Biden's frustrating campaign by podcast.

I was listening to the NYT "Daily" podcast this morning. The episode is called "Biden's Campaign of Isolation." Because of the lockdown, Biden can't do any of the conventional campaign activities, and his main idea seems to be this podcast. But is anyone listening? I love podcasts, but not all podcasts. I need to hear a voice that's got something podcasty about it. The host of "The Daily," Michael Barbaro has it.  Obviously, Joe Rogan has it. You can name some others. I enjoy Scott Adams. Marc Maron. Etc.

That special quality could be a lot of different things, but it's not going to be a politician carefully shaping his message around the goal of getting elected. That's so unappetizing.

But listening to "The Daily," I heard some snippets of Biden's podcast, specifically his interview with Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and they were talking about — I think they were talking about — the very subject I was just saying I wanted to hear more talk about. Here's what I wrote 3 days ago:

Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?

Shouldn't the Democrats be saying this? Where's Joe Biden?

I know how to listen to the Biden podcast with Inslee, but I'm not motivated to the point where I'm going to do that, partly because I value my time and hate to give a speaker control over it and partly because as a blogger, I need text. But I will read, because I can scan it at my own speed, and because I can copy and paste. I don't have to do my own transcription to write about it. So where is the transcript?! I can see one transcript at Joe Biden's podcast page — it happens to be with Ron Klain — but I can't find the Inslee transcription.

Did Biden embrace a Green New Deal approach to emergence from the lockdown? I can't believe I'm supposed to slog through a podcast to understand. So frustrating!

"It is giving us this quite extraordinary insight into just how much of a mess we humans are making of our beautiful planet. This is giving us an opportunity to magically see how much better it can be."

Said Duke University conservation scientist Stuart Pimm, quoted in "As people stay home, Earth turns wilder and cleaner. These before-and-after images show the change" (by AP science writer Seth Borenstein, published at Madison.com).

Another quote — from Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: "In many ways we kind of whacked the Earth system with a sledgehammer and now we see what Earth's response is."

With photographs and maps, the article concentrates on the reduction in air pollution. There's also a bit about wild animals taking the opportunity to show themselves on city streets. But I'd like to see more about climate change.

All the article says is:

The greenhouse gases that trap heat and cause climate change stay in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, so the pandemic shutdown is unlikely to affect global warming, says Breakthrough Institute climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. Carbon dioxide levels are still rising, but not as fast as last year.

But this can be viewed as an experimental head start on the Green New Deal we've heard so much about. What had seemed impossible to begin is now a way of life we've plunged into. We've gone much further than what the climate activists were proposing, though we've done it for a different reason, by government order, under the fear of death by disease, and seemingly only for a few weeks (or months).

Why aren't people saying that when we emerge in phases from this lockdown — as we must, or we face economic doom — we should not attempt to go back to everything that we were doing before but go forward into some livable, workable form of the Green New Deal?

Shouldn't the Democrats be saying this? Where's Joe Biden?

Could Donald Trump and the Republicans offer something like this? I know the term "Green New Deal" has a Democratic Party sound to it, but why can't they present something visionary and future-looking that inspires hope instead of merely presuming that what's best is whatever we happened to have had in the past?