Biden’s actions on climate essentially will be opposite Trump’s
The nation’s attention is focused on COVID-19 and security at the U.S. Capitol. But when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take office Wednesday, one of their other top priorities will be to immediately start dismantling Donald Trump’s legacy on the environment. From the first few hours of their new administration, America is expected to see a major shift from the last four years, including on key issues affecting offshore oil drilling, wildlife, the type of vehicles people drive and how electricity is generated.
“It’s going to be like night and day,” said law professor Dan Farber, director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and Environment. “They could not be more different. Trump has almost exclusively dedicated himself to eliminating or weakening past environmental protections. Biden is going to want to go in the opposite direction — restoring existing protections and then going beyond them.”
But the new president will have limits. Democrats control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives for the first time in 10 years. Yet their majorities are slim. And Trump put in place hundreds of new federal judges.
“There’s going to be an immense difference in personality and personnel, and in the image they project,” said Frank Maisano, a principal at the Washington, D.C., law firm Bracewell LLC, which lobbies for oil, utility, chemical and renewable energy companies. “The Biden administration is going to propose a lot of stuff, but I don’t think they will be able to do as much as progressives want. This is a pretty close Senate
and a pretty close House.”
Here are five big changes on the way:
• Paris Climate Agreement — It’s back. On Day One. In 2015, the Obama administration helped negotiate the Paris Climate Agreement with 197 countries. The voluntary agreement, in which countries set their own targets to reduce pollution, is aimed at keeping the global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius — or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — from pre-industrial levels, a margin scientists say is critical to curbing its worst impacts, from wildfires to megadroughts. Earth already has warmed 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.
Trump called climate change “a hoax,” and withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017. This past weekend, Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, announced Biden will re-enter it Wednesday. There are reports Biden also will kill the Keystone XL pipeline that day, a project to pipe Canadian oil to Nebraska. Meanwhile, Biden has appointed former Secretary of State John Kerry to negotiate future international agreements, including at a new United Nations climate summit in November in Glasgow, Scotland. Bottom line: Rejoining Paris will be largely symbolic at first, but signals to other countries the U.S. is ready to lead again internationally. And to meet emissions targets, Biden will pursue everything from new tax credits for electric cars to tougher pollution rules on coal-fired power plants.
• Offshore oil drilling — In 2018, Trump proposed the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas drilling in U.S. history, releasing a fiveyear plan to allow new drilling off the coasts of Northern, Central and Southern California, along with most of the East Coast. The plan stalled due to court challenges. “Now Biden can just drop it into the shredder and start anew,” said Richard Charter, a senior fellow with the Ocean Foundation, in Sonoma County.
Environmentalists and some political leaders are likely to push Biden to establish a new national marine sanctuary off the San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara coasts. But Biden also is expected to push for offshore wind energy, and that will split environmentalists in some areas.
• New cabinet — Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is a former coal industry lobbyist. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is a former lobbyist for the oil and mining industry and Westlands Water District in Fresno. Biden’s cabinet will be much different. His climate czar, Gina McCarthy, was Obama’s EPA chief and president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. His new EPA chief, Michael Regan, and interior secretary nominee, Deb Haaland, have similar green backgrounds.
• Money for renewable energy — In July, Biden announced a plan to generate 100% of U.S. electricity from carbon-free sources like solar, wind, nuclear and hydropower by 2035 and invest $2 trillion over four years toward that end. He may not have the votes for a carbon tax, particularly with Democrats like Joe Manchin from coal-rich West Virginia in the 50-50 Senate. But he should have some with a bipartisan infrastructure bill for roads, bridges and water projects that includes money for more renewable energy, experts say.
“Renewable energy is pretty popular, even with people who are not left of center,” Farber said. “There could be a lot in there for solar, wind, new transmission lines, battery storage. But it can’t be the only thing in the bill.”
• Rewriting regulations — Trump’s administration rewrote roughly 100 major environmental regulations, relaxing rules on everything from mercury pollution to appliance efficiency standards to removing gray wolves from the endangered species list. He also blocked California from setting its own pollution standards for vehicles, as it has done under the Clean Air Act for 50 years. Lawsuits blocked some Trump rollbacks. The Biden administration will rewrite other rules, Maisano said. But it can take two years for studies, public hearings and other steps. In the end, California is likely to be setting standards for vehicles again soon, which will mean more electric cars, delivery vans and trucks nationwide.
“Parts of Trump’s rollbacks may survive,” Farber said, “given the more conservative courts. But I would say that four years from now, we will mostly be looking back on the Trump era as an interlude that didn’t have a lot of long-term effect.”