WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Wednesday he would expand existing federal programs to help Americans cope with the extreme heat caused by climate change, even as he faces mounting pressure to take aggressive action to reduce fossil fuel emissions. dangerously warming the planet.
The measures fell short of the sort of executive action that an increasing number of Democrats have called on Mr. Biden to take in the wake of last week’s decision by West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin III to pass clean energy legislation in the Senate. . That decision effectively doomed the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s climate change agenda, leading Democrats and Mr. Biden to look for other ways to achieve their goals.
Mr Manchin’s move followed a Supreme Court decision in June to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate climate-warming pollution from power plants, dealing a blow to another tool Mr Biden had hoped to use.
Speaking at a shuttered coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, which is being converted into a facility to make wind energy components, Mr. Biden insisted that even after the two cornerstones of his climate agenda collapsed and burned, he would to curb heat-trapping fossil fuels.
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world,” Mr Biden said. His comments came as the blistering heat disrupted transportation networks in the United Kingdom, melted the roofs of factories in China and scorched the southern and western United States. Noting the lack of support from Republicans for his climate proposals, Mr. Biden said, “This is an emergency, an emergency, and I’ll look at it that way.”
Still, the actions Biden announced on Wednesday will do almost nothing to help the United States significantly reduce its emissions. Instead, the president’s moves are primarily acknowledging that the nation is already in the throes of the catastrophic impacts of climate change and seeking to reduce its impact on households and communities.
He announced the allocation of $2.3 billion from an existing Federal Emergency Management Agency program to help communities, especially those in disadvantaged neighborhoods, build structures and programs to deal with severe heat, storms, fires and floods. already brought about by climate change.
Separately, he announced the expansion of the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, traditionally used to help people pay to heat their homes in the winter. The program will now also be used to help people cool their homes in the summer and build communal cooling centers.
Mr Biden also instructed the Department of the Interior to open the door to construction of offshore wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico, following steps over the past year to expand wind development off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
“It was just important for the president to wrap his arms around the different working threads we can put together and lay them out in a way he’s comfortable with,” Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser, told reporters. reporters on the go. to the event.
The modest rollout comes as Biden faces mounting calls from members of his own party to declare a national climate emergency, which would give him the opportunity to halt new federal oil drilling and cut wind, solar and other clean energy projects. Before Mr Biden spoke on Wednesday, a group outside the Somerset facility greeted the president with a banner that read, “Declare the National Climate Emergency.”
John F. Kerry, Mr. Biden’s international climate envoy, said in an interview that Mr. Biden is “very close” to taking that step and that the debate within the government is over when to announce the statement and how to make it happen. should be deployed, rather than as it should be done.
Understand what happened to Biden’s domestic agenda
“Better rebuild.” Before Joseph R. Biden Jr. Elected president in 2020, he articulated his ambitious vision for his administration under the slogan “Build Back Better,” pledging to invest in clean energy and ensure procurement spending went to American products.
“The president has to decide on the timing of that,” said Mr. Kerry. “It’s a matter of timing.” After the Massachusetts event, Mr. Biden told reporters that he had not yet declared a state of emergency because he still “has the traps on the authority I have,” adding that he “will make a decision on that shortly.”
Although Biden retired on Wednesday, the White House appeared to be testing the waters by repeatedly referring to climate change as an “emergency” in a fact sheet and in the president’s comments.
But White House officials are still wary of how forcefully a formal climate emergency statement should be drafted: The actions it could unleash would almost certainly result in lawsuits by Republican states, which could eventually derail them.
But Mr Biden’s slow adoption of new climate regulations for power plants and automobiles has also fueled frustration among many on the Democratic base who say the nation’s tumultuous state requires urgency. But with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, rising inflation, and now-failed climate legislation, Mr. Biden has mostly urged Congress to act and get Americans to vote, while taking sweeping executive steps. that his government fears could become entangled in the courts. .
The combination of passivity in Congress and an increasing number of crises has put Mr. Biden in political bondage just months before the midterm elections. The possibility that Democrats could cede power to Republicans has increased the need to pass legislation quickly.
“There were very high expectations around quite a number of issues from climate to democracy and the hopes of an FDR-type climate legacy have been replaced by the rollback of 50-year rights in this country that young women are supposed to have. said Sean McElwee, the founder and executive director of Data for Progress, a liberal policy and polling organization. “I find that demoralizing and maybe the expectations were too high.”
In the past year, Mr. Biden directed the EPA to create new regulations to reduce emissions from the Earth’s three largest sources of pollution: automobiles, power plants, and oil and gas wells. Combined, those rules could take a hefty bite out of the country’s carbon pollution, experts said, assuming they can withstand inevitable lawsuits from Republican states. But the rules aren’t expected to be completed until 2023 or 2024 — and their ambition could still be watered down in response to political objections from automakers, union workers and voters in the swing state.
“The unsexy reality is that we’re going to make some progress with these tools, and it won’t be as much as Biden had hoped,” said Jody Freeman, a Harvard environmental law professor who advised the Obama White House on climate policy. “But making some progress is better than making no progress — and over time, these rules can unlock new technologies and benefits that we can’t foresee later.”
Some Democrats see the slow pace and low profile of the regulation as a kind of concession to Mr. Manchin, a coal state senator who has opposed many EPA rules. The White House still hopes that Mr Manchin will return to the table in the fall to negotiate part of a climate change bill.
“I don’t know what Congress expects or any senator for that matter,” said Ms. McCarthy. “But the idea that the president is initiating here is to acknowledge the challenge.”
Without Congressional action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is mathematically impossible for Mr. Biden to achieve the goal he promised the United States of halving global warming by the end of the decade. Scientists say the United States must contain so much pollution to do its part to prevent the planet warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius in pre-industrial times. That’s the threshold over which scientists say the world won’t be able to avoid the most catastrophic effects of a warming planet — deadly heatwaves, widespread wildfires, devastating storms, floods and droughts. The planet has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius in that time.
“All we’ve seen is a handful of executive actions and the slow death of climate legislation in Congress,” Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group, said in a statement. “Young people are tired of getting scraps from our government.”
Mr Kerry also highlighted the serious global implications of the failure to enact climate legislation in the United States.
“You see the impact in Europe with the fires, burning houses, melting jobs, railroad trains not going fast because of the metal warming,” said Mr. Kerry. Greenhouse gas emissions won’t stop spewing into the atmosphere “just because people don’t get their act together and get something done.”
Kerry said the battle to implement Biden’s once ambitious proposals is already causing concern on the international stage.
In Berlin earlier this week for a climate conference, Mr Kerry said he was approached by a Chinese negotiator who asked him about the impact of the recent Supreme Court EPA case. Others, he said, questioned whether Mr. Biden would be able to keep his promise to roughly halve U.S. emissions.
“It’s very interesting when you hear people in other countries asking whether or not you can achieve your goals,” said Mr. Kerry, adding that he is concerned that other countries could use Congress’ passivity as an excuse to not reduce emissions.
Resistance to tackling climate change, Kerry said, also “underscores the narrative” of some critics that the United States is a country in decline.
“It’s a hard argument to counter if you don’t pass legislation,” he said.