What Biden has done is to cut the issuance of drilling leases to the minimum required by law, pass the Inflation Reduction Act, enact a regulation to force vehicle electrification, and similarly force fossil fuels out of most power plants.
What Biden has not done: stop issuing drilling permits or impose export restrictions on fossil fuels. The former has some serious limits because of how the courts treat the right to drill as a property right once you hold a drilling lease, and the latter is simply untested.
Organizing within the system is exactly how we’ve gotten as much as we have.
The alternative is to roll the dice with revolution, and that’s about as likely to end up in a much worse place than we’d otherwise get. That’s really only a rational choice when you don’t have other avenues to change policy.
I suppose that depends on what era you’re referring to. It wasn’t working within the system that won the right to unionize, it was work outside the system that provided the necessary pressure to coerce concessions out of the government.
Unionization started as an outside-the-system thing, but really took off under FDR because of legal changes made by supporters of it who were elected to Congress. You can get started on the outside, but actually getting to where we need to be means holding power.
Union growth was at its strongest in American history during the period between 1900-1920. There were already millions of union members decades before FDR ever took office. It was a 50+ year battle starting in the 1800s, I don’t think I’d call that starting. I’d call FDR the results of that movement, if anything.