President Joe Biden entered the Oval Office swinging on energy and climate, revoking the Keystone XL pipeline and pausing new oil and gas leasing on federal land in his first week. However, he still left a lot to be desired for his liberal environmental constituencies through his first year.
Supportive lawmakers and interest groups generally maintain that Biden’s is an executive’s most ambitious climate change agenda in U.S. history. While some experts agree his administration enters 2022 with a good deal to show for it, they also emphasize ways in which it fell short of acting aggressively enough to move the economy off of fossil fuels.
Big wins of the year for environmentalists include Biden’s “return to the table” by reentering the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius at most, and subsequent setting of national greenhouse gas emissions targets.
“The most important climate goal that they made was their commitment to the international climate talks to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half over the next decade,” Lena Moffitt, campaigns director for Evergreen Action, told the Washington Examiner.
Moffitt recently helped Evergreen draft its “46 for 46: A year in review” report, which ranks 46 commitments Biden made during the campaign on a scale of relative success.
Biden was rated as having made “great progress” on five commitments, including reducing the federal government’s carbon footprint. On that front, he issued an executive order in December directing federal agencies to reduce their emissions and to procure products with low or no emissions output to support reaching net-zero across all federal operations by 2050.
That includes a target of achieving a 100% zero-emission federal vehicle fleet by 2035 and of powering federal operations using only 24-hour, 100% carbon emissions-free electricity by 2030.
Evergreen’s report also recognized progress on interrupting U.S. financing of overseas fossil fuel projects, which was announced during the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. The State Department moved ahead with that policy in December, informing embassies worldwide that U.S. policy “will center on promoting clean energy” and avoid financing for fossil fuel projects going forward.
“The top line one year in is that they have really made incredible progress. They set out the most ambitious climate goals of any presidency, and that’s what the American people elected them to deliver on,” Moffitt said. “And it’s really urgent that in the next three years, they go even farther, even faster.”
One area in which the administration needs to be more aggressive is oil and gas leasing reform, Moffitt said.
A perceived lack of movement by the administration to reform and restrict new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, which Biden pledged to end altogether on the campaign trail, has been a significant disappointment to those lobbying for a more hawkish approach.
“Giving away our public lands to the oil and gas industry at the very low cost that we currently are, and at the rate that we currently are, runs counter to both our climate goals and our environmental justice goals,” Moffitt said.
Biden issued a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing last January, a moratorium that a federal court later enjoined, and ordered the Interior Department to review the federal leasing program to address it.
The department put out its findings the day after Thanksgiving, concluding royalty rates paid by developers to the federal government must be increased to give taxpayers a fair return. But critics weren’t impressed.
Evergreen assessed the Interior Department’s report as having “stopped far short of endorsing even the end goal of ramping down fossil fuel extraction from public lands and waters, despite earlier ambition to this effect.”
In Congress, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, responded to the department’s report by saying the Biden administration “needs to manage public lands and waters consistent with its climate commitments.”
“Today’s report does not offer a plan to do that,” he said.
Just over a week before on Nov. 17, the department carried out a major oil and gas drilling lease auction covering 1.7 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico, a decision that Friends of the Earth Legal Director Hallie Templeton said at the time was met with “extreme disappointment, depleted hope, and shattered trust” by environmental opponents of the auction.
“There were opportunities to delay that lease sale and go back to the drawing board and take a closer look at the environmental analysis it relied on. That didn’t happen,” Templeton told the Washington Examiner.
Templeton said the Biden administration’s argument that it had to move forward with the auction because of the order enjoining Biden’s leasing moratorium was flawed because the order didn’t preclude treatment of lease sales on a case-by-case basis — only that it couldn’t impose a sweeping pause.
The administration’s duty is to ensure that taxpayers “are receiving a fair value for the public lands that are being leased,” Templeton said, referring to the relatively low value of bids placed during the November auction. “And they have the ultimate authority to reject those lease sale bids and not allow the leases. They have the authority right now and the discretion to not accept those lease sale bids.”
Templeton praised the administration’s proposal to ban new oil and gas leasing around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its intention to cut down the amount of acreage within the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska to be available for leasing, but she said the administration had done too little in the aggregate to cut back on fossil fuel production.
“Six months ago, it was, ‘OK, honeymoon’s over. We’re done waiting. Let’s see real action,'” Templeton said. “And now we’re digging our heels into the ground.”
