Climate activists accuse President Joe Biden of doing too little to move the U.S. away from fossil fuels. Polls show that many voters don’t know about Biden’s biggest green initiatives.

But the president’s top climate adviser says Biden’s policies are kicking off a job-creating economic transformation that will tackle the fundamental causes of climate change — a titanic opportunity that would be squandered if Donald Trump regains the White House.

And the American people get it, Ali Zaidi told the POLITICO Energy podcast. He said the president will deliver that message forcefully in Thursday’s State of the Union address.

Biden will show that he’s “approached climate in a fundamentally different way” than previous U.S. presidents, Zaidi said — “not as a sidecar or a sideshow to his national security or his economic or domestic agenda, but as a thread that’s woven through everything.”

Zaidi pointed to the replacement of a huge coal-fired power plant in New Mexico with a solar farm, the growth of solar manufacturing in places like Dalton, Georgia, and the spread of a nationwide network of chargers for electric vehicles. Those are just some of the many projects that Biden’s hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy incentives are driving in both red and blue states.

“People know that what the president has done uniquely, forcefully and historically is propel a national investment agenda,” Zaidi said. He added that gutting all these efforts by reelecting Trump would cause the U.S. to “miss out on the biggest economic opportunity of the century.”

“I don’t know why you would make that choice,” Zaidi said.

His comments come as polls show many voters are unaware of the sharp growth in manufacturing and renewable energy deployment spurred by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. Meanwhile, Biden is drawing heat from the left, with climate activists complaining he’s been too soft in phasing out fossil fuels, and in some cases disrupting public appearances by his aides and Cabinet members.

Recent polls, including one from The New York Times this week, also showed voters viewed Trump as better on the economy than Biden, even with the surge in jobs in the clean energy sector and overall low unemployment rate.

In 2016, Biden had won over green activists by promising to make fighting climate change a core priority of his administration.

But the political pain from rising gasoline prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — as well as pressure from West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who held the Senate’s key swing vote — has prompted the White House to make some compromises on its effort to speed the transition away from fossil fuels. Environmentalists have been particularly incensed by the administration giving a green light to the massive Willow Oil Project on federal land in Alaska, approving the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline in West Virginia and continuing to auction off leases to drill on federal land and water.

Zaidi, who said his comments were as a White House official and not aimed at the 2024 election, said the chasm between the Biden administration and Republicans on climate change was clear.

“As someone who spent the first year and a half, two years, working on [and] addressing almost 200 regulatory rollbacks from the previous administration and trying to refill seats at hollowed out regulatory agencies across Washington, yes, there’s definitely a stark difference in terms of policy visions,” he said.

“And I think we’re focused on doing what the president has laid out, doing it aggressively, doing it in a way that’s durable, that brings people along, that’s going to hold up in the courts,” Zaidi added.

Biden remains fully committed to transitioning the U.S. economy off fossil fuels despite recent complaints from environmentalists that the administration has weakened or slowed some climate regulations, he said. Recent administration actions include a decision to split up an upcoming regulation for climate pollution from power plants, postponing the piece that would take on thousands of plants fueled by natural gas.

POLITICO has also reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is leaning toward a less-aggressive option than the agency originally proposed for regulating car and truck tailpipe pollution. The change would allow automakers to sell fewer electric vehicles than initially projected during the next few years — though it would still aim to have EVs make up more than two-thirds of new sales by 2032.

Those rules are expected to be some of the most sweeping ever enacted in the U.S. to address climate pollution, and the administration hopes its more careful, targeted approach will make their regulatory agenda more legally durable in the face of a conservative Supreme Court that has already gutted major climate rules.

The administration also recently issued a controversial pause on new exports of U.S. natural gas that Zaidi said demonstrates Biden’s seriousness about moving away from fossil fuels.

“The president, in a historic fashion, has not only made that a clarion call in the United States, he brought the world together around a consensus that we need to work towards transitioning away from fossil fuels, that we don’t meet our science based goals just by deploying clean energy, with fossil fuels no end in sight,” Zaidi said.

Zaidi also said Biden’s second term would place a priority on efforts to reduce carbon from industrial manufacturing in industries like steel making — a sector where eliminating climate pollution is notoriously difficult because it uses coal both as a component of the metal and to heat the giant furnaces.

The Biden administration also supports burgeoning bipartisan conversations occurring in Congress around injecting climate change policy into U.S. trade rules by imposing a fee on products imported from high greenhouse gas-emitting countries, Zaidi said.

Such a policy would protect U.S. manufacturers from competition from China and other countries with lax environmental standards.

Zaidi specifically cited the PROVE IT Act, a bill led by GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware that would authorize a study to prove U.S. manufactured goods are more climate friendly than those from adversaries like China.

“From a data perspective, we think we can do a lot of that, and we’re going to go out and do it,” Zaidi said.”You’ve seen a lot of really productive conversations about leveling the playing field and boosting America’s industrial competitiveness through border arrangements … that will shore up our competitive advantage.”

The full episode of POLITICO Energy is available on podcast platforms including Apple and Spotify.