What happened to Biden’s climate agenda?

The president who entered the White House last year with the most ambitious climate agenda in history is struggling to notch major wins.

And his progressive base is losing patience.

Joe Biden elevated climate change to one of the top four issues for his administration, along with battling the pandemic, rebuilding the economy and fighting racism. Yet his most crucial climate proposal is dead in Congress, and the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will take up a case this month that could shred his administration’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from power plants.

His biggest achievements so far have included some symbolic steps like rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, along with passage of an infrastructure bill that includes new federal investments for next generation clean energy projects, expanding the power grid for renewables and installing a charging network for electric vehicles. The legislation also offers tens of billions of dollars to help cities and states become more resilient against the storms, floods and wildfires worsened by climate change, and even to help relocate communities away from vulnerable places, but doesn't include the type of transformative investments advocates say are needed.

Many on the left, who rallied behind Biden during the 2020 campaign as he embraced aggressive climate action, are losing hope — noting both the galloping spread of climate-linked disasters around the world, and the strong possibility that Democrats could lose control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

“Voters are looking at us and shaking their heads with frustration,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told POLITICO. “In order for us to animate all parts of our base including climate voters we have to be able to show them what we've done. A lot of the big things they wanted to see action on, like climate, haven't happened yet.”

The Biden administration is aware of the Democratic base's disappointment with the stalling of their signature climate package. “We understand people’s frustration," White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy said at a POLITICO event Thursday. "Would we all like to be running faster and faster? Yes, we would. And we fully intend to be running faster and faster.”

Biden did kill the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada — a move that, like rejoining the Paris Agreement, reversed former President Donald Trump’s attempts to undo the Obama administration’s climate achievements. But the steps he’s taken so far will not be enough to achieve Biden’s most ambitious climate pledges, including a promise to wean the U.S. power grid off fossil fuels by 2035 and cut overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least half by 2030.

Setbacks, meanwhile, keep mounting.

A federal court overturned Biden’s pause on oil and gas drilling on federal land last year, and his banking regulators face a maze of obstacles in even beginning to try to force the financial system to prepare for the threats from climate change. And on Friday, a federal judge issued an injunction to block the Biden administration from using its estimate on the economic impact of future carbon emissions when issuing new rules.

Other regulations that could put teeth in Biden’s climate policies, such as imposing limits on methane pollution from sources like oil and gas wells, are still wending their way through the rulemaking process and are virtually certain to draw legal challenges. The Environmental Protection Agency's tightened limits on pollution from cars and light trucks will go into effect at the end of this month after suffering a temporary reversal under the Trump administration — although environmental groups have said the effort still will not make up for the reductions that would have happened under targets set by former President Barack Obama.

Perhaps most ominously, EPA's ability to regulate the carbon emissions from power plants will face a big test this spring, when the Supreme Court hears arguments about the scope of the agency's power under the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court in 2016 blocked the original Obama-era regulation, while an appellate court last year struck down the Trump administration’s version. An adverse ruling from the Supreme Court — which has moved to the right since it blocked the Obama rule — could hamper EPA's power to target the sector that emits one-third of the nation's energy-related greenhouse gases.

Still, Biden has elevated climate change in other ways, making it a top priority across different agencies not normally associated with the issue, including Treasury and Health and Human Services. He added several environmental justice positions that is overseeing an initiative to steer 40 percent of federal benefits to long overlooked communities exposed to pollution from power plants and industrial facilities, known as Justice40.

His international climate envoy, John Kerry, marshaled progress at U.N. global climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, in November by leading a global pledge of more than 100 countries vowing to reduce emissions of the potent pollutant methane 30 percent by 2030.

So far, the Democratic base is largely unimpressed with his performance. In fact, a recent poll showed climate change may be the only issue where Biden gets higher marks from conservative voters than Democrats — but mostly because he's been legislatively constrained. In the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted in December, 26 percent of self-identified right-leaning Americans said Biden had done the right amount to combat climate change, compared with only 10 percent of left-leaning respondents. And 80 percent of those on the left said he's done too little.

Democrats fear they are running out of time to deliver on Biden’s pledges because of Congress’ failure to pass the Build Back Better Act, the health and social spending bill that would have devoted $550 billion to reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. The bill passed the House but then died at the hands of Sen. Joe Manchin, the coal-supporting West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Energy Committee.

Biden and other Democrats have talked about shrinking Build Back Better into a narrower party-line bill that might be able to pass muster with Manchin, one that would nix some social policy priorities while retaining the core of their climate agenda.

But Jamal Raad, co-founder and executive director of Evergreen Action, an environmental group, said he worries Democrats aren’t committed to that strategy, and he dismissed the contention that voters will be impressed by the climate-related elements of the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed last year.

“Congress has done nothing to significantly reduce carbon emissions," Raad said. "And to stop now and pivot to campaign on an infrastructure bill would be a disaster for our climate and would be looked upon unfavorably in the years to come."

Some centrist Democrats ahead of the president’s March 1 State of the Union address are encouraging the Biden administration to tout earlier legislative victories, like the bipartisan infrastructure bill, that they say most administrations would certainly list as a major accomplishment.

“We have already done more than anyone has ever done in history in terms of climate,” Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) told POLITICO.

But Democrats largely agree with analysts that Biden stands no chance of reaching his emissions-cutting targets without enacting the climate portions of the Build Back Better legislation, and they maintain they can reach consensus on those provisions. Those include $320 billion in expanded clean energy tax subsidies aimed mainly at wind and solar, but which also support other technologies such as battery storage, nuclear power, clean hydrogen and carbon capture for use on fossil fuel plants.

Those credits would be nearly four times the amount that Obama signed into law 2009's stimulus bill that's been credited with jump-starting the renewables sector. And they would remain on the books for a decade, providing certainty to clean energy developers who have urged Congress to give them a long lead time to plan projects.

“It would still be the biggest climate bill in American history, and passing that in a historically divided Congress would be an enormous accomplishment,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told POLITICO.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said Republicans deserve their share of blame if Democrats can’t successfully resurrect their climate legislation.

“It’s important to remember that not a single Republican in either the Senate or House is willing to align with this and help us pass these things to put us on the forefront of the clean energy transition,” she said.

As their legislative ambitions flag, some Democrats are urging Biden to more aggressively use executive action to curb emissions.

Jayapal said her caucus is working with outside green groups to present to the White House a list of actions that Biden and his agencies can take without Congress, but she acknowledged those won't replace the need for climate legislation.

“We can't pretend executive action will get us to the same place with climate,” she said.

Administration defenders say Biden has faced a herculean task just to undo the setbacks from the Trump administration that kept the U.S. from engaging on climate change internationally and weakened emissions regulations domestically.

“A lot of work that gets less attention and less credit went into undoing the Trump damage,” said Dan Reicher, former Obama administration assistant secretary of Energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy, now senior scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He pointed to efforts at the Energy Department to reinvigorate a clean energy loan program office and restore energy efficiency standards.

Josh Freed, senior vice president for the climate and energy program at Third Way, a Democratic think tank agreed.

“Climate and clean energy policy have always really been block by block rather than one, big sweeping change," he said. "And what we've seen so far from the Biden administration has been the blocks that they've been able to build are much bigger and have much more impact than we've been able to see in a long time. And so for the first year of the administration, that alone is really encouraging."

But Democrats in Congress acknowledge they are falling short and that the unforgiving political calendar could soon close any legislative path for climate action.

“It doesn’t get easier to do this. It gets harder,” Smith said.

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By: Josh Siegel, Kelsey Tamborrino and Alex Guillén
Title: What happened to Biden's climate agenda?
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/2022/02/13/biden-climate-agenda-promises-what-happened-00007308
Published Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2022 07:00:00 EST

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