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Biden
President Joe Biden departs Holy Trinity Catholic Church after attending a Mass on July 17, 2022.
Joe Manchin’s rejection of the energy section of the Biden legislative agenda has put the president’s 2030 climate goals further out of reach. To remedy this, President Biden will visit Somerset, Massachusetts today to announce executive actions geared to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That could include declaring a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, though it doesn’t look like that will happen tomorrow.
As Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner wrote for the Prospect earlier this month, the maximal version of declaring a climate emergency would give the president authority to reinstate the ban on crude exports that Congress ended in 2015. The president could also, in a climate emergency, halt fossil fuel imports that would add to U.S. emissions; stop or restrict the investment in fossil fuel projects at home and abroad; and suspend offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.
These options are designed to prevent the burning of fossil fuels. They would certainly accomplish that goal, but also raise the price of a gallon of gasoline far beyond current levels, at a time when the public is reeling from inflation. Banning exports would also consign Europe to near-disaster at the moment.
But there’s another side to a climate emergency declaration that could be additive—providing the funding that Congress has as yet been unable to provide to build out an energy transition. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how that could match the Congressional appropriations envisioned in the original Biden agenda. This is the brick wall of energy policy that’s supremely hard to bore one’s way through.
When President Trump declared an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, he used that authority to repurpose military construction money toward building a border wall. When that was challenged by a lower court, the Supreme Court allowed the diversion of funds, and it continued for years until the Biden administration stopped spending on border wall activities.
The Biden administration could act in a similar manner to redirect spending toward clean energy production, as Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) laid out before Biden’s inauguration. Likewise, the Federal Emergency Management Agency could be ordered under the Stafford Act to build small, distributed-energy systems like rooftop solar, microturbines, or biomass generators. This could form an abundance agenda to increase the level of available energy, rather than just cutting off the dirtiest energy sources before replacements are available.
Biden has gestured in this direction, repeatedly invoking the Defense Production Act to direct manufacturing toward solar panel components, heat pumps, and other green tech. But the DPA must be funded to have a real impact in this sector, and to date only $100 million has been put toward that purpose—money that the White House didn’t even push for. That would scarcely make a dent.
With a climate emergency, additional sums could be redirected toward energy production, solving some of the investment riddle that has bedeviled the U.S. throughout the transition. FEMA could draw on as much as $10 billion for resiliency and climate-related projects, for example. It’s unclear how much else could be yielded. I asked Sen. Merkley’s office how much they envision being made available for funding; spokesperson Maggie Rousseau referred to the $3.6 billion Trump diverted for the border wall. “Climate chaos is the biggest threat to our planet and our national security,” Rousseau said. “There are enormous needs, and Senator Merkley looks forward to working with the White House and agencies to identify the biggest opportunities to meet that threat using the emergency powers.”
Even the most aggressive redirecting strategy would fall far short of the $550 billion designated in clean energy tax credits and investments in the original Build Back Better Act, or even the approximately $300 billion being discussed in the slimmed-down version, until Manchin rejected it last week. At this point, the existing subsidies for clean energy are imperiled without a legislative vehicle; a climate emergency might only barely replace them.
In a statement, climate hawk Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said, “While I support a climate emergency declaration, it reduces no emissions on its own. I believe the most powerful tools that the President has at his disposal are his bully pulpit, the purchasing power of the government, and well-established regulatory and administrative authorities that can limit carbon pollution.”
But the problem with the clean energy buildout generally has been the lack of dedicated investment capital. As long as fossil fuels remain profitable, the private sector will not provide funds for sustainable energy at the scale needed, and the public sector has been deadlocked.
To highlight one case, it’s all well and good to talk about returning to nuclear power, but there has been only one new reactor brought online since the mid-1990s, and the few others in production are wildly over budget. The reason is largely the lack of financing, plus the fact that nobody remembers how to even build a reactor. Even the small modular reactors coming online—explicitly to bring down the cost of construction—are pricier than solar and wind, and there are questions about their ability to scale.
By rights, nuclear and renewable technologies should be complementary. But instead we face a false choice between building insufficient amounts of one or the other, because the money isn’t available. There are certainly regulatory choices that would make cleaner sources of energy more attractive, but they still run up against monetary constraints.
The problem with the clean energy buildout generally has been the lack of dedicated investment capital.
For example, you could put pressure on fossil fuel emissions through the “executive beast mode” agenda outlined by Sen. Whitehouse—which includes an aggressive social cost of carbon rule, carbon capture requirements, strong surveillance and policing of methane leaks, and tighter regulations on pollutants like ozone and coal ash. On the flip side, you could ensure that both green power production and the electric transmission lines to move that energy around are easier to build. But at the end of the day, ratepayer funds won’t support the transition, private-sector actors want a hard-to-create return on their investment, and government has been recalcitrant. Find the money and that will determine how much build-out you’re going to get.
Similarly, incentivizing the production of electric vehicles can be done with smart fuel economy regulations; the Transportation Department has pending regulations to complete for the 2027 vehicle model year and beyond. The DOT could follow California’s Advanced Clean Cars II regulation, to take all internal combustion engines off the road by 2035. Dozens of states are looking to side with California’s approach, which is allowable under the law.
Electric vehicles can make money for investors. But there are currently hard limits to locating the components, including lithium for batteries and refined copper, which is also used in all kinds of renewable power and grid infrastructure projects. The grid itself would have to be improved to handle millions of new electric vehicles, as everyone well knows. The $65 billion for the grid in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is a good start, but it falls short of what is needed.
Finally, the Democratic premise underlying the energy transition is that it will boost the abundance and quality of green jobs. A regulatory agenda that favors or disfavors certain types of energy doesn’t guarantee good jobs the way direct investment would, leaving Democrats open to the charge of both raising energy costs and showing elite contempt for working people by creating low-paying jobs.
Meanwhile, the government isn’t even using direct investment to its full potential. There is $20 billion available to the EV industry in the IIJA, along with $52 billion for semiconductors in the CHIPS-plus bill that the Senate is debating this week, much of which will go to computer chips for automotives. But there are no specific, defined labor standards in those bills that go beyond best practices or generic support for “good-paying union jobs.” No federal outlay for EV production requires union neutrality in any state. And the National Blueprint for Lithium Batteries released by the Department of Energy even lists U.S. labor costs as a “weakness.”
Looming in the distance is a Supreme Court that has already struck down a power plant rule, and will likely stretch the bounds of creativity to prevent projects Democrats favor while waving through Republican projects using similar authorities. That cannot be a reason for inaction, of course; it would be difficult for the Court to strike down every component of a committed climate executive action project. But the locus of the judiciary’s complaint is that on “major questions,” Congress must be intentional in telling the executive branch how to act. And there’s nothing more intentional than an outlay of money.
Unfortunately, the administration is only getting around to stating its intentions now. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), the holder of the keys to climate investment, responded to the possibility of Biden declaring a climate emergency by saying, “Let’s see what the Congress does, the Congress needs to act.” That he’s the sole figure holding back Congress from acting makes this exasperating. But it also shows the missed opportunity. If executive beast mode had bared its teeth during the negotiations rather than afterward, maybe that would have spurred Manchin to act, lest he get left behind.
Now it’s too late. (The tiny possibility theoretically exists of an FY2023 reconciliation bill in the lame-duck session, but that’s very unlikely.) Aggressive executive actions can make a huge difference, as this magazine has been saying for three years. A strong executive can use current law to lower emissions and begin a transition to a cleaner, safer, and healthier energy economy. But it would have been far preferable to use that power to coax complementary legislative action, particularly on investment funding. Without that, the country is in a pretty deep hole.
