Photo by whitehouse.org
The first day of the Biden-Harris administration was marked by a burst of executive orders and actions announcing major initiatives to protect our climate, promote environmental justice, and begin the process of reversing the Trump administration’s harmful anti-environment rules. President Biden has described the climate crisis as the "number-one issue facing humanity,” and, on day one of his presidency, he showed that he understands that tackling it will require swift, bold action.
During his first hours in the Oval Office, Biden signed an order beginning the process of rejoining the Paris Agreement. This agreement, which seeks to keep climate change from reaching catastrophic levels, was abandoned by the Trump administration early in its term. Now, the US has a chance to reestablish itself as an international leader in combating the climate crisis, and to drive progress faster and further than ever before.
Biden’s executive orders seek to address the climate crisis through domestic policy, too. He has directed agencies to review and reverse a slew of Trump-era rules that encouraged automakers, airlines, and the fossil fuel industry to emit higher levels of planet-warming gases, pushing us closer to climate catastrophe. Biden also tasked a working group with producing a “social cost of carbon” that accurately describes the damage the greenhouse gas inflicts upon our climate, vulnerable communities, and future generations.
These Day One executive orders and actions also signal that the Biden administration is ready to make environmental justice a priority as it tackles the climate crisis. Several orders sought to reduce fossil fuel extraction by protecting lands sacred to Indigenous peoples. One executed a moratorium on drilling in the Arctic Refuge, called “the sacred place where life begins” by the Gwich'in people. And after 12 years of struggle by Indigenous water protectors, landowners, and their environmental allies, Biden signed an order effectively killing the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried hundreds of gallons of dirty tar sands oil through the lands of the Rosebud Sioux and other Tribes.
The Biden administration’s first-day actions also focused on undoing the Trump administration’s damage to our lands, water, and wildlife. President Biden rescinded Trump’s emergency declaration that illegally allowed money from the military budget to be used to build a border wall, tearing apart communities, bulldozing Indigenous lands and burial grounds, and leaving unfathomable environmental damage in its wake. Biden has promised to reverse Trump’s rollbacks of protections for wildlife and public lands, including for national monuments like Bears’ Ears.
People like you are responsible for the pace and intensity of Biden’s Day One actions on climate and the environment. The environmental movement called on the president to make his climate and environmental justice platform the most ambitious of any major party nominee, and it worked hard to help him win the presidency. We should feel proud to see our efforts pay off so immediately and so spectacularly.
But there’s a tremendous amount of work left to do. It’s not enough to just rejoin the Paris Agreement. The Biden administration must ensure we fulfill the agreement’s goal of averting cataclysmic warming by decarbonizing our economy. It’s not enough to cancel one pipeline permit. It must ensure that the many other pipelines that threaten our clean water, our climate, and Indigeous homelands are never built. And in all this work, it must prioritize partnership and engagement with the communities of color and low-income communities that are most exposed to pollution and climate chaos.
Let's thank the Biden administration for what it’s done so far -- and work with them to build on it so that everyone is ensured access to clean air, clean water, and a stable climate.