"Climate Day" Accelerates New Environmental Agenda

President Joe Biden has already taken more executive action on climate change and the environment in his first week in office than any president before him. On day one of his administration, he rejoined the Paris Agreement, revoked the federal permit for the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, and signed a temporary moratorium on drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But all those actions, while bold, were just a reset—a rollback of the Trump-era rollbacks—designed to return US environmental policy to where it was at the end of the Obama administration. 

Now, the real work begins. Branding Wednesday, January 27, as Climate Day, the Biden White House turned toward the future as the president signed a second batch of executive orders that effectively launched his administration’s plan to confront the climate crisis.

"In my view, we've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis. We can't wait any longer,” Biden said shortly before signing the executive actions. “We see it with our own eyes. We feel it. We know it in our bones. And it's time to act.”

In a sweeping executive order titled “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” the Biden-Harris administration placed climate change and environmental justice at the center of its domestic and foreign policy agendas. The order elevates climate change to a national security priority, reaffirms that Biden will host a Leaders’ Climate Summit on this coming Earth Day, and promises that the United States will “press for enhanced climate ambition” on the international stage. It also begins the process of creating the country’s “national determined contribution”—the emissions-reduction target it must set for itself under the Paris Agreement.

The order also directs federal agencies to undertake an ambitious conservation plan. It commits to conserving at least 30 percent of lands and waters in the United States by 2030—a number that biologists say is crucial to preserving biodiversity and the American landscape’s ability to provide clean air, clear water, and a stable climate. The order also calls for the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps—inspired by the New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps—that would put Americans to work restoring public lands.

It establishes a trio of White House–based councils tasked with spurring job creation and ensuring that at least 40 percent of the federal government’s investments in clean energy and infrastructure find their way to poor and minority communities, including coal country. And, in a step toward fulfilling one of the Biden administration’s campaign promises, it starts the long, regulatory process of banning new oil and gas leases on federal lands. Fossil fuel extraction on federal lands accounts for more than one-fifth of all US carbon dioxide emissions.

Much of the environmental community cheered the moves. “I am without words,” said Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club. “The breadth and sweeping nature of what President Biden has put forward—from public lands to environmental justice to jobs—is too much to get your head around.”

In a prepared statement, Angela Ledford Anderson, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists said, “President Biden used his executive order authority to affirm what scientists have been saying for decades: Climate change is not a distant crisis but rather one that has already reached our doorstep and can no longer be ignored. Its fingerprints are everywhere in the form of more intense hurricanes, a longer wildfire season, and worsening heat, floods, and drought.”   

As part of the move to prioritize climate change in foreign policymaking, the executive order mandates the director of national intelligence to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on the implications of climate change—a move national security experts say is long overdue. “We’re currently living with the consequence of an outdated national security doctrine,” said Rod Schoonover, a former director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council. “If the things happening in the United States right now were being done by a foreign agent—setting off wildfires, destroying homes and property, killing Americans—we would have no problem whatsoever viewing this as a threat to the homeland.”  

The national security order is a revision of an Obama-era presidential memorandum signed in September 2016, which former President Donald Trump quickly ripped up. The memorandum’s short history as the ball in an executive ping pong match highlights an important limitation to the actions Biden has taken on climate change so far: They’re not permanent. Whether the Biden administration can achieve climate progress on a scale equivalent to the threat of rising temperatures will ultimately depend on Congress, particularly in the Senate, where any major legislation would require at least 10 Republicans to join a unified Democratic Party. Without the staying power of legislation, US environmental policy runs the risk of becoming the political equivalent of an ephemeral stream—a wellspring during one administration, a dry creek bed the next.

But policy analysts say it is significant that these executive orders are coming not in year seven of a presidential administration (as happened during the Obama administration’s most important climate actions) but in week two. “I’m very hopeful this level of intensity and commitment sets the tone for congressional legislation,” said Sally Hardin, the interim director of the Energy and Environment War Room at the Center for American Progress. “The momentum is strong.” 

The Biden administration has set 2035 as the power sector’s deadline for becoming “carbon-pollution-free,” and the order leverages the federal government’s immense buying power to reach that goal by directing federal agencies to buy “carbon-pollution-free” electricity and zero-emission vehicles. A low-carbon military, for example, would go a long way toward helping the United States reduce its emissions. The Department of Defense has more buildings and uses more energy than any other federal agency—77 percent of the entire federal government’s energy consumption. “It has a great responsibility to lead by example, getting its own contributions to climate change under control in a way that also preserves its mission to defend America,” said Sherri Goodman, a deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security under Obama who is now a senior fellow at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. 

The most outspoken critic of the White House’s Climate Day was, unsurprisingly, the oil industry. With both its greenwashed “better than coal” advertising campaign and its bottom line at stake, the oil industry has taken up conflicting positions on the Biden administration’s climate plans, simultaneously applauding its move to rejoin the Paris Agreement and condemning the pause on new oil and gas leases. “Restricting development on federal lands and waters is nothing more than an ‘import more oil’ policy,” wrote Mike Sommers, the president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute.

On Wednesday, Biden also signed a separate executive order reestablishing the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a presidential memorandum directing federal agencies to make “evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.”

Combined, these actions will ensure that the federal government incorporates science (and scientists) into its solutions to the problems Biden highlighted in his inaugural address—the climate crisis, racial injustice, and an economy in shambles. In doing so, Biden simultaneously tackles another issue on his list: the assault on truth. “Science underpins what we understand about reality,” said Schoonover, who resigned from government work in 2019 because of the Trump administration’s assaults on scientific integrity and the independence of the intelligence community. “When we incorporate science into policy decisions, our policies aren’t based on one opinion over another. They’re reality-based.”

Hardin and others said that by sidelining scientists, the Trump administration laid the groundwork for its policies to be rolled back and that by leaning on science, the Biden administration can make its executive orders more durable. “Now we can talk about what we need to do instead of talking about what we need to protect,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy. “We’re switching from defense to offense.”

Rosenberg echoed Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who recently told the White House press corps that it feels “liberating” to work as a federal scientist under the Biden administration: “It’s time to let the science speak.”