The good news is the president takes the climate crisis seriously. The bad news is it\u2019s worse than ever. The climate catastrophe didn\u2019t stop because Trump ignored it. Forests didn\u2019t stop burning because he said it was a raking problem. The polar ice caps didn\u2019t stop melting because the U.S. acted as if that didn\u2019t matter. All that just got worse. For four years the earth continued to do what it was on track to do for some time: it got hotter. It did so because of the millions of tons of carbon that the human race pumps into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. And it will keep getting hotter until (and even after) we stop doing that. It\u2019s that simple.<\/p>\n
Within days of taking office, the Washington Post reported, Biden stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, returned to the Paris climate agreement, closed the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling, made climate action a priority for every federal agency, imposed a moratorium on federal oil and gas leasing and more. He also \u201cinitiated a process to invest in minority and low-income communities that historically have borne the brunt of pollution.\u201d Biden overturned 10 Trump rollbacks of environmental policy \u201cand is targeting more than 60 others.\u201d He has promised to review more than 100.<\/p>\n
He did this in two executive orders, one on January 20, the other on January 27. Biden\u2019s first executive order singles out the Trump administration by directing federal agencies to address actions \u201cduring the last four years that conflict\u201d with Biden\u2019s climate agenda. It orders a review of all regulations and policies adopted by Trump on the climate and the environment.<\/p>\n
These directives, the New York Times reported Biden as saying, \u201cwould reserve 30 percent of federal land and water for conservation purposes, make climate policy central to national security decisions and build out a network of electric-car charging stations nationwide.\u201d The bad news was that Biden qualified all this green enthusiasm by repeating that he wouldn\u2019t ban fracking. And he treads very carefully around the right-wing canard that going green is a job-killer. Indeed, \u201chis order creates a task force aimed at economically reviving communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Biden has other tools at hand to tackle climate change besides his executive orders, which are just a start. There\u2019s also the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). This commission could put \u201ccarbon prices on electricity, propelling a massive build out of high voltage power lines and making it harder to build natural gas pipelines,\u201d Bloomberg reports, before arguing that Biden can\u2019t rely on congress, because it\u2019s so closely divided.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where FERC comes in, and FERC is doubtless not the only federal board or commission Biden can turn to. This is where his long years in congress and bureaucratic expertise could really have some effect. This is different, to say the least, from the wrecking ball that slammed thorough the delicate climate mitigation machinery of regulation during the Trump years.<\/p>\n
Among the splashiest headline-grabbing actions announced by Biden on the climate in the January 20 executive order is the one stopping the Keystone XL pipeline. The revocation cites a 2015 review that concluded Keystone did not serve the U.S. national interest. The order argues that we face a climate crisis which requires \u201caction on a scale and at a speed commensurate with the need to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory.\u201d<\/p>\n
The $8 billion pipeline, which would have carried 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day to the Gulf Coast from Canada was rejected by Obama in 2015. As NPR reported when Biden nixed it a second time, \u201cconstruction on Keystone XL began last year and\u2026about 300 miles of the pipeline has been built so far.\u201d Needless to say, oil and gas industry groups screamed at once about \u201ckilling 10,000 jobs.\u201d But the pipeline\u2019s owner, TC Energy Corp. told PolitiFact that that number was really 1000. And even those jobs were temporary. The difference is due to how many jobs were projected to be created by Keystone, and that number was 10,400. However, Biden can just as easily argue that more green-energy jobs will be created instead. In fact, Biden\u2019s clean energy plan aims to generate 10 million jobs. When compared thus, the numbers don\u2019t look so daunting.<\/p>\n
Bush was the first president to issue a permit for Keystone, in 2008. The Keystone pipeline system consists of four Phases. The fourth is Keystone XL. It proposes a pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta, through Montana and South Dakota to Steele City, Nebraska. Obama rejected the extension over environmental concerns. Upon inauguration, in a body-blow to those who want a livable planet, Trump promptly revived it. Now Biden has axed the pipeline again.<\/p>\n
This is a huge victory for the Native people and the environmental groups that opposed the pipeline, but plenty of work remains. Lots of other awful projects wait in the wings. As Nick Estes reported in the Guardian: \u201cIn Arizona, where Biden won the Native vote, the Forest Service could, in the coming months, hand over 2400 acres of Chi\u2019chil Bildagoteel, an Apache sacred site, to the Australian mining company Rio Tinto\u2026for a copper mine, which would create a nearly two-mile wide open-pit crater, destroying numerous Native burial sites, ceremonial areas and cultural items.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also, there\u2019s still the Dakota Access pipeline. This runs under the Missouri River and, the group Environmental Action charges, is \u201ca spill waiting to happen.\u201d Indian Country Today reports that Biden\u2019s termination of the Keystone XL pipeline has encouraged leaders of four Sioux tribes to ask that he do the same to Dakota Access. \u201cThe leaders want Biden to instruct the Army Corps of Engineers to stop the flow of oil through the pipeline,\u201d the publication reports, adding that these leaders cite the Obama administration\u2019s halt for an easement to that pipeline, a decision that Trump reversed at once upon taking office.<\/p>\n
Trump also opened the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling. To stop this, Biden\u2019s first executive order issued a moratorium, based on legal deficiencies in Trump\u2019s program, \u201cincluding the inadequacy of the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Secretary of the Interior shall\u2026place a temporary moratorium on\u2026the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program.\u201d Biden\u2019s order states that the secretary shall review the program; it cites Obama\u2019s protection of parts of the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea from oil and gas drilling and Trump\u2019s subsequent revocation of that. Biden reinstates Obama\u2019s orders \u201cin their original form.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to High North News: \u201cThe new moratorium comes only one day after the Trump administration announced that it had finalized their 10-year leases for oil drilling in the northern part of the refuge, the coastal plain.\u201d Trump did this in the teeth of lawsuits against it from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and the Gwich\u2019in Steering Committee. Major U.S., Canadian and European banks \u201cpledged not to finance projects in the Arctic,\u201d according to the Sierra Club\u2019s magazine.<\/p>\n
Apparently, the spectacle of fossil fuel corporations\u2019 depraved assault on one of the worlds\u2019 most pristine wildernesses and the horrendous publicity that would create was too much for some banks. After all, the Arctic Refuge\u2019s species include polar bears, waterbirds, arctic foxes, caribou, moose, Dall sheep, muskoxen and brown and black bears. It is also a wildlife nursery. According to the Alaska Wilderness Society, the Refuge\u2019s \u201ccoastal plain serves as birthing grounds for the Porcupine caribou in summer and the most important land denning area for America\u2019s threatened polar bears in winter.\u201d It\u2019s also an avian migration destination: \u201cApproximately 200 species of birds call the Arctic Refuge home at least part of the year, including snowy owls, Arctic terns and golden eagles.\u201d The Society explains that these 19.6 million acres of public land in northeast Alaska include the Mollie Beattie Wilderness, which at eight million acres is \u201cthe second largest wilderness area in the U.S.\u201d Indigenous people also live there and don\u2019t appreciate the prospect of their villages polluted by oil drilling and their sacred sites desecrated. There is an Inupiaq village on the Arctic Ocean coast. The Gwich\u2019in people also live in the Refuge.<\/p>\n
So saving this primeval wild is a big deal. Just as despoiling it, which Trump did possibly maliciously, also would have been. Trump\u2019s policy offered drilling rights on about one million acres of coastal plain. That included 22 tracts of federal land, about five percent of the Arctic Refuge. But back on January 6, the lease sale only attracted three bidders, one of which was the state of Alaska. Why? Because major oil companies stayed away. But that didn\u2019t stop Trump, determined to desecrate this wilderness. He auctioned off a half a million acres. If not for the pandemic and sagging oil demand, he might have leased much more. The purpose of his unseemly haste with this auction was to lock in as many leases as possible before Biden took office.<\/p>\n
This was a very close call. And it may not be the end of the Refuge\u2019s problems. The Republican-led congress approved drilling in the 2017 tax cut act, \u201crequiring lease sales by the end of 2021 and 2024,\u201d reported the Anchorage Daily News. After the auction flopped, \u201coil production in the refuge, if it ever occurs, is not expected to happen for at least a decade.\u201d Remember, Biden\u2019s moratorium is perforce temporary; he needs congressional action to make it permanent. Those 10-year leases that were issued \u201ccreate extra legal hurdles for Biden to overcome, but experts have said Biden\u2019s administration has avenues to delay or stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unluckily, the coastal plain may contain billions of barrels of oil. That is something senators and other Alaskan leaders find very alluring. They are not concerned with the Gwich\u2019in, who depend on the Porcupine caribou herd for food. Nor are they concerned that burning those barrels of oil would release millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. And now they have a weapon \u2013 the leases \u2013 and the headaches they create for the Biden administration \u201cif it plans to revoke them\u201d according to the Anchorage Daily News. However, \u201cthe federal government has suspended leases before. Former President Barack Obama\u2019s administration suspended oil and gas leases in Montana in an area sacred to the Blackfeet Nation. Federal courts have upheld the decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
Biden\u2019s executive order also restores national monuments, specifically Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah and one undersea monument the size of Connecticut, Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Rhode Island. The order\u2019s language focuses on restoring these monuments\u2019 boundaries, which Trump shrank. The review will take 60 days, conducted by the secretary of the interior and also the attorney general, who is involved due to pending litigation. The AG may \u201cprovide notice of this order to any court with jurisdiction\u201d over litigation over these monuments and he may \u201crequest the court stay the litigation\u2026or seek other appropriate relief.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump constricted the boundaries to open more land for mining. He thus reduced the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears monument by 85 percent, and cut Grand Staircase-Escalante in half. It was a move in keeping with Trump\u2019s aim to promote oil and gas leasing on protected lands, to gut habitat protections for endangered species and to limit drilling regulations.<\/p>\n
But then the lawsuits started coming \u2013 from Native nations and tourism and environmental groups. According to National Geographic, while the 1906 Antiquities Act gave Obama the power to protect these monuments, \u201cthere is no language in the law, however, granting presidents the right to rescind or cut them.\u201d With oil and gas fields on Bears Ears\u2019 boundaries, there loomed the danger of serious pollution. But for both monuments, Trump touted his reduced boundaries as job creators. The coal at Escalante, however, is deeply buried, and the coal market has collapsed, making that extraction less likely.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one values the splendor of Utah more than you do,\u201d Trump told a crowd, when he visited the state to announce his monument edicts, \u201cand no one knows better how to use it.\u201d He also criticized Obama\u2019s creation of such large monuments in the first place: \u201cThese abuses of the Antiquities Act give enormous power to faraway bureaucrats at the expense of the people who actually live here, work here and make this place their home.\u201d He showed no such concern for the Indigenous people who have made this place their home since long before Utah was even a state.<\/p>\n
According to Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye\u2019s written statement: \u201cThe decision to reduce the size of the Monument is being made with no tribal consultation. The Navajo nation will defend Bears Ears.\u201d Begaye affirmed that the Navajos would litigate. The statement announced that the Navajo Nation, four other tribes and a coalition of nonprofits and citizens\u2019 groups had rallied to defend the monument. No wonder Biden\u2019s executive order involves his attorney general. Lots of people sued over Trump\u2019s attempt to trash these monuments. And then there could also be lawsuits from the other side, from those who wanted to mine there.<\/p>\n
Biden\u2019s executive order also revokes many of Trump\u2019s orders, memoranda and agency rules and actions. Indeed, section two of Biden\u2019s executive order is titled \u201cImmediate Review of Agency Actions Taken Between January 20, 2017 and January 20, 2021.\u201d Clearly Biden tried to undo as much of Trump\u2019s environmental damage as he could in one fell swoop.<\/p>\n
Noteworthy in this connection is the preamble to the January 20 executive order. In it, Biden invokes listening to science, protecting the environment, limiting exposure to dangerous chemicals and pesticides, holding polluters accountable and prioritizing environmental justice, among other things. These are the sorts of big claims one associates with campaign promises made to be broken. If Biden does more than a small portion of them, it will be astonishing.<\/p>\n
Just take clean water \u2013 also mentioned in this introduction. The Flint water crisis began in April 2014, in the Obama years. Obama did not address it in any substantive way, aside from sending in FEMA. Trump certainly didn\u2019t either. So now, in 2021, when Flint finally, allegedly has clean water \u2013 guess what? The locals won\u2019t drink it. Would you? If you had brown, lead-polluted water flowing out of your tap for years, courtesy of the state government and they finally claimed they fixed it \u2013 would you drink it? Can you blame anyone who wouldn\u2019t?<\/p>\n
Flint may now have lead-free water, but plenty of other American cities don\u2019t: Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Newark and Washington, D. C., to name a few. According to Business Insider, Brady, Texas has radium in its water; Baltimore\u2019s cloudy water contains potentially toxic particles; toxic chemicals pollute water in Dos Palos, California; Newburgh, New York had contaminated water last year and Miami tap water contains forever chemicals, PFAS. Trump invoked clean air and clean water, but that was a joke. Now Biden invokes them in his first executive order. If he\u2019s serious, what about all these American cities with dirty tap water? Will he make fixing that a priority? Because he should.<\/p>\n
The second executive order, the one from January 27 presents much more of your standard impenetrable government prose, as it places \u201cthe climate crisis at the forefront of the Nation\u2019s foreign policy and national security planning,\u201d including rejoining the Paris agreement. In this regard, the order says Biden will host a Leaders Climate Summit, and that the U.S. will reconvene the major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, to pursue \u201cinitiatives to advance the clean energy transition, sectoral decarbonization\u201d and more.<\/p>\n
The order also calls for integrating climate concerns \u201cacross a wide range of international fora,\u201d including the G7 and G10; it announces the U.S. will develop a climate financial plan to help developing countries reduce emissions, protect critical ecosystems, and promote \u201cthe flow of capital toward climate-aligned investments and away from high-carbon investments.\u201d The order directs the secretaries of state, treasury and energy to cooperate with the Export-Import Bank and others to help the U.S. \u201cpromote ending international financing of carbon-intensive fossil fuel-based energy.\u201d<\/p>\n
A major concern is how the climate catastrophe affects foreign policy and national security. Since the U.S. military is one of the world\u2019s biggest polluters, one would expect that to be addressed. Biden does so \u2013 but only to a certain extent and in dense bureaucratese. He calls for assessing \u201cclimate impacts of their agency-managed infrastructure abroad (e.g. embassies, military installations).\u201d Biden also orders the director of national intelligence to prepare a \u201cNational Intelligence Estimate on the national and economic security impacts of climate change.\u201d He directs numerous bureaucratic bigwigs to work together to produce \u201can analysis of the security implications of climate change (Climate Risk Analysis) that can be incorporated into modeling, simulation, war-gaming\u2026\u201d Just what we need: green war-games. Or maybe Biden is concerned about climate-caused freak typhoons interfering with the U.S. navy war games in the South China Sea. Either way, it\u2019s not hard to brainstorm better ways to focus on the U.S. military\u2019s humongous pollution problem.<\/p>\n
In the section on taking a government-wide approach to the climate crisis, Biden cooks up an alphabet soup of departments and advisors, who are to support the Climate Policy Office. Then he creates a National Climate Task Force. Everybody\u2019s on it. As far as I can tell, every secretary, director, chair, administrator in this administration participates in this task force.<\/p>\n
Buried in this section is the startling, eye-popping goal of achieving \u201ca carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035.\u201d This phrase makes struggling through the jungle of bureaucratic terminology worth it. 2035 might not be too late. The climate catastrophe is dire, but if we stop making it worse by 2035, there\u2019s hope for our species \u2013 assuming other countries decide to emulate this goal. And then, equally exciting and hopeful, Biden directs various mucky mucks to make sure to end what has long seemed a permanent feature of our government, namely, fossil fuel subsidies \u2013 starting with the budget request for fiscal 2022. Reading these executive orders, one could be forgiven for concluding that maybe 2035 for drastically reduced carbon emissions is doable.<\/p>\n
Separately from his executive orders, in other environmentally sensitive actions, Biden asked the senate to approve the amendment to the Montreal Protocol of 1987, already ratified by 113 nations. Trump was letting this die on the vine. This amendment phases out heat-trapping hydroflourocarbons (HFCs). These greenhouse gasses are 1000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, regarding global warming. HFCs are used in air-conditioners and refrigerators, but have other uses too.<\/p>\n
Originally promoted as substitutes to ozone layer-depleting chlorofluorocarbons 30 years ago, HFCs clearly have their own problems. According to the New York Times, \u201cthanks to well over $1 billion invested in innovation by American companies, alternatives exist.\u201d The Times estimates that U.S. ratification of this treaty would add 33,000 new manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and have other economic benefits. Overall for the environment, this is a huge deal.<\/p>\n
As Biden unravels Trump\u2019s skein of environmental abuse, it\u2019s wise not to lose sight of the tremendous tasks that remain: the climate catastrophe itself, the sixth mass extinction and ubiquitous plastic pollution, for starters. Trump did not cause these. Our economic system, also known as capitalism, did that. Massive, even revolutionary, changes in how the supposedly sacred and very unfree free market works will be required to alter the deadly course we are on. It will take a lot more than two executive orders to cure these ills \u2013 or even just to tame the illness, currently raging toward a deadly planetary fever.<\/p>\n
One small but noteworthy example: Under Trump, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing endangered species act protections from gray wolves in most of the U.S. This is a lousy idea. It has taken years to get a healthy wolf population back in the wild, and now hunters and ranchers will have a free hand to decimate these animals again. This is not how you rescue an endangered species \u2013 and globally there are thousands of endangered species. Biden hasn\u2019t waded into the wolf debate, but what more eloquent if understated way to show that the U.S. government takes its own laws seriously? For if the endangered species act means anything, it means that once we\u2019ve rescued a species, we don\u2019t turn around and endanger it again.<\/p>\n
Biden has taken some necessary first steps on the environment, but that\u2019s what they are \u2013 first steps. He may not be able to get a fully stocked Green New Deal through a closely divided congress, but he should certainly try to do as much as he can to reverse the planetary poisoning caused by the capitalism this country so stubbornly and dogmatically champions. FDR is his role model. FDR said he created his stupendous New Deal social programs to save capitalism (from itself). So, following in FDR\u2019s gigantic footsteps, Biden will doubtless try to save capitalism for a second time. Whether it is possible to do so this time around, and maintain a livable planet, remains to be seen.<\/p>\n
The post Better News on the Climate<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The good news is the president takes the climate crisis seriously. The bad news is it\u2019s worse than ever. The climate catastrophe didn\u2019t stop because Trump ignored it. Forests didn\u2019t stop burning because he said it was a raking problem. The polar ice caps didn\u2019t stop melting because the U.S. acted as if that didn\u2019t More<\/a><\/p>\n The post Better News on the Climate<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":380,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228,230],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47693"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/380"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47693"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48035,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47693\/revisions\/48035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}