This story is part of the Prospect’s series on how the next president can make progress without new legislation. Read all of our Day One Agenda articles here.
When he first ran for president, Barack Obama did not set forth an executive-action agenda on the environment. The centerpiece of his green agenda was to pass a law creating a cap-and-trade system to regulate climate pollution—a law that would explicitly have given up the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. But Obama learned the hard way, via the collapse of Senate negotiations over cap-and-trade, that Republicans could not be induced to pass climate legislation. After some dithering, Obama turned in his second term to using the executive branch’s full authority to combat climate change.
Victor Juhasz
Democratic presidential candidates are currently campaigning on ambitious climate legislation such as the Green New Deal, but they should know from Obama’s experience that the real environmental action in their prospective administration could come through regulatory and diplomatic actions taken under existing legal authority—and would have to if the Republicans keep control of the Senate. Luckily for them, there is a lot that can be done, thanks to some broad powers created decades ago.
Here are the five primary ways in which the next pro-environment president can mitigate climate change through executive actions:
International diplomacy. The next president’s first test on climate change may come before they even take office, because the next major round of global climate negotiations is set for mid-November 2020, right after the presidential election. Since the United States only accounts for 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, forging an ambitious global agreement for concerted international action to cut greenhouse emissions will be essential to averting catastrophic climate change. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama played a leading role in negotiating the Paris Agreement, setting it up with bilateral announcements of intent with previously recalcitrant large developing nations, including China, Brazil, and India. The national pledges made in Paris would not lower emissions fast enough to stay below the widely shared goal of less than two degrees Celsius of warming over pre-industrial levels. The environmentally concerned signatories hoped, however, that nations would return every five years to make increasingly bold commitments, once the political framework had proved workable and technological advances eased the path economically.
President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement, and his administration certainly won’t be working toward a stronger deal in 2020. Before the next chief executive has even taken office, a Democratic president-elect would want to persuade other nations that the United States will be rejoining the international community, meeting its original emissions targets for the 2020–2025 period that it committed to in Paris, and starting to develop the more advanced emissions targets for the 2025–2030 period that the next agreement will likely cover. Then, a suite of domestic policies governing everything from energy and transportation to public lands management will have to be developed to ensure the United States will be able to actually meet those goals. This will take months and years, but doing it as soon as possible will be essential to assuring the rest of the world that the U.S., the world’s largest economy—which is responsible for more than 25 percent of cumulative emissions—will be playing its part. “There will be a need to publicly affirm and go beyond the U.S.’s commitment to Paris and put together a comprehensive plan to fulfill its emissions reductions pledges,” says John Coequyt, the Sierra Club’s global climate policy director, “and that’s going to take some time.”
The Clean Air Act. Obama’s signature domestic climate policy was the Clean Power Plan, an EPA regulation limiting carbon emissions from power plants under Clean Air Act authority. The plan has been revoked by the Trump administration and replaced with a rule requiring much smaller cuts to carbon emissions from electric utilities. Reinstating the Clean Power rule will be among the next pro-environment president’s top priorities.
But the ongoing decline of coal in favor of natural gas and renewable sources such as wind and solar has eclipsed the goals that the Obama administration originally laid out. The Clean Power Plan aimed to reduce power plant emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. As an Environmental Defense Fund blog post noted in June, “In 2015, when the Clean Power Plan was finalized, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) projected baseline power sector carbon dioxide pollution would drop 10% from 2005 levels by 2030. Based on recent trends and technological developments, however, EIA’s most recent projections estimate that power sector carbon pollution would be at 34% below 2005 levels by 2030—surpassing Clean Power Plan targets—even without federal climate regulation.”
So, beyond merely returning to the Obama-era benchmarks, which many utilities can now meet without any extra effort, the next administration could go further and increase the rule’s ambition. “I think the 2015 Clean Power Plan was aiming to go farther than gas and renewable trends were heading for at that time, but the trends have picked up,” says David Doniger, senior strategic director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate and Clean Energy Program. “Now, business-as-usual trends are the same as the Clean Power Plan required. A responsible administration would have said, ‘It’s time to strengthen the CPP and go farther.’” Trump didn’t do that, of course, but his successor could.
Public lands management. The scale of land controlled by the federal government, especially in the Western states, is massive—and so too is the amount of coal mining and oil and gas drilling that occurs on public land. The executive branch has wide latitude under the law to decide how best to manage federal land and waters. In November 2018, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that nearly one-quarter of the country’s carbon emissions emanate from fossil fuel extracted on public lands. As of 2016, 41 percent of American coal was mined on federal leases. Fossil fuel extraction on federal land—especially coal—is being subsidized by the American taxpayer. A January 2015 Headwaters Economics report found that “as a result of loopholes and subsidies, coal companies end up paying just an effective royalty rate of 4.9 percent—well below the 12.5 percent rate required by law.” A lack of transparency and competition leads to leases being sold for below-market rates. In January 2016, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced a moratorium on coal leasing while the program was reviewed. Two months after taking office, Trump reversed that policy and re-opened the public lands for private profiteering from coal.
During the 2016 presidential primaries, pressure from Senator Bernie Sanders and environmental activists forced Hillary Clinton to embrace phasing out fossil fuel leasing on public lands and oppose drilling off the Atlantic Coast. That has since become the common position of the pro-environment 2020 presidential candidates. All ten candidates who participated in CNN’s climate change town hall in September proposed an end to new leases for fossil fuel extraction offshore and on federal land. Presumably, any of them would use their authority to adopt such a policy, although it would undoubtedly trigger legal challenges from fossil fuel companies and the states such as Wyoming that are most dependent on federal fossil fuel leasing. Even a more moderate president could have the Department of the Interior factor the social cost of climate pollution into its decisions about what to lease and how much to charge for it, which could eliminate the subsidy for fossil fuel development on public land and greatly reduce how much is extracted.
Another aspect of public land management that may become an important front in the war on climate change is bolstering areas that can absorb carbon pollution, such as national forests. That may mean changes to logging policies, for instance, or wetlands restoration. “One of the big differences between Obama’s Climate Action Plan and what’s likely to come from the next administration is that the next administration is going to focus a lot more on carbon sinks,” Coequyt suggested. “That could include [research and development] for carbon sequestration, but more likely a government-wide effort looking at what can be done to make America more resilient and [better able to] absorb carbon in fields and in forests.”
Clamping down on methane leakage. Natural gas is supposedly a cleaner alternative to coal, as it creates half the level of carbon emissions when burned. Thus, the fracking boom in domestic oil and gas extraction has been hailed as an environmentally friendly way to replace coal-burning power plants with ones that run on natural gas. But numerous independent studies have found that some of that gas is released during the drilling and piping processes in fracking operations. Since unburned natural gas is mostly methane, a potent greenhouse gas, its escape into the atmosphere may moot the climate advantage of gas over coal. As Bloomberg News recently noted, “Although methane accounts for roughly 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, it’s been blamed for up to a quarter of the planet’s warming as it has more than 84 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide the first two decades after entering the atmosphere.”
The Obama administration developed rules to require best practices for preventing fugitive gas emissions, such as quickly finding and patching leaks on public land and—again using the Clean Air Act—in new wells on private land. (The law requires that rules on new sources must precede those for existing sources, and Obama never got to the latter, much to the dismay of many environmentalists.)
Trump’s EPA has already loosened the requirements on new wells and wells on public lands, and over the summer, it proposed largely revoking methane regulation on private land. That, of course, may be tied up in court when the next president takes office. In any event, the next president could reinstate Obama’s methane regulations and go a step further by regulating existing infrastructure—including the aging and often leaky wells and pipelines that are responsible for the vast majority of methane leakage.
Conventional pollution regulations. Climate change is not the only social cost for which the coal industry has successfully stuck the American public with the bill. Mining and burning coal creates a number of harmful pollutants that are subject to federal regulation, such as sulfur dioxide, ozone, mercury, and coal ash. Tightening these regulations would limit the prevalence of coal mining and burning and raise the cost of those activities, accelerating their demise. The Trump administration, of course, has gone in the other direction, for example, by weakening a 2014 coal ash regulation. “The transition away from coal is being undermined by unwillingness at EPA to strictly enforce the Clean Air Act,” says Coequyt. “If you strictly enforce the Clean Air Act on conventional pollution, it would help us with climate as well.”
So the next president will have plenty of opportunities to make the coal industry pay its own way. But that’s only part of what the next president will have to do to make up for lost time under Trump.
Candidate Spotlight
Virtually every major candidate has introduced plans to mitigate the climate crisis. Most of the plans involve legislation, but many use presidential authority as well. Candidates have promised to implement new methane limitations (almost everyone, though O’Rourke, Warren, and Sanders add other pollutants), strengthen Clean Air Act rules (O’Rourke, Yang, Sanders, Castro), bulk up fuel economy and energy efficiency standards (Sanders, O’Rourke), and institute a “buy clean” program for government procurement (Steyer, O’Rourke, Castro, Klobuchar, Yang). ELIZABETH WARREN has proposed to have the Securities and Exchange Commission direct all public companies to disclose the risk to their business from unchecked climate pollution.
But the point of convergence for the entire field involves placing a moratorium on fossil fuel extraction on public lands. Every candidate who participated in CNN’s climate town hall in September supported the moratorium. Barack Obama’s administration issued thousands of leases and permits on public lands to oil and gas producers, increasing oil production by 60 percent over the last year of George W. Bush’s term. Times have changed.
