President Biden will travel Wednesday to a closed-end coal-fired power plant that is now part of a offshore wind project in Massachusetts, where he is expected to comment on clean energy as his administration struggles to save its climate agenda.
Mr Biden and his advisers have been debating whether to declare a national climate emergency, an extraordinary step that would give it a chance to stop new oil drilling on federal land and water and spend federal funds on wind, solar and other energy. clean services. energy projects. He is not expected to take that step on Wednesday, but he will at another time, two administration officials familiar with his plans said.
The president is under great pressure from other Democrats and climate activists to take decisive action. His administration has spent the last year and a half trying to pass solid legislation on climate change, only to see it collapsed last week because it failed to gain the support of Senator Joe Manchin III, the Democratic vote in the Senate.
This setback came after a Supreme Court decision in June that drastically limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
On Wednesday, it will tour the former Brayton Point power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, which, when it closed in 2017, was the last coal plant in the state, administration officials said. The plant is being transformed into an offshore wind facility that will manufacture submarine transmission cables. These lines will carry the energy generated by wind turbines, now under construction in the Atlantic, to the New England power grid.
Mr. Biden’s move comes when more than 100 million Americans, from Texas to most of Kentucky, were under heat warnings or warnings on Tuesday. Temperatures were expected to reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit, about 43 degrees Celsius, in some states and cities. Heat warnings and emergencies were also in place or planned for some areas of the East Coast, including Boston.
In Europe, the heat was breaking temperature records across the continent, prompting British officials to declare the first “red” warning of extreme heat in England. The heat caused forest fires in Spain, France, Portugal and Greece. UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday called on nations to act in the face of what he called a global “climate emergency.”
Democratic lawmakers have urged Mr. Biden to act quickly to try to reduce U.S.-generated pollution, which has historically added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than any other country.
Environmental agenda of the Biden administration
President Biden is pushing for tougher regulations, but he faces a narrow path to achieving his goals in the fight against global warming.
“In many ways, the president put all his tabs on this action in Congress, and we failed,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat. But, he said, “This triggers the president from waiting for Congress to act.”
Mr Biden has been hurt by accusations from some Democrats that his response to the recent Supreme Court abortion ruling was slow and lukewarm, and he has been anxious to make an aggressive announcement, the two officials said. , who asked to remain anonymous because they were not. authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
At the same time, some advisers to the president have called for caution not to antagonize Mr Manchin in the hope that he can still accept tax credits for wind or solar suppliers or other measures, they said.
Mr Merkley accused the Biden administration of “walking on eggshells” around Mr Manchin over the past year.
He and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said Mr. Biden should call for a national climate emergency, as well as a number of other measures such as regulating power plant greenhouse gas emissions. electrically, formally establishing a dollar estimate of the climatic damage caused by fossils. fuel projects and impose a tax on imports from nations that do not have aggressive climate policies.
“There are a whole host of other regulations that they could proceed with,” Mr. Whitehouse.
Climate advocates said Biden had to show he could take aggressive action to curb rising emissions.
“There has really been a total lack of leadership in this country on climate,” said Jean Su, senior lawyer and director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Energy Justice Program. “It’s time to get serious. That is the call we need from this country’s leadership. “
Even before Manchin disconnected climate legislation, the White House had been working on executive action to combat global warming, which experts say could still remove some of the country’s carbon footprint, though not enough to achieve the goals of Mr. Biden is committed to the rest of the world.
In the coming months, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to issue tougher regulations to control methane, a potent greenhouse gas that seeps from oil and gas wells.
Next year, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation plan to introduce a new rule designed to force car companies to quickly increase sales of electric vehicles.
The EPA is also planning new regulation to force power companies to slightly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and possibly install technology to capture and sequester carbon dioxide pollution, although this nascent technology is not yet in place. it is commercially viable.
The agency is also planning stricter limits on other pollution generated by power plants, such as mercury, smog and soot, which do not add to global warming. The idea is that the repression of these pollutants could have a secondary advantage in forcing power companies to clean or close the dirtiest facilities, such as coal-fired power plants, which produce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. greenhouse.
“They used to have direct tools to fight climate change, and now they have smaller indirect options left,” said Michael Wara, a climate policy expert at Stanford University.
At the same time, Democrats have not given up all hope of enacting some sort of climate change or clean energy policy in Congress this year, which may be their last chance if Republicans gain control of one or both houses. of Congress in the November midterm elections.
While Mr. Manchin said last week that he could not support climate legislation, which would have provided $ 300 billion in tax credits for wind and solar power and electric vehicles, he later suggested in a radio interview that he could reconsider in the fall. These statements came after a year in which Mr. Manchin repeatedly suggested to Democrats that he would support their policies, only to withdraw. But some Democrats think they could include some modest extensions of existing clean energy tax incentives in a fiscal package that is expected to be approved with bipartisan support by the end of the year.
Invoking a national emergency would unlock a number of tools: Mr Biden could reinstate the crude export ban lifted in 2015, stop offshore oil and gas drilling and restrict both US fossil fuel exports like the billion-dollar U.S. investment in fossils. overseas fuel projects. It could also lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fund the construction of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, and organize private domestic industries to manufacture more renewable energy and transportation technologies.
The president and executive branch already have the authority to take most of these actions, but experts said declaring a climate emergency would streamline Mr Biden’s ability to quickly enact all of these policies at once.
In a survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication this year, 58 percent of Americans surveyed said they support a U.S. president declaring global warming a national emergency if Congress it does not act.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic majority, urged Mr. Biden to declare a national climate emergency just a week after the president’s term. Last year, Senator Bernie Sanders and Reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Earl Blumenauer introduced a bill ordering the president to declare a national climate emergency.
The National Emergencies Act, enacted nearly 50 years ago, requires presidents to formally declare a national emergency in order to activate special emergency powers, and imposed certain procedural formalities on invoking those powers. The idea was to enable the president to respond quickly to urgent, often unpredictable crises.
Each president has since declared at least one national emergency during his tenure and 41 are still in place today, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. President Biden invoked the law when he extended a national emergency regarding the Covid-19 in February and when he banned Russian oil imports in March.
Some scholars warn that a declaration of a national emergency would be counterproductive and would constitute a harmful excess of the executive branch.
The emergency powers “were never intended to address long-term problems, however serious, and are certainly not intended to provide long-term solutions,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the National Freedom and Security Program at the Center. Brennan.
Oil industry leaders are already rejecting the possibility of Mr Biden invoking new powers.
“The unilateral declaration of a climate emergency will not reduce emissions in a molecule,” Anne Bradbury, president of the American Exploration and Production Council, which represents independent oil and gas producers, said in a statement. “The only way to significantly reduce emissions is to work on a lasting climate policy with all stakeholders, including the U.S. oil and gas industry,” he said.
Emily Cochrane contributed to the report.