached out to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg for help persuading Biden, tweeting at the young advocate: “In just days, the US will approve a massive oil project in Alaska. Can you help us tell US @POTUS to #StopWillowProject?”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a longtime climate advocate, expressed dismay at the news.

“We cannot allow the Willow Project to move forward,” he tweeted late Friday. “We must build a clean energy future — not return to a dark, fossil-fueled past.”

An approval, if it comes, would infuriate environmental groups and continue a year-long strengthening of the administration’s relationship with the oil industry. But it would also come as market analysts are forecasting that oil prices will remain volatile for the next several years, which would make killing the project politically tricky.

Biden himself has softened his rhetoric on transitioning the country away from fossil fuels, and he has repeatedly pressed the oil and gas industry to increase production in the short term to keep prices lower.

“We are still going to need oil and gas for a while.” he said during his State of the Union speech last month.

The Willow development is the rare large-scale oil project to be announced in recent years in the United States, where the industry has instead shifted its focus to drilling smaller, cheaper and faster projects using fracking to tap into shale fields in the Southwest. If approved, construction could start soon, and additional construction in Alaska's North Slope for Willow will occur throughout the summer and fall, the company has said.

Alaskan native tribes have expressed split opinions on the project, with some warning it would degrade their environment and others welcoming its potential economic gains.

“The Willow Project is a new opportunity to ensure a viable future for our communities, creating generational economic stability for our people and advancing our self-determination,” said Nagruk Harcharek, president of the nonprofit Voice of Arctic Iñupiat, in a statement Saturday. “North Slope Iñupiat communities have waited nearly a generation for Willow to advance.”

Yet that urgency to develop the project, and the signals from the White House, were disheartening to environmental groups.

“To us, it all sucks because it flies in the face of meeting our climate goals. So we’re going to keep fighting until there is a final record of decision,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs with the League of Conservation Voters.

Some of Biden’s green allies suggested the move could have repercussions for Democrats in 2024. Along with the long-debated Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, which Biden effectively killed in one of his first acts as president, Willow has joined the ranks of fossil fuel projects that in earlier decades would have flown under radar but have now taken on outsized political significance.

The Biden administration is caught in the middle, hyping the Inflation Reduction Act it signed into law as the biggest climate-related legislation ever but also asking companies to keep pumping barrels to keep fuel prices low in the here-and-now. That law has also won praise from the oil and gas sector for its incentives for carbon capture and storage and clean hydrogen – technologies the fossil fuel producers are pursuing.

Raad, from Evergreen Action, said the Willow project “was something that really took the internet and social media by storm the last few weeks – because it is a physical thing and a physical place that feels real.” And that has implications for Biden’s hopes for reelection, he added.

“There's just no escaping the fact that we're going to need to rally young folks and folks interested in climate next year to win,” Raad said. “And this does not help in any shape or form.”

As of March 2, environmental advocates were citing 9,000 videos protesting Willow on the social media platform TikTok. Former Vice President Al Gore earlier this week weighed in to say it would be “recklessly irresponsible” to approve Willow.

Deirdre Shelly, campaigns director with the youth environmental group Sunrise Movement, said her organization is already strategizing for the next election and that approving Willow would make organizers’ jobs more difficult.

“This is just a huge disappointment. … It does feel like an about-face,” she said. “It makes it even harder for us to convince young people that they need to vote, that the Democratic Party leaders will act on climate.”

But the administration also felt heavy pressure from the oil industry and the state’s politically powerful Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski has long championed Willow as a needed boost to the Alaskan economy, which has been troubled for years as the overall oil industry has picked up stakes to move to the cheaper opportunities in the Lower 48.

Oil and gas companies and energy-state lawmakers would have been ready to blame the rejection of Willow for any subsequent rise in energy costs, even though the Biden Interior Department has approved new permits to drill on public land at a faster rate than his predecessors.

Murkowski, speaking Friday in Houston before the announcement, said she had met with the White House last week to warn that the administration was legally bound to approve the project, given that Conoco held oil leases on federal land.

“The fact of the matter is these are valid existing leases that Conoco holds,” Murkowski told reporters. “If the administration [had] basically not allowed them to be able to access those leases, what follows then? … Alaska litigation is always something that we have to reckon with.”

Catherine Morehouse contributed to this report.

No avoiding it now: Immigration issues threaten Biden’s climate program

President Joe Biden’s plan for greening the economy relies on a simple pitch: It will create good-paying jobs for Americans.

The problem is there might not be enough Americans to fill them. That reality is pressuring the Biden administration to wrestle with the nation’s immigration system to avoid squandering its biggest legislative achievements.

“There’s no question that addressing our broken immigration system in America would address many workforce shortages,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), a vocal proponent of immigration overhaul, told POLITICO. “There’s employment needed right now. Jobs are available.”

Congress has put a record amount of money behind boosting jobs the U.S. workforce presently does not appear equipped to fulfill. That includes $369 billion in climate incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, $550 billion in new money through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act’s $52 billion to boost semiconductor manufacturing.

Lawmakers, former administration officials, clean energy and labor advocates said immigration fixes are needed if the administration wants to ensure its biggest victories don’t go to waste — and that the nation can fight climate change, add jobs and beat geopolitical rivals like China in the global marketplace. Those changes include raising annual visa caps for highly skilled workers needed to grow the next wave of U.S. industry and securing ironclad work protections for people in the country on a temporary basis, they said. It’s the key to building a workforce needed to design, manufacture and install millions of new appliances, solar panels and electric vehicles.

The high stakes for Biden’s jobs agenda, which will be a pillar of his likely reelection message next year, may force the White House to finally grapple with an issue it’s mostly kept on the back burner.

President Donald Trump cut legal immigration in half over his four years in office through a mix of executive orders that halted immigration from Muslim countries and limited the ability of people seeking to join their spouses and other family members in the U.S. As Republicans have attacked Biden over the migrant crisis at the southern border, his administration has kept some of his predecessor’s immigration policies in place. And the White House is wary about enabling additional GOP attacks that would likely ignore the economic rationale for any easing of legal migration and simply hammer Biden as “soft” on immigration.

In addition, calling for foreign-born workers would appear at odds with Biden’s blue-collar, American-made green revolution.

Last decade saw the U.S. population grow at its slowest rate since the Great Depression, yet the White House remains somewhat hesitant to take further executive action or use its bully pulpit on immigration, according to people familiar with the administration’s thinking. But they said the administration recognizes immigration tweaks could break a labor shortage raising the price of goods through supply chain constraints, slowing clean energy projects and preventing highly skilled people from helping American businesses lead in emerging global industries.

One former administration official warned that policymakers must soon address the reality of global competition for high-skilled talent.

“If in the long term we neglect the human capital equation here, to some extent these efforts to change the face of industrial policy in the United States are not going to be as successful as they should be,” said Amy Nice, distinguished immigration fellow and visiting scholar at Cornell Law, who until January led STEM immigration policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “And some measures will be in vain.”

The White House has been hearing from senior officials, including at least one Cabinet secretary, about the need for administrative actions on immigration — raising caps on certain visa categories, filling country quotas — to help alleviate the pressure on the workforce and increase the country’s labor supply, according to a senior administration official not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Biden, some officials and lawmakers have asserted, could also increase staff and other resources to help speed up visa processing and cut through a massive backlog that has left potential workers in limbo for months, years, and in some cases, decades.

But for now, the administration seems more inclined to allow Congress to work on the issue.

“I don’t think politics is the main concern. It’s just inertia and the hope that something more substantial could be done through legislation,” said one senior administration official who did not want to be named in order to speak freely.

A White House official defended the administration’s record on immigration, noting Biden sent a framework for comprehensive immigration reform to Congress as one of his first presidential actions. The measure has yet to gain traction.

The White House official noted the administration is moving to address immediate clean energy workforce needs in the construction, electrification and manufacturing fields, where a shortage of qualified people threatens to slow deployment of climate-fighting innovations Biden needs to meet his climate goals.

The official said the administration has worked with organizations to pair skilled refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine with trade union apprenticeship programs. The official said the administration’s focus remains on retraining people through creating training pipelines for electricians, broadband installers and construction workers. The official added that expanding union participation would ensure stronger labor supply by reducing turnover through improved job quality, safety and wages.

“I don’t think we’ve run out of people to do these kinds of jobs,” the official said.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said in an interview that the White House is “certainly aware that the low unemployment rate can be an obstacle” to the economy and the laws it has passed, but that the administration “hasn’t come to the Hill with a real workforce focus” on immigration.

The stakes are clear for sectors pivotal to building and operating the infrastructure, manufacturing and clean energy projects Biden and Democrats have promised. The 57,000 foreign-born workers currently in the electrical and electronics engineering field comprise nearly 27 percent that sector’s workforce, while the 686,000 foreign-born construction laborers account for 38 percent of the nation’s total, according to a New American Economy analysis of Census data. Most foreign-born construction laborers are undocumented immigrants, according to the Center for American Progress, making up nearly one-quarter of the sector’s national workforce.

“My largest worry about the American economy right now is the workforce worry,” Kaine said.

The White House has seemed more comfortable taking executive steps, Kaine said, such as expanding a humanitarian parole program for migrants that also comes with a two-year work authorization. It also has pledged to step up enforcement against employers that exploit undocumented workers, which advocates contend will help keep those people in the workforce.

But conversations are also brewing again on Capitol Hill about more “discreet” immigration bills. Kaine said he and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have discussed legislation to help support people with Temporary Protected Status, a Department of Homeland Security designation for people who have fled natural disasters, armed conflict or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” in their home country.

Immigration restrictions are even hindering oil and gas companies right now, Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas), said in a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last month.

“The permits that ranchers use, agriculture, the permits that hospitality use — those same immigration permits are not the ones that are needed for people to have temporary work visas in the oil and gas sector,” he said. “You ain’t unleashing a thing unless you do something about immigration reform."

Others have suggested that in addition to its inability to reach a deal to update the nation’s outdated immigration system, Congress needs to do a better job at retaining the immigrants who specifically come to the U.S. to earn degrees.

The U.S. for years has struggled to develop advanced STEM degree holders, a key indicator of a country’s future competitiveness in these fields. It has fewer native-born advanced STEM degree recipients than countries like China, raising national security concerns from top officials. The Biden administration has tried to break that logjam, in part by allowing international STEM students to stay on student visas and work for up to three years in the U.S. post-graduation.

“Why educate some of these folks in American schools … and then lose some of our best and brightest talent just because our system is super outdated?” said Kerri Talbot, deputy director of the Immigration Hub.

And the demand for high-skilled workers far outweighs the nation’s immigration caps, said Shev Dalal-Dheini, head of government affairs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Congress limited employment-based green cards and H-1B visas offering temporary residency to skilled workers to 140,000 and 85,000 per year, respectively.

Foreign nationals dominate the exact fields the U.S. needs to grow its clean energy and manufacturing base. Nearly three-quarters of all full-time graduate students at U.S. universities pursuing electrical engineering, computer and information science, and industrial and manufacturing engineering degrees are foreign-born, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, an innovation, trade and immigration think tank. The same is true for more than half seeking mechanical engineering and agricultural economics, mathematics, chemical engineering, metallurgical and materials engineering and materials sciences degrees.

Subtle changes, like requiring more evidence and interviews, under the Trump administration worsened already-common backlogs. Processing at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is mainly paper based, not electronic, shuttered during the pandemic — it remains plagued by staff and funding shortages.

To the extent that the green energy transition is a race for a global market and influence, the U.S. immigration system is like a boulder in its shoe.

“Canada literally places billboards in Washington state saying, ‘Come here,’” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior advisor for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Our ability to succeed in these big goals relies on people being able to do the work to meet those goals.”

Biden taps former Mastercard CEO Banga to head World Bank

President Joe Biden on Thursday nominated Ajay Banga, the former CEO of Mastercard, to lead the World Bank.

The surprise selection would install in the role a Wall Street veteran positioned to leverage billions more in private capital the institution needs to transform into a leader on climate change and other global challenges.

Biden said in a statement that Banga is "uniquely equipped to lead the World Bank at this critical moment in history." World leaders have called on the international lender to rethink how it addresses emerging global crises like climate change, food security and the coronavirus pandemic.

The nomination comes just days after current World Bank President David Malpass announced he would resign by July, months ahead of when the Trump administration-nominated leader's term expired.

Banga, if confirmed by the World Bank's board, will have to balance the climate agenda of the U.S., the bank’s largest shareholder, with concerns from other countries about a potential move away from the institution’s core mandates of fighting poverty and funding economic development projects within national borders.

The U.S. has historically been allowed to choose the head of the World Bank, although that dynamic has recently faced pushback from other nations.

Banga, an admired figure for decades on Wall Street, rose to prominence at Citigroup as a protege of then-CEO Sandy Weill. Raised in India as a Sikh, Banga cut a recognizable figure at parties and events with his stylish turban and humble approach.

Weill had to convince him to take the company jet after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks instead of flying commercial and risking intense immigration scrutiny. Sikh Americans faced significant hostility from some Americans after the attacks even though they had no connection to Islamic jihadists.

Despite being in the mix to take over Citi from Weill, Banga decided to leave the bank to take over at Mastercard, which he led from 2010 to 2020.

Environmental advocates have put a premium on ensuring the next World Bank president will marshal its resources to address rising temperatures and deliver finance to green energy systems across the globe.

Yet Banga is a bit of a mystery to the climate-minded community.

"The World Bank is about a host of issues, which includes climate. So, I mean, first you actually have to run the bank, which is no small feat," said Kalee Kreider, a longtime adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, who is now president of public affairs firm Ridgely Walsh.

Added Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development: “Banga’s nomination clearly reflects a desire to focus on the World Bank as a bank and find ways to achieve greater scale in the financial model."

Some environmental groups are less keen on the choice.

“Biden has chosen a planet-wrecking CEO for World Bank President," said Bronwen Tucker, Public Finance Campaign Co-Manager at Oil Change International. "This is the sadly predictable outcome of a broken process, but he shouldn’t be allowed to name one in the first place."

Still, green champions have also recognized that the World Bank's power comes from bringing in more private capital needed to spark the type of investment crucial to keeping global temperatures from surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

Special Climate Envoy John Kerry, who has urged the World Bank to overhaul its practices to drive more capital into high-emitting nations and poorer ones struggling to adapt to a warmer planet, said Banga is the right person to deliver on that mission.

"Ajay has proven his ability as a manager of large institutions, and understands investment and the mobilization of capital to power the green transition," Kerry said in a tweet. "He can help put in place new policies that help deploy the large sums of money necessary to reduce global emissions and help developing and vulnerable countries adapt, build resilience, and mitigate the impact of greenhouse gases."

Banga is also an adviser to private equity firm General Atlantic's BeyondNetZero fund.

“The White House has gone for a bit of an outsider who might shake things up," said Sonia Dunlop of environmental think tank E3G. “He’s used to pushing big change, big change management stuff through big organizations -- and that’s what we need at the World Bank.”

While Banga might not be a household name to environmentalists, he is well-known to Biden world. He served on an Obama administration trade advisory council, chaired the U.S.-India Business Council, and more recently had been working with Vice President Kamala Harris’ office to "address the root causes of migration from Central America,” a White House official said.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called Banga a "renowned executive" who is well-equipped to balance the sprawling institution's core objectives with a new agenda focused on climate change.

"His efforts have helped bring 500 million unbanked people into the digital economy, deploy private capital into climate solutions, and expand economic opportunity through the Partnership for Central America," Yellen said in a statement.

Biden gets chance to redefine World Bank role

The Biden administration is about to undertake one of its most complicated international initiatives, installing a new leader at the World Bank who can steer the organization toward a sweeping climate change agenda.

Bank President David Malpass’s abrupt announcement that he will step down from his post a year early opens the way for President Joe Biden to choose someone who embraces the new goal of fundamentally overhauling the bank’s work to focus more on climate and other global challenges.

Malpass — a Trump appointee who once voiced doubts about climate science — didn't fit the administration's vision for the job. More than a dozen close watchers of the bank who were interviewed for this story said the rift, and now its resolution, allows the U.S. to reshape the institution, which it helped launch nearly eight decades ago, to tackle one of the world’s most intractable policy issues: climate change.

The path ahead is littered with obstacles for the U.S.

The Biden administration will need to identify a leader with the ability to wrangle a giant bureaucratic institution. It will have to guide the bank’s other leading shareholders, including China, through an organizational overhaul to focus on climate concerns on a much larger scale. And an expanded climate change agenda might eventually require a substantial capital increase from the bank’s 189 member countries — a move that could prove difficult since it would require approval of the U.S. Congress, where Republican lawmakers have been critical of both the bank and the climate agenda.

What’s more, it’s no guarantee that the U.S. president will get to choose the next leader — and that the choice will be an American. That’s a tradition some other governments have begun to resist, especially since the position is expected to grow in importance as major shareholder nations push the bank to become a leader on global issues like future pandemics and cross-border conflicts, as well as climate change.

Whoever takes over will have to balance the agenda of the U.S., the bank’s largest shareholder, with concerns from other countries that fear a move away from the institution’s core mandates of fighting poverty and funding economic development projects within national borders.

"The world wants to move quickly, but we have to move in a way that builds consensus and recognizes that not all 189 members see the tradeoffs and the balance between global challenges and country-focused development in the same way," said Masood Ahmed, president of the Center for Global Development, a think tank. "That’s what the job is going to be for the next president, how do you build a way forward?”

Malpass says he stepped down from his post voluntarily. But pressure from the Biden administration on the leader of the world’s top development organization over its climate agenda helped push him to the exit.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in recent months repeatedly and publicly pressured the bank to deliver on reforms that aim to turn the institution into a climate finance powerhouse. The administration’s climate czar John Kerry, a leading contender for the job, has also urged the bank to do more.

Malpass, a former senior Treasury Department official who was appointed to the post by President Donald Trump in 2019, came under fire last September for comments in which he cast doubt on the science underpinning concerns about climate change. Those remarks were condemned by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and he later walked them back, but it led to calls for fundamental reforms of the bank to speed financing of the transition to greener energy.

The remarks complicated Malpass’s position, but Yellen has also spoken positively about some of the World Bank’s climate initiatives during his tenure. The outgoing World Bank chief was recognized by the administration as being generally well-liked among the bank’s nearly 16,000 staff, and his response to the pandemic was held in high regard by member countries.

Still, Yellen has viewed the World Bank as a key linchpin for the global response to climate change.

“The world cannot afford to delay or lower our ambitions,” she said in a speech outlining her views last October. “The current challenges are urgent. That is why I, along with leaders from a broad group of countries, will be calling on World Bank management at the Annual Meetings next week to work with shareholders to develop a World Bank evolution roadmap by December. Deeper work should begin by the spring.”

“She’s calling for fundamental reform, and they’re going to start with the World Bank,” said Kevin Gallagher, director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center. “She charged the management to come up with the plan, knowing that a few months ago, the guy who is the head of it denied climate change.”

“This agenda is not his. It’s Janet Yellen’s,” he added.

A World Bank spokesperson pointed to Malpass's public remarks on his resignation and declined to comment further.

Malpass, in media interviews following his announcement that he would step down by July, dismissed suggestions that he was forced out. He stressed that he left on his own terms. He also defended his climate record at the bank, noting that the institution delivered a record level of climate finance — $32 billion — in fiscal 2022.

“This is a good time for the transition at the bank and a good time for me personally,” Malpass said in an interview with Devex, a publication that covers the development sector.

One person close to Malpass said the differences between him and the Biden administration were “overblown.”

“I think he was tired of the job,” the person said. “The administration’s reform agenda is still pretty amorphous, so it’s not as if he was opposing specific policy preferences.”

Malpass showed support for the initiative, releasing a 20-page roadmap on the bank’s evolution, but experts said his mixed past on climate change didn’t bode well for a new vision for the bank.

“The process has been managed in a way where [Malpass] was able to save face enough to be able to exit gracefully,” said Jonathan Walters, a former senior World Bank official. “If he had been a climate leader he would have invigorated the institution behind climate. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t.”

Yellen, earlier this month, said the U.S. expected to see ideas “translated into action” over the next few months. The World Bank’s annual spring meetings it holds in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund in April is the next inflection point for the effort.

“[Yellen] and many others had expressed concerns about how he was performing in the role. And he made a decision that it would be in his and the institution’s best interest to move along at a time that could allow for a smooth transition over the months ahead,” said a former Biden administration official.

The job ahead will be a challenge for anyone who takes the helm. Divisions among member countries and within staff are emerging as the bank starts to move forward with its climate agenda. That includes cutting off new financing for projects that use fossil fuels and shift more toward renewables.

“Most of the World Bank staff who are not climate specialists did not believe the directive from the U.S. and EU against funding natural gas projects was productive,” said a person close to Malpass.

Two of the organization’s main branches, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association, did not invest in new fossil fuel finance in fiscal 2021, and the group has not financed upstream oil and gas projects since 2019.

The bank’s new roadmap has raised concerns that traditional efforts aimed at eliminating poverty and funding national development will be sidelined and the move toward climate-friendly projects will become an unfunded mandate for poorer countries.

There’s also fear that most of the climate financing will flow more easily into efforts to mitigate carbon emissions largely produced by wealthier countries rather than for initiatives to help poorer nations already struggling to adapt to the ravages of climate change.

Given the high hurdle of increasing the World Bank’s overall capital, two big challenges facing the next leader will be optimizing the bank’s balance sheets to get more bang out of the institution’s existing capital and mobilizing private capital more than five times greater than it currently is, said Masood of the Center for Global Development.

“There is a need to make sure that reform moves forward,” he said. “You can build consensus around the U.S. and G7 [countries] but the 189 members all need to be sufficiently bought into that.”

What climate law? Voters clueless about Biden's top achievement

President Joe Biden and his team are fanning out across the country to tout the climate-change-fighting, job-creating, money-saving benefits coming from Democrats’ landmark Inflation Reduction Act.

The problem? Most Americans have probably heard more about Republican complaints that Biden is coming for their gas stoves.

Biden used his platform at Tuesday’s State of the Union address to call the Inflation Reduction Act and its $369 billion in green incentives “the most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis,” while proclaiming that the law will trigger a boom in U.S. clean energy manufacturing. His Energy Department followed that up Thursday by announcing it was lending $2 billion to a Nevada company that promises to create thousands of jobs producing materials for electric vehicle batteries.

The sales pitch for Biden’s signature legislation would be crucial to any reelection effort he wages in 2024. But polls show that few Americans are aware of the climate law and how it could benefit them — creating a political challenge that the president’s Democratic allies acknowledge.

“If we can’t figure out how to sell that story over the next two years, we should find a different job,” Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Tom Carper (D-Del.), whose committee wrote a sizable chunk of the law, said in an interview. “And I don’t have any plans to find a different job.”

It won’t be an easy task.

A third of registered voters have heard “nothing at all” about the climate law, while another 24 percent heard “a little” and 29 percent heard “some,” according to a Yale Project on Climate Change Communication poll conducted in December. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday found that 62 percent of Americans thought Biden had accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing.”

“I really feel sympathy with the president,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told POLITICO. “You do really important things that might have an impact and there’s a day or two of news coverage. If important political points are not getting out to the public, it’s not just the politicians’ fault.”

Republicans are offering no condolences — including lawmakers whose districts are poised to host many of the jobs the legislation would create. They contend that the law, H.R. 5376 (117th), has stoked inflation that is burdening households with high gasoline, food and home-heating prices.

“It has made the lives of American people, American families more difficult and it doesn’t matter how much spin the president puts on it — it’s been two years of failure,” said House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson of Pennsylvania, who like every other congressional Republican opposed the measure.

The Biden administration is employing two approaches to sell the law’s benefits to a largely unaware public — an effort that will take officials on the road and into people’s homes.

Biden, a self-professed “car guy,” has promoted the law and its tax credits for electric vehicles at public events such as the North American International Auto Show in Detroit and in appearances on Jay Leno’s Garage. On Wednesday, Biden spoke at a Laborers’ International Union of North America training center in Deforest, Wis., about new manufacturing jobs.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited Ultium Cells in Spring Hill, Tenn., on Wednesday to champion new domestic battery manufacturing sparked by the climate law. EPA Administrator Michael Regan headed to Wabaunsee, Kan., that same day to talk electric school buses. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is on a three-state swing through Friday across Utah, Nevada and Massachusetts.

Granholm also made Thursday’s announcement of the $2 billion battery-materials loan, which will come from a 2007 DOE program that got additional funding and authority from Biden’s climate law. The company, Redwood Materials, said the loan would fund projects creating jobs in Nevada and Kansas.

“We have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it,” said Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 U.S. governors working to help the administration slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half from 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

The focus on the middle of the country is intentional. The Biden administration championed the climate law as a jobs boon for blue-collar workers that will ease consumers’ financial burden during the country’s transition to clean energy.

“We’ve already created 800,000 manufacturing jobs even without this law. With this new law, we will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs across the country,” Biden said in the State of the Union speech, noting Intel’s plans to build a semiconductor factory outside Columbus, Ohio. That project will bring jobs that pay workers $130,000 a year, including for many positions that don’t require a college degree, he noted.

Since Biden signed the law in August, 100,000 new job postings sprouted across 31 states and 94 clean energy projects have drawn $89.5 billion in new investment, according to an analysis by Climate Power, a coalition of environmental groups. Biden administration officials and Democrats widely promoted the study, which was released Monday.

Many of those jobs are in districts represented by GOP lawmakers who opposed the legislation.

Among other political headwinds, though, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said many Americans are simply exhausted from years of crises such as the coronavirus pandemic, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, two impeachments of former President Donald Trump and protests about police brutality and racial justice.

“To the extent that the mood improves — and I think it is and it will continue to — I think that overwhelmingly benefits the party that has the White House,” Kaine said in an interview.

Meanwhile, Biden and his team are working to inform people about the economic gains the climate law promises. They’ve also added a consumer outreach official who is tasked with making it easier for the average American to take advantage of the law’s rebates, tax credits and other incentives.

Many of the law’s tax benefits, such as rebates for home improvements and appliance upgrades, won’t be felt until a year from now when Americans file their 2023 returns. Lawmakers, regulators and U.S. allies are still fighting over which electric vehicles should qualify for a $7,500 credit.

Joshua Peck, senior policy adviser on the White House implementation team for the climate law, said it’s not essential for Americans to know the legislation’s name — but they “need to see and feel benefits, and know that they are part of the president’s agenda.”

“Over the next year or two, so many of those accomplishments will be happening on top of each other,” Peck said.

Don’t expect splashy public service announcements or advertising. Peck and his team are working behind the scenes organizing businesses, trade associations, equipment manufacturers and state energy offices to bring awareness to the opportunities the law affords.

The idea is to spread the word that more energy efficient, cleaner options are available, which begins with educating people like heating and cooling contractors, tradespeople and electric utilities about ways they can inform customers of savings.

The White House’s environmental allies are also looking to help.

“It was just signed into law a matter of months ago. It’s a big, complex law,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs with the League of Conservation Voters. “It’s incumbent on all of us to make clear to people all across the country the ways that — not the ins and outs or getting into the weeds of the legislation — but how does it benefit them? How does it save them money on their monthly energy bills? What are the rebates for making their home more efficient or electrifying the homes?”

Of course, that message runs up against Republican warnings that Biden is out to abolish traditional touchstones of Americans’ lives — including gas stoves along with older, inefficient, toilets, dishwashers, showerheads and incandescent light bulbs.

Rewiring America, a nonprofit whose work has been influential within the White House Climate Policy Office, has partnered with Redfin and Airbnb to get the message out to 10 million Americans about the benefits of converting appliances and homes to run off electric power rather than gas — tasks the climate law will make more affordable.

People already are curious: 400,000 people have used a tool on the website of Rewiring America run by a green advocacy group that calculates potential savings from the law. Those visitors all came to the tool by word of mouth and news articles, said Ari Matusiak, CEO of Rewiring America.

“If the policy is effective it is going to be embedded in the transactions that people are making and these electric machines are increasingly going to become the default,” Matusiak said. “That’s the actual goal — that it becomes the kind of no-brainer decision.”