Amplify: Biden Administration’s Environmental Accomplishments (Part 3)
This is part 3 of a series amplifying the Biden Administration's environmental accomplishments
In an all-out war on the environment, Donald Trump dismantled policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, mocked climate science, opened vast tracts of American land to fossil fuel development and jettisoned the Paris Climate Agreement.
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we reviewed the Biden Administration’s environmental accomplishments on the legislative front. In this Part 3, we’ll examine how President Biden has asserted his executive authority to reverse the damage of the Trump years -- and to prioritize the climate crisis both in the U.S. and internationally.
Highlights— Executive Actions:
In a complete and immediate repudiation of his predecessor’s policies, President Biden moved, within hours of taking office, to confront what he characterized as “the greatest threat to our country,” by issuing Executive Order 13990, which set a sweeping and urgent environmental agenda for his new Administration:
The Biden First Day Order: In addition to rejoining the Paris Agreement, and revoking authorization for the Keystone XL Pipeline, the President set the Administration’s goal of tackling the climate crisis by ordering that government activities cumulatively must attain net zero emissions by 2050.
Greenhouse Gas Reduction Pledge: That first day Order was followed within a week by a second, highly detailed implementing order, which established the National Climate Task Force of 25 cabinet-level leaders to ensure that the U.S. would meet its Paris Agreement pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 50 - 52% below 2005 levels by 2030 – which will entail an overall reduction of U.S. emissions by approximately 25%. (Implementation of the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts alone is expected to get the U.S. 80% of the way towards that goal.)
Specific Implementing Actions: The Order made the climate crisis a key national security and foreign policy focus by mandating a broad list of specific implementing actions, including setting government-wide deadlines for achieving emissions reductions and pausing new oil and gas leases on public lands.
Prioritization of Greenhouse Gas Impact Analyses: Reversing Trump’s dismissal of climate science, the Administration also required all agencies to immediately determine and incorporate the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (“SC-GHG”) — i.e., the environmental impact on climate change — as a component in all budgetary decisions.
Rebuilding the EPA: Among Trump’s priorities was the dismantling of the EPA, where the agency’s top scientists fled due to political interference in their work, and funding was dramatically reduced Under President Biden, these harmful steps have been reversed with the EPA budget for 2024 increased by approximately 50% from the Trump years.
100 More Executive Orders: In the ensuing three years since his initial orders, President Biden has issued more than 100 executive actions on the environment, which range from mandating scientific integrity in policy-making to strengthening U.S. supply chains, establishing the American Climate Corps that serves as a green jobs training program, and unwinding nearly 100 Trump anti-environment actions.
Highlights—International Actions:
Unfortunately, the devastating impact of the Trump agenda extended far beyond U.S. borders. His withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement enabled other countries (e.g., Russia and Turkey) to likewise renege on their climate commitments, and Australian legislators specifically cited Trump’s actions in refusing to confirm their country’s emissions reduction pledge.
Similarly, having declared climate change a “hoax,” in 2017, Trump ended contributions to the Green Climate Fund, which had been established to raise $11 billion annually to assist developing countries in reducing emissions and adapting to climate change. Trump’s action led other developed countries to similarly halt their contributions, leaving the GCF with a massive shortfall.
U.S. contributions to the Fund were resumed by President Biden in 2021, with a contribution of $1 billion, and again in December 2023, with the pledge of an additional $3 billion. The U.S. contributions have spurred investments by other countries, and been accompanied by additional Administration efforts to drive support for the GCF from private companies and philanthropic sources.
In April 2023, President Biden convened leaders of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate for the fourth time since taking office to explore concrete initiatives to increase clean energy supply and cut greenhouse gas emissions. The MEF countries account for roughly 80 percent of global GDP and global greenhouse gasses and, through the Forum, have agreed to eliminate climate change-causing hydrofluorocarbons, accelerate carbon capture and management, and reduce methane emissions by 30%.
The US is both the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter (behind China) and the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. Accordingly, it was seen as a major development that the U.S., along with other producing countries, was willing to agree at COP28 (in December 2023) to transition away from fossil fuels in “an orderly and just manner” to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Since COP28 was the most recent of the annual UN conferences that bring together nearly 200 countries to act on climate change, the agreement characterized by many as “the “beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.”
In a major step towards phasing out fossil fuels, the Biden administration paused all approvals of new liquified natural gas export facilities, in January 2024. LNG is particularly toxic to the environment when burned, and its transport creates methane leaks that are 80 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Next: In Part 4, we’ll wrap up the series with a review of how the Biden Administration’s environmental policies are advancing job creation, national security and US industrial leadership for the 21st Century.
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