Biden to overturn Trump’s climate legacy on dozens of fronts

Biden will order federal agencies to review scores of climate policies enacted during the Trump administration and, if possible, to quickly reverse them. Nearly half of the regulations the new administration is targeting come from the Environmental Protection Agency, on issues ranging from drinking water and dangerous chemicals to gas mileage standards.

In a briefing with reporters Tuesday evening, Biden’s new national climate adviser, Gina McCarthy, said the moves will “begin undoing some of the harmful actions that happened in the previous administration’s watch, so that we can move forward in combating the climate crisis.”

In addition to rejoining the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, which the United States formally exited on Nov. 4, McCarthy said Biden would sign “a broad executive order that takes steps that are imperative to address our climate crisis, and will also create good union jobs and advance environmental justice while reversing more than 100 of the previous administration’s harmful policies.”

Incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would sign 15 executive orders Wednesday afternoon in the Oval Office, among his first actions as president. Though incoming presidents often like to sign executive orders on their first day, the chasm between Biden’s agenda and Trump’s legacy is one of the widest in recent decades. Nowhere is that contrast more pronounced than on climate change — which Trump largely dismissed altogether — and the environment, where he and his deputies scaled back a range of protections to benefit the fossil fuel industry.

Biden comes to power with a sense of urgency about climate change that is unmatched by any previous occupant of the White House, and he is installing people who share his views throughout the government. The regulations he is instructing agencies to review range from a recent Labor Department rule preventing environmentally sustainable mutual funds from being default retirement investments to a Transportation Department regulation making it easier to transport liquefied natural gas by rail.

McCarthy repeatedly referred to the warming of the planet as a crisis in her remarks Tuesday, adding, “At this moment of profound crisis, we have the opportunity to build a more resilient, sustainable economy, one that will put the United States on an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions economy-wide no later than 2050.”

While many of Biden’s actions Wednesday will take effect over time — the country will again formally become a party to the Paris agreement 30 days from now — his most immediate action will be to rescind the presidential permit Trump granted the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada across the border into the United States. The project became a flash point for climate activists during the Obama administration, and Biden pledged during the campaign to block it.

His aides said the president-elect also intends to block any “proclamations, memoranda and permits” signed over the past four years that “do not serve the U.S. national interest.”

Dozens of other steps Biden plans to take on his first day as president will take months, if not longer, to complete.

He is instructing the EPA and Transportation Department to strengthen fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, which Trump weakened. He also asked two other departments, Interior and Commerce, to review the boundaries and protections Trump had scaled back for the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in Utah, and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of New England.

While Biden can change the boundaries of a national monument with the stroke of a pen, and while U.S. automakers are probably willing to strike a deal with the new administration on more-ambitious gas mileage standards for the nation’s cars and pickup trucks, other Trump policies will be harder to reverse.

Biden plans to impose a temporary moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to caribou, polar bears and Indigenous people. But on Tuesday, Interior’s Bureau of Land Management signed and issued nine leases it auctioned off earlier this month, spanning 437,804 acres on the refuge’s coastal plain.

All but two of the new leases were won by the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, an arm of the Alaska state government. The total sale raised roughly $14 million, less than 2 percent of what congressional Republicans projected when they opened the near-pristine reserve to drilling in 2017.

BLM Alaska State Director Chad Padgett said Tuesday that the leases “reflect a solid commitment by both the state and industry to pursue responsible oil and gas development on the Alaska’s North Slope.”

“While any further actions on the ground will require additional environmental analysis, this is a hallmark step and a clear indication that Alaska remains important to meeting the nation’s energy needs,” he added.

A Biden transition aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said officials would examine whether the leases were issued properly.

“The outgoing administration cut numerous corners to rush through this lease sale,” the aide said in an email. “Under the moratorium that the President-elect is putting in place on Day 1, the Interior Department will fully evaluate the situation, and determine whether the leases signed are valid or not and whether decisions and processes that led up to the lease sale were conducted in conformance with the law.”

In some instances, Biden is setting the stage for changes that will reverberate throughout the federal government. On Wednesday, he will revive an interagency working group Trump disbanded in 2017 that sets the “social cost of carbon,” which estimates the economic damage caused by the release of a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Policymakers factor this figure into the costs and benefit calculations they make on a host of issues, from permitting a new oil well to imposing stricter pollution controls on coal- and gas-fired power plants. Under the Obama administration’s formula, the price per ton would now stand at $52, but Trump officials reduced it to between $1 and $7 per ton.

Many economists suggest the Biden administration should start at $125 per ton, to better reflect new research on the economic damage of climate change and market realities.

“It is the one way you can uniformly incorporate the cost of climate change into decisions across all of government,” Kevin Rennert, who directs the Social Cost of Carbon Initiative at the environmental think tank Resources for the Future, said in an interview.

While Biden’s environmental push on Day 1 far surpasses that of any previous president, only time will show how much of his agenda he can actually finish — and how successfully he can rebuild the nation’s image around the world, particularly when it comes to leading on climate action.

“Rejoining the Paris agreement is only the beginning, and the incoming administration appears to know this. In order to make truly meaningful progress towards global cooperation on climate, the Biden administration must follow up with concrete actions,” Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, said in an email.

“There’s simply no reason for other countries to trust our word if we fail, again, to act on our own emissions and use the significant resources at our disposal to support the world’s most vulnerable countries.”