Biden Goes It Alone On Climate
Just days after Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin appeared to scuttle hopes of moving climate policy through Congress, U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to lay out his plans to push some measures forward through executive action in a speech today in Massachusetts.
Biden’s focus on the issue comes as the price of inaction is already apparent. The world is experiencing intense heatwaves, which climate scientists forecast becoming more frequent in a warming world: Over the past week, Britain recorded its highest ever temperature, 100 million Americans were under a heat warning or advisory, and Portugal and Spain recorded a total of 1,700 heat-related deaths.
Biden’s speech will also take place at a time when fossil fuels are seeing a resurgence, as high prices of oil and gas as well as supply chain worries prompt a return to coal.
The coal comeback isn’t just in the West. In China, currently the world’s largest carbon emitter, government approvals for new coal-powered plants have increased dramatically this year—in line with the country’s goal of ramping up emissions to peak in 2030.
For Biden and the Democratic party, time to act on climate may be running out. A victory for the Republican Party in November’s midterm elections would end any hopes of further legislative action, while a return of Donald Trump to the White House after the 2024 election (a possibility within the margin of error in a recent poll) would similarly halt any hopes of progress.
Fresh momentum is needed if the United States is to meet the goals it set alongside 195 other countries when it signed onto the Paris climate accord. According to energy research firm Rhodium Group, the status quo is nowhere close to cutting it. Current estimates put the United States on course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent (at best) by 2030, far short of its 50 percent goal.
Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, expressed optimism that the door to U.S. climate action was not yet closed. “President Biden can use executive authority to make significant progress on climate,” Stokes told Foreign Policy. “It’s not going to be as substantive as what we would have gotten through budget reconciliation, but it’s still absolutely crucial.”
Biden’s best bet for forcing through policies to lower carbon emissions is through the Environmental Protection Agency.
Stricter emissions regulations on cars could help speed a transition to electric vehicles, (an urgent task seeing as 27 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions came from transportation in 2020), while tightening regulations around other non-carbon pollutants in the country’s power plants could help hasten a move to cleaner energy production (and stay within the limits set by the Supreme Court’s recent EPA ruling).
As climate advocacy group Evergreen Action has written, other U.S. agencies can also get involved: The Department of the Interior can shut down new fossil fuel exploration on U.S. soil, while the Treasury Department could force publicly-traded companies to more clearly disclose the emissions impact of their businesses—a move designed to give investors a better understanding of where to put their money.
What he won’t do is declare a climate emergency, a move activists and some senior Democratic senators have called for. Invoking emergency powers would allow Biden more leeway in a number of areas—from boosting renewable energy to blocking fossil fuel projects—and even reinstating a ban on crude oil exports.
“It’s not on the table for this week,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of the emergency declaration. “We are still considering it. I don’t have the upsides or the downsides of it.”