Biden picks deal-makers, fighters for climate team
WASHINGTON – Joe Biden is picking deal-makers and fighters to lead a climate team he will ask to remake and clean up the nation’s transportation and power-plant systems, and as fast as politically possible.
Although the president-elect’s picks have the experience to do the heavy lifting required in a climate overhaul of the U.S. economy, they also seem to be reassuring skeptics that he won’t neglect the low-income, working class and minority communities hit hardest by fossil fuel pollution and climate change.
Progressives, energy lobbyists, environmental groups and auto workers on Wednesday welcomed Biden’s choice of popular former Mayor Pete Buttigieg as transportation secretary. His expected picks of former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm for energy secretary and former Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy as leader of domestic climate efforts also were met with general applause.
Along with the yet-to-be-named heads of EPA and the Interior Department, Buttigieg, Granholm and McCarthy
will be part of an effort to rapidly build and develop technology to retool the United States’ transportation and power grid systems from petroleum and coal to a greater reliance on solar, wind and other cleaner forms of energy.
Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland of New
Mexico was selected as Secretary of the Interior late Thursday, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary.
Biden has pledged to make slowing the impacts of climate change a top priority and has laid out an ambitious plan to reduce U.S. greenhouse emissions to net-zero by 2050. The plan includes an immediate return to the global 2015 Paris Agreement on climate and a pledge to stop all climate-damaging emissions from U.S. power plants by 2035.
Among those on his climate team, Granholm as Michigan’s governor helped nudge auto workers toward accepting a switch to production of more electric vehicles. That will be one of several big ticket clean-energy efforts she and others in the administration will be pushing under Biden’s promised $2 trillion climate plan, which will face obstacles from Republicans in Congress and fights over which priorities to implement first.
Also helping drive Biden’s plan will be McCarthy, who as EPA head under President Barack Obama pushed for landmark rules to cut planet-warming pollution. In her new position, which does not require Senate confirmation, McCarthy will oversee a broad interagency effort to address climate change across the federal government.
McCarthy would be the domestic counterpart to former Secretary of State John Kerry, who will serve as a special climate envoy.