WASHINGTON – President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday renewed the United States’ commitment to the Paris climate agreement, the international agreement created to prevent catastrophic global warming, and ordered federal agencies to start reviewing and restoring more of 100 environmental regulations that have been weakened or rolled back by former President Donald J. Trump.
The measures represent a first step towards resolving one of the deepest fissures between the United States and the rest of the world, after Trump defiantly rejected the Paris pact and seemed to appreciate his government’s drive to weaken or undo key domestic climate policies.
Mr. Biden has placed combating the climate crisis among his highest priorities. In addition to containing global warming, he promised that ending the coronavirus pandemic, restoring the economy and tackling racial injustice will be the central causes of his government.
“We are going to fight climate change in a way that we have never done before,” said Biden in the Oval Office on Wednesday night, just before signing executive decrees. Even so, he warned: “These are only executive actions. They are important, but we will need legislation for many of the things that we are going to do ”.
Foreign leaders hailed Biden’s first measures as a powerful sign that the United States, the biggest contributor to global warming in history, intends to restart its efforts to reduce pollution levels and restore the international order overturned by Trump. “Welcome back to the Paris Agreement!” Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, said in a Twitter message.
Under the Paris Agreement, some 200 nations have pledged to reduce emissions from global warming to avoid the most disastrous consequences of climate change. A letter to the United Nations signed by Biden on Wednesday formally begins the 30-day process to bring the United States back into the agreement.
But analysts warned that Biden’s actions on the first day must be quickly followed by a series of aggressive domestic climate policies to dramatically reduce the country’s emissions of pollution that heats the planet through exhaust pipes, chimneys and oil and gas wells.
Also on Wednesday, Biden terminated the construction license for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport heavy carbon oil from Canadian oil sands to the Gulf Coast. Earlier in the day, TC Energy, a Canadian company, said it was suspending work on the line.
But the lengthy legal process of undoing most of Trump’s environmental setbacks and replacing them with new regulations can take many years and is likely to be filled with political landmines if Republicans or business groups fight against them.
Even before Biden was sworn in on Wednesday, some Republicans attacked his new political leadership.
“President-elect Biden’s policies from day one have hurt American workers and our economy,” West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said in a statement.
In another initial indication of the headwinds Biden may face in Congress, Senator Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, said he intended to present a resolution requiring the president to seek Senate advice and consent to the Paris Agreement, and a separate bill document that would authorize the Keystone gas pipeline congress, despite Biden’s objections.
The country’s largest business lobby, the United States Chamber of Commerce, which opposed much of former President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda, signaled its support for a return to the Paris agreement, but also its opposition to the end of the Keystone project. .
“It is critical that the United States restore its leading role in international efforts to address the climate challenge,” said Marty Durbin, president of the Chamber’s Global Energy Institute. But he said of the Keystone project: “It will hurt consumers and leave thousands of Americans unemployed in the construction business.”
Mr. Biden has set an ambitious goal for the United States to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector by 2035 and the entire economy by 2050. However, it is far from certain that the United States can achieve these goals. without new legislation from Congress – a difficult prospect, given the minimal majority of a Democratic vote in the Senate.
Scientists said this means that Biden will need to enact tougher regulations than those put in place by Obama and repealed by Trump.
“There is still a very big task to be done,” said Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. He noted that the United Nations climate science reports call for zero net global emissions by 2050.
Biden on Wednesday instructed federal agencies to review all decisions by the Trump administration in the past four years “that have been harmful to public health, harmful to the environment, without the support of the best science available, or otherwise not in the interest national”
This includes restoring regulations, rolled out by Mr. Trump, that restrict greenhouse gas emissions from car exhausts and methane leaks from oil and gas wells, as well as replacing energy efficiency standards for appliances and buildings .
Dr. Oppenheimer noted that reversing and replacing these measures will take time. “We just lost four years,” he said. And the new rules “must be stronger than the previous ones, or else the time lost by the Trump administration will not be made up,” said Oppenheimer.
The urgency is political and existential. Numerous scientific reports have concluded that the first irreversible effects of climate change have already begun to spread across the globe, including rising sea levels, record forest fires and more devastating storms. This month, scientists announced that 2020 was tied with 2016 for the hottest year on record.
In November, representatives of the nations participating in the Paris Agreement will meet at a United Nations summit in Glasgow to announce new rigid targets to reduce their domestic emissions. The targets are intended to be more ambitious than those initially set out in the 2015 agreement in Paris.
Obama had promised that the United States would reduce global warming emissions by about 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.
The United States is now only halfway to achieving Obama’s goal, but the Biden government will be under intense and almost immediate pressure to increase the goal.
When that happens, possibly as early as June, the government is probably not leading the world, but trying to recover. Britain and the European Union have set new targets for cutting carbon, and China has announced that it will aim to achieve zero net emissions by 2060.
Climate policy experts said they were confident that Biden – through a combination of new regulations, increased spending on renewable energy and supporting state efforts to abandon coal-fired generation – could meet and exceed the country’s initial goal in Paris .
Most suggested that the Biden government could set a new target somewhere between 40% and 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.
Other major economies will keep an eye on the Biden government to see what specific policy measures the new president plans before the Glasgow meeting.
“China has set its concrete goal, but not the concrete steps to achieve it,” said Byford Tsang, an analyst who focuses on China’s climate policy at E3G, a London-based research organization. “So if Biden sets a goal and takes concrete action, he can put pressure on China.”
The Obama administration, which achieved its goal in relative secrecy, incorrectly assured foreign diplomats in 2015 that a subsequent government could not dismantle regulatory policies to reduce the climate pollution on which that goal depended.
Now, negotiators have said that they have a “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame ”about the attitude of the United States and will insist that the Biden government prove that it can do what it says.
“They say trust comes on foot and goes on horseback,” said Jules Kortenhorst, chief executive of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a research organization focused on transforming the global energy economy. “The world has missed the USA in this incredibly important scenario in recent years. The rebuilding of trust will come on foot for Biden in the same way as the trust in the USA under the command of Trump left on horseback ”.