It’s still early and there is lots of campaigning still to do, but important and powerful people are already beginning to operate under the assumption that Joe Biden will soon be in charge of this country. For example, oil executives naturally hate the climate plan Biden unveiled this week, but they’re being careful not to be too strident in their criticism:

The oil and gas sector is not thrilled with several parts of Joe Biden’s new climate plan.

Petroleum industry representatives are arguing the former vice president’s plan to mandate a transition from gas-fired power to renewables will hasten the ongoing decline of union jobs and add to the strife the industry is already feeling due to the coronavirus pandemic.

But at the same time, oil and gas industry representatives are choosing their words carefully, preparing for a new political landscape if Biden wins the presidential election, and aiming to still have a seat at the table when it comes to crafting federal climate policy.

This is one of the benefits of polls that show Biden with a commanding lead. It’s emasculating paid killers like this dude:

“We’re really looking for areas to work with the Biden campaign. We’re going to be looking for areas to work with the Trump administration, and with both parties in Congress,” said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s biggest lobbying group.

“The one constant is: We are going to work with whoever the policymakers are that are in charge,” he said.

Unlike the Trump campaign, Mr. Macchiarola isn’t screaming that Biden is a communist who wants to destroy the American way of life because it looks like a lost cause. If Biden is going to smoke Donald Trump like a flavored blunt in the upcoming election, there’s really no advantage in making the man angry. The American Petroleum Institute isn’t all in for Trump because Trump is a loser, a road apple, a person already living in our past.

But that doesn’t mean that they are going to roll over and die. They’re going to lobby Democrats by telling them that Biden’s plan will hurt unions:

The lobby group is arguing that the renewable energy sector largely lacks union representation, and that Biden’s proposed transition would result in lower pay for blue-collar workers.

Pointing to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, API notes the average annual pay for gas and oil extraction workers was $91,000 in 2018 — about twice that for solar panel installers and about 60 percent higher than the mean salary for a wind turbine technician.

This talking point would be more impressive if it didn’t require us to believe that the API is concerned about the health and strength of unions rather than holding on to their market share of the electricity production sector. In any case, Biden isn’t neglecting union workers:

Biden won over several labor unions by including in his climate plan requirements on developers to pay prevailing wages and use union workers.

That and other moves let Biden mend the rift that had developed between labor unions and advocates of the Green New Deal.

Last year, Lonnie Stephenson, head of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, came out in opposition to that aggressive 10-year plan from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to cut climate-warming emissions, calling it “not achievable or realistic.”

But this week, the electrical workers’ union boss sang the praised of Biden’s climate plan, in a statement saying he was “pleased that it will create so many jobs in nearly every sector of the workforce we represent, including construction, utility, telecommunications, manufacturing, and railroad.”

The unions will largely be on board when, God willing, Congress convenes in January to work on Biden’s climate plan. That’s also why the API is boasting that they’re working to reduce methane emissions and noting that more gas than coal is being used to produce electricity, neither of which would be relevant if they were still insisting that climate change is a myth.
Biden’s strength and Trump’s weakness is therefore compounding both the energy sector and the Trump campaign’s problems. The campaign can’t get the lobbyists to full-throatedly attack Biden, and that means that momentum will build for change.