By Lesley Clark
President Trump will try to lash Joe Biden tightly to a ban on fracking and the Green New Deal as the incumbent looks to keep the Rust Belt states that voted for him over Hillary Clinton in 2016, a former White House energy and environmental adviser says.
In an interview recorded last week with “Off the Charts,” a podcast from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, Mike Catanzaro says he expects Biden to win the Democratic presidential nomination and for Trump to try to portray Biden as supporting environmental policies that would increase energy costs.
Even as Republicans have tempered their remarks on climate change and Trump has touted his support for initiatives like planting trees, Catanzaro said he believes the campaign will look to paint Democrats as likely to raise energy bills.
“I think he and his political team think that they have this massive gift sitting in front of them called the Green New Deal,” Catanzaro said, adding that Trump has signaled at rallies that he doesn’t want to “spoil the fun” of talking about the Democratic proposal to tackle climate change too early.