Photo courtesy of whitehouse.gov
On January 27, the Biden-Harris administration showed that it was serious about using every tool at its disposal to tackle the climate crisis and environmental injustice. Just a week after Inauguration Day, it unveiled its second major set of executive actions and presidential memoranda. Finally, we have an administration whose actions reflect the fact that we are in a climate emergency, with just a few years left to avert catastrophic climate change. What a breath of fresh air!
These new executive actions make addressing the climate crisis and environmental injustice a priority in every government agency, as well as in our foreign policy and national security. They reaffirm the Biden administration’s commitment to making our electricity sector carbon-free by 2035, our entire economy carbon-neutral by 2050, and tying climate action to some of this country’s most deeply held values: uprooting injustice, ensuring economic opportunity for all, and protecting our lands, waters, and wildlife.
January's executive actions show that the Biden administration understands that without addressing environmental injustice, there is no solving the climate crisis. It has created a number of new councils and task forces focused on environmental justice, including a first-of-its-kind White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council. These new offices, councils, and task forces offer environmental justice advocates far more seats at the table -- a crucial first step toward healing decades of harm resulting from shutting environmental justice communities out of the halls of power.
The Biden administration is also ramping up investment in the communities of color and low-income communities grappling with the worst effects of climate change, as well as the systemic inequities caused by economic and racial injustices. These investments will help ensure all communities are included in the clean energy economy -- and able to be resilient when facing the fiercer storms, floods, and fires that climate change is already bringing.
Another just-established working group will advance just transition projects in coal and power plant communities. As the country transitions to a clean energy economy, we must ensure that we grow jobs in every community. This executive order aims to put people to work cleaning up pollution left behind by dirty fuels and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells -- reducing emissions of the potent planet-warming gas methane.
With our economy reeling from the COVID-19 crisis, the Biden administration is working to repair it by creating well-paying jobs in addressing the climate crisis and protecting our beloved wild places. It announced that it would establish a Civilian Climate Corps that will employ young people to do the work of making our natural world part of the climate solution, supporting themselves while working to conserve and restore public lands, waters, and forests; reforest land; and sequester carbon in farmland.
The Biden administration also aims to create jobs through an executive order directing every federal agency to buy clean energy and zero-emission vehicles made in America under prevailing wage and benefit agreements, prioritizing those produced by workers who can join unions. This order will leverage the enormous spending power of the federal government to rapidly scale up the industries we need for a sustainable future -- and put Americans back to work in these fast-growing fields.
A separate spate of executive orders links action on the climate crisis to something else Americans hold dear: our lands and waters. The Biden-Harris administration has paused all new fossil-fuel leasing on public lands and waters, and announced plans to review existing leases and permits and increase offshore wind development. It plans to protect 30 percent of our wild places by 2030 -- the minimum scientists say is needed to protect nature and buffer against the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Together, these orders will help leverage our public lands and waters as part of the climate solution, while ensuring that they can be enjoyed by generations to come.
These recent executive actions are monumental. They offer us a much better chance of averting the worst impacts of the climate crisis than we had just a month ago -- as well as more opportunities to ensure that every community enjoys a healthy environment. And none of it would have happened without decades of pressure from the climate and environmental justice movements, including Sierra Club members and supporters like you.
But this is just a starting point for the much larger transformations this country needs to build back better after the COVID-19 crisis, reinvigorate our economy, strengthen our democracy, address racial injustice, and cancel the climate apocalypse. As the journalist Emily Atkin put it,“‘Climate Day’ should be every day.”