by Delaney McCarty
January 20th, 2021: Newly inaugurated President of the United States Biden signs a slew of executive orders on his first night in office, including a measure for the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, the most extensive effort internationally to mitigate climate change. Showing a sharp contrast in climate policy to his predecessor Donald Trump who began the process to leave the agreement in 2017, Biden rejoins the worldwide effort to curb global warming. In doing so, he is committing to cut the United States’ climate pollution rates and to increase the intensity of anti-pollution initiatives over time to keep the global temperature increase of this century below 2℃. Rejoining is a vital step towards a greener nation, but not enough on its own to curb the destructive contributions of the U.S. to the ongoing global climate crisis. So what else does President Biden have up his sleeves?
Compared to most other contemporary U.S. politicians, Biden has a longstanding record of legislative action on climate change behind him. He introduced his first climate bill in 1986, but unfortunately, the bill died in the Senate. The bill was known as the Global Climate Protection Act and would call on the president to create a task force to plan how to mitigate global warming. In his attempts to persuade Congress, he cited risks such as the melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels threatening human habitats, warnings which are still prevalent today. While an essential step for climate change legislation, this early bill was essentially a plan to create a plan, and even after a version of it became an amendment to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act under the Reagan administration, it was Clinton’s administration that set up the task force.
While not the first recognition of climate risks by Congress, Biden’s bill was groundbreaking for being the first climate change bill to specifically call for mitigation of global warming. There had been some movements to combat climate change before the Global Climate Protection Act, but none were as explicitly focused on global warming or would have had as much influence. The Clean Air Act of 1963 did include a provision to combat climate change and the release of greenhouse gasses, yet focused primarily on tackling air pollution to specific standards to account for public health. Ten years before Biden’s bill, in 1976, representative Al Gore held House hearings on climate change, and in 1985 introduced a concurrent resolution in which both the House and the Senate asked the president to fund an international research program on greenhouse gas emissions. Neither of these movements taken by Gore, however, actually took action against climate change. Inspired by Senate hearings held by John Chafee revealing just how imminent the effects of climate change were, Biden’s 1986 bill was the first action by Congress to suggest how the country should approach combating climate change.
The state of the global climate in 2021 is undoubtedly far worse than it was in 1986, and now Biden has a lot more influence as president. As such, he has created a detailed plan for combating climate change. The basics of Biden’s plan for climate are to eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035 and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. He would like to make all new US-made buses zero-emissions by 2030, give 40% of benefits from clean energy and infrastructure spending to disadvantaged communities, and make all new commercial buildings net-zero emissions by 2030. He would also like to connect his climate plan to his plans to help the suffering economy by creating millions of jobs in the energy, transportation, and infrastructure sectors where workers could join unions.
Further highlights of Biden’s policy include an Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard to watch over clean energy goals. This standard aims to implement more wind, solar, nuclear, and hydropower sources to replace coal and oil-based energy sources. This would not only mitigate the usage of fossil fuels but also would contribute to millions of additional construction, scientific research, and engineering jobs as a part of Biden’s goals to help the economy. A climate research agency is also on the table that would focus on safer and more efficient nuclear reactors as well as research into carbon capture and storage technology to prevent carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. Looking to infrastructure goals, Biden plans to create millions of unionized jobs to improve roads, bridges, railroads, aviation, seaports, and inland waterways that will be more efficient and less expensive all while making this infrastructure more resilient to climate disasters. The infrastructure goals also include better quality public transportation in America’s major cities.
While ambitious, Biden plans to pay for the plan using increased taxes on corporate income and the wealthy as well as stimulus money. There is also the question as to if Biden is doing enough as the climate crisis worsens daily. His plan is by no means the far left Green New Deal: while pathways to reduced emissions are the same as with “weatherization” of homes and updating buildings, his goals are way more moderate. While perhaps not as promising for climate change mitigation, Biden is more likely to gain Republican support considering the Green New Deal’s general distrust from the right for primarily economic reasons. Going too far with his goals could mean failure in Congress or the Supreme Court, and what the world needs now is any amount of emission reduction. Biden and his administration may have to get creative in how they work with the rest of the U.S. government if they want to get even their most ambitious goals passed and help save the world from impending doom.
Only time will tell the success of Biden’s plan against climate change. His past with climate legislation and speed in rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement are promising. Still, America must wait and see how successful his ambitious climate plan will turn out to be as the state of the world becomes more concerning by day.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/paris-climate-agreement-everything-you-need-know
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/aug/03/joe-bidens-climate-change-plan-explained/
At a Glance 