First 100: Biden Climate Pledges Heavily Reliant on the Infrastructure Package

And they don’t really have to be.

by

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The Chief

President Biden was up early this morning, kicking off a climate summit in which 40 leaders, including Chinese president Xi Jinping, will participate. As had been previously announced, Biden pledged at the summit in opening remarks to cut greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels in half by 2030 and make America carbon neutral by 2050.

The White House produced a fact sheet on this today that’s missing most of the important question: how will you reduce these emissions. Really you have a few standbys—invest in clean energy to make electricity carbon-free, make buildings energy efficient, electrify transportation, plant trees, capture industrial carbon output, hope for an energy innovation. Not so much how as “hey, let’s do this!”

Much of the how, of course, is embedded in the American Jobs Plan, which is as close as we’re getting to a Green New Deal. We’ve been analyzing some of the climate components, from the clean energy standard by 2035 to the capping of orphaned oil and gas wells that leak greenhouse gases to electrifying the federal vehicle fleet to building national charging infrastructure to establishing a Civilian Climate Corps to put other policies into practice. There’s more policy in there, including a $174 billion commitment to electric vehicles, primarily for point-of-sale rebates and aid to manufacturers; 24-7 clean energy at federal buildings; a tax credit for high-voltage transmission lines that can move clean energy to population centers; electrifying school buses; and more.

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Biden has room to maneuver outside of the AJP. He can and will end the silly fight with California and allow its higher fuel economy standard to go national. He can go further, as several governors have asked, and ban the sale of greenhouse-gas emitting cars by 2035; California has already adopted this. There’s been a cancellation of the KeystoneXL pipeline but not the Line 3 Oil Pipeline, as Colleen Connolly reports for us today. There’s an end to “permitting” of fossil fuel projects on public lands, but at the end of the Trump administration oil and gas companies loaded up on permits, and drilling continues. The announcement launching more offshore wind was definitely positive.

Our executive action tracker has several other actions that Biden could take, including at this week’s summit. He could set targets for 2025 in international agreements that would further restrict the use of greenhouse gases. He could incorporate the pledge for carbon-free power generation by 2035 into the EPA’s Clean Power Plan regulation, which right now would only reduce emissions in the baseline power sector by 34 percent by 2030. He could sanction companies with fines that allow carbon leaks into the atmosphere, and adopt stronger rules for sulfur dioxide, ozone, mercury, and coal ash. Activists want more out of the infrastructure bill, because that is their role to maximize climate action. I’ve heard surprisingly less from that world on maximizing executive authority

The point here is that there’s a whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis that is more aggressive than the path Biden is now taking, which relies heavily on a massive infrastructure bill that hinges on a lot more than climate-related elements passing through Congress, including winning the support of the guy who shot a copy of climate legislation with a rifle in his campaign ads. If that bill shatters there are certainly command-and-control fallback options for some of the energy transition, but the lack of total urgency on those right now isn’t a good sign.

Personnel is policy and Biden has assembled a lot of smart thinkers on climate (Even that’s not unilateral; Treasury’s choice to run its climate hub is ex-private equity and has no regulatory experience). But in addition, policy is policy, and if all the personnel does is make pledges and cross fingers about Joe Manchin, that’s not going to be enough.

That’s especially true because, as Adam Tooze explains, the AJP is tied up with revenue-raisers subject to unending fights, which both have the potential to delay the final package and shrink its ambitions. If the package must be “paid for” over a certain time frame and things like the corporate tax rate is already been shaved, then that would necessarily lead to reductions on the spending side. Arguing about taxes in the face of an energy transition imperative every bit as much of an emergency as, say, distributing COVID vaccines and managing the concomitant economic pain, adds unneeded friction into the whole enterprise. The foregrounding of climate transition as a job creator is smart politics, but that also should negate the need to offset it with revenues.

And in the background of all of this is the international diplomacy piece, on display this week at the climate summit. The U.S. will simply not be able to impose the green revolution on its own; cooperation, particularly with heavy emitters China, India, Russia, and Brazil, will be required. On the opposite end, developing countries already facing severe damage from global warming need climate aid, which richer countries have been reluctant to provide.

The climate conference in Glasgow at the end of this year matters more than this week’s talks, but the goal this week is to draw out countries’ new climate targets. Of course, no country in the industrialized world honored its targets in the Paris agreement, so these pledges aren’t worth much beyond the paper.

Biden has definitely leapt past Donald Trump and even Barack Obama on his foregrounding of climate, but that’s a low bar. And “foregrounding” is talk, not necessarily action. There have been strong promises on greening the country, and half-steps on getting there. We need more than pledges, and the Biden team can do it even if Congress balks and hedges and trims.

What Day of Biden’s Presidency Is It?

Day 93.

Today I Learned

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