Biden is right to praise the auto strike. His climate agenda depends on it | Kate Aronoff

The president has a golden opportunity to prove that green jobs will bear dividends for the working class

Joe Biden had to choose a side in the United Auto Workers' contract fight with the big three" American automakers, and he did. This week, he became the first US president to walk a picket line while in office when he joined strikers in Belleville, Michigan, offering enthusiastic support for their demands. Biden should be thanking the UAW for handing him a golden opportunity: to prove that the green jobs his administration is creating will be good, union jobs, too, and that climate policy will bear dividends for the working class.

Republicans cosplaying solidarity have tried to exploit the strike to score cheap political points. As Republican presidential hopefuls debated this week, Donald Trump told a rally at a non-union plant in Michigan that the strike wouldn't make a damn bit of difference" because the car industry was being assassinated" by EV mandates". (Whether there were any union members or even autoworkers in the room isn't clear.) Ohio senator JD Vance has similarly blamed autoworkers' plight on the premature transition to electric vehicles" and Biden's war on American cars".

Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet - And How We Fight Back