The Executive Actions Biden Should Take on Climate

In his State of the Union speech, President Biden touted his administration’s commitment to “confronting the climate crisis, not denying it.” He called action on this issue “the most significant action on climate ever in the history of the world.”

The message is that climate is “solved.” The government is taking care of it. Unfortunately, this is dangerously untrue.

Over the last year, there have been heat waves, wildfires and droughts across vast swaths of the world. Even as Biden spoke, Texas was reeling from the biggest wildfire in its history.

The issue isn’t so much what Biden could have said differently. It’s more what he could have done differently over the last three years.

The administration points to two pieces of legislation, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), as evidence of its commitment to bold climate action. But the hype around these bills doesn’t stand up to objective scrutiny.

The IRA does include significant funding for renewable energy, home energy efficiency and other measures that reduce our fossil fuel dependence, which is commendable. However, it also includes significant giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.

For example, the law mandates that renewable energy leases on public lands and waters cannot be granted until minimum thresholds for oil and gas leasing are met. This section effectively holds any renewable energy expansion on public lands and waters hostage to further fossil fuel expansion.

Another dangerous provision in the IRA is the expanded tax credit for carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that purportedly sucks carbon dioxide out of smokestacks and buries it in the ground. If it worked, it would be a way to keep using fossil fuels without emitting greenhouse gases.

However, it doesn’t work. Numerous studies have shown that the technology is flawed, and the empirical record of CCS adoption confirms this finding. Even if CCS did work, it would not address any other harmful effects of fossil fuels, such as air and water pollution from drilling for fossil fuels or burning them.

These giveaways shouldn’t be dismissed as a compromise needed to pass the better parts of the bill.

There’s growing scientific consensus — from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. Environment Program, the International Energy Agency, and peer-reviewed studies — that expanding fossil fuel infrastructure poses serious risks of failing to cut emissions. Instead, it’s essential to phase out the production of fossil fuels altogether.

Those fossil fuel-friendly “compromises,” in other words, threaten the effectiveness of the investments they helped to win. In fact, U.S. crude oil production has reached record highs under the Biden administration, which has issued fossil fuel leases on public lands even faster than the Trump administration did.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill is even worse — it doesn’t include significant investments in renewable energy. It does, however, throw more public money at useless carbon capture scams. It also wastes precious public resources on expanding our already bloated highway system, doubling down on automobile dependence, sprawl, greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants.

Biden can keep trying to embellish his flawed climate record. Or he can start taking bold actions he needs to take without waiting for Congress, which is unlikely to take further action on climate anytime soon.

For example, Biden could use his executive powers to reinstate the crude oil export ban and go beyond the recent pause on new liquefied natural gas export licenses to permanently end new LNG export licenses. He can also direct all federal agencies to stop issuing permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure, such as drilling, pipelines, petrochemical plants and export terminals.

The president has these executive powers and should use them. It is essential now, with the House of Representatives controlled by Republicans who will block his agenda and the Senate Energy Committee controlled by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) the most fossil fuel-friendly politician in the United States.

It’s not too late for Biden to take real climate action. Our job is to make him decide to.

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