The Planet Needs Jerome Powell
In recent weeks, the climate movement has become caught in the middle of a fight that seemingly has nothing to do with the environment: Should President Joe Biden renominate Jerome Powell to lead the Federal Reserve?
The choice of who should run the country’s central bank has historically not captivated climate advocates—or many Americans, for that matter—yet it has carved the left into two opposing camps, each claiming to fight for a greener economy.
On one side, a group of pro-Powell employment hawks argue that Powell has overturned right-wing orthodoxy that has needlessly cramped economic growth and impoverished American workers for decades. Their opponents—let’s call them the regulation hawks—say that Powell and other Republican Fed governors have gone too easy on big banks and are now risking a climate-induced financial crisis.
Even weirder than the fight happening at all is the fact that many of Powell’s climate critics say that he has done a good job executing the Fed’s most important duty. “Why the climate base is increasingly fired up about the Fed … has absolutely nothing to do with monetary policy,” Justin Guay, a prominent climate-finance activist, told me. Would anti-war progressives try to replace an openly pacifist secretary of defense because they disagreed with his management of DARPA? This is not so far from what’s happening in the Fed-chair fight.
