Biden sets government on carbon-neutral path

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Wednesday set in motion a plan to make the federal government carbon neutral by 2050, ordering federal agencies to buy electric vehicles, to power facilities with wind, solar and nuclear energy, and to use sustainable building materials.

In a series of executive orders, Biden directed the government to transform its 300,000 buildings, 600,000 cars and trucks, and use its annual purchases of $650 billion in goods and services to meet his goal of a federal government that stops adding carbon dioxide into the atmosphere within the next three decades.

From his earliest days in office, Biden said he intended to use the federal government as a model and to help spur the markets for green energy. The executive orders signed Wednesday set a timetable for the transition.

By 2030, Biden wants the federal government to buy electricity produced only from sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, the most plentiful of the humancaused greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. By 2032, the Biden administration wants to see the emissions from building operations, such as heating, cut in half. And by 2035, all new federal car and truck purchases also would be zero-emissions.

The move comes as Biden is struggling to turn many of his climate goals into reality. He has promised to cut America’s emissions from fossil fuels roughly in half by the end of this decade. But Congress hasn’t approved a $1.7 trillion spending bill that would help achieve that target. The Supreme Court also appears poised to limit the federal government’s ability to use certain regulatory actions to tackle climate change.

The procurement goals could go a long way in transforming the clean energy markets, experts said.

“It’s a similar strategy to what China is doing so successfully, leveraging the purchasing power of their government to create demand that markets can meet,” said Joshua Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic research group.

“The federal government in so many areas is one of, if not the largest, purchaser,” Freed said. “Having the certainty the government is going to purchase cleaner products, materials and vehicles enables companies to move in that direction.”

Republicans already are mounting opposition to the plan. On Wednesday Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, denounced it as “disgraceful” and said the plan would harm workers in the fossil fuel sector.

“This is not build back better,” he said in a statement. “It’s another backbreaking move to build bigger bureaucracy.”

The plan Biden set forth presents significant challenges for the administration.

Just 40 percent of the electricity bought by the federal government now comes from renewable sources such as wind and solar. The goal is to ramp that up to 100 percent in less than a decade. The federal government currently consumes just 1.5 percent of the nation’s energy, although it’s a major player in states where it has significant operations such as Virginia, California, Georgia and North Carolina.

In converting its power to wind, solar and other sources that don’t produce planet-warming emissions, the government intends to follow the path set by companies such as Google, Apple and Walmart, which established tariffs or developed power-purchase agreements with local utilities to achieve their goals of 100 percent renewable energy, a senior administration official said.