President Biden directed agencies to purchase more carbon-free power and electric cars in a sweeping executive order Wednesday meant to have the government weigh climate change in nearly everything it does.
The order also pauses new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, delivering on a campaign promise but creating immediate and fierce tensions with the oil and gas industry and congressional Republicans.
Biden’s order builds on executive actions he took on his first day in office, when he began the process to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and targeted more than 100 Trump-era environmental and climate deregulatory actions.
Wednesday’s order directs federal agencies to procure carbon-free power and zero-emissions vehicles, a directive Biden teased in remarks Monday before signing a separate executive order to boost U.S.-made products.
Under the order, federal agencies must also develop a plan to harden facilities and operations to the effects of climate change. In addition, the order directs federal agencies to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies “as consistent with applicable law” and find new ways to bolster clean energy development, according to a White House fact sheet.
Climate change will be incorporated into infrastructure investment decisions, too. The order seeks to ensure that every federally funded infrastructure project “reduces climate pollution,” according to the fact sheet. Biden is also calling for faster siting and permitting of clean energy and transmission projects “in an environmentally sustainable manner.”
The new president is establishing climate change as a national security threat, ordering his national intelligence director to examine how climate change affects national security.
Biden will also seek to commit the United States to another global climate deal, asking the State Department to prepare to send an international agreement limiting potent greenhouse gas coolants known as the Kigali Amendment to the Senate for ratification.
Conservation commitments
Beyond the leasing pause, Biden is taking additional steps to conserve U.S. lands and waters, adopting a national goal to protect 30% by 2030.
That commitment fulfills a promise Biden made in his climate plans on the campaign trail, in which he pledged to protect biodiversity, slow extinction rates, and help store carbon in forests and soils. The goal is rooted in scientific research.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has already enshrined that goal in his own executive order last fall, making California the first state to do so. Nearly 40 countries have also made a commitment to conserve 30% of their lands and waters by 2030.
Democrats in Congress have backed the effort, too. Former New Mexico Democratic Sen. Tom Udall, once in the running to be Biden’s interior secretary, led efforts in Congress to codify the goal legislatively with a resolution last year. Vice President Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor of that resolution when she was in the Senate.
To reach that goal, however, Biden will have to look to Congress for resources.
“We’re going to need resources. … Especially for the restoration components of conservation, we’re going to need flat-out investment from our government, putting people to work on both public and private land in restoration activities,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, associate vice president for public lands at the National Wildlife Federation.
Part of that work could be completed by the Civilian Climate Corps that Biden also seeks to establish with his executive order, though he would need funding from Congress to set that up.
Biden’s commitment to most-polluted regions
Biden’s executive order also establishes a number of new interagency working groups and councils aimed at helping support fossil fuel regions and prioritizing investments to minority and low-income people disproportionately affected by pollution.
The order codifies a target Biden announced in his updated climate plans last summer to direct 40% of the benefits of “relevant federal investments” to minority and low-income regions. Biden is also setting up interagency councils to prioritize “environmental justice,” including through new or strengthened dedicated offices at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Mustafa Santiago Ali, vice president of environmental justice, climate, and community revitalization at the National Wildlife Federation, said he would have liked to see Biden hire senior “environmental justice” advisers within the White House and at federal agencies on day one.
“There are too many really important issues that the president has to deal with that are all connected to environmental justice,” said Ali, who worked at the EPA for more than two decades, including as its top environmental justice official.
“When we look at the COVID response and what’s going on, there’s no one with environmental justice expertise that I know of right now that’s a part of that team, and many of the communities that are being most greatly impacted are communities with environmental justice concerns,” he added.
Ali said that directing 40% of investments to those regions would be “transformative,” but he stressed that those funds must help create businesses owned by people of color that can benefit from new wealth being created in those areas.
