Climate Change and the Biden Administration

In conversation with Joshua Busby, Associate Professor of Public Affairs and Distinguished Scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at UT Austin.

A majority of Americans today believe that climate change is the most pressing issue. That being said, what should President Biden do to achieve substantive progress in the fight against climate change?

The Biden Administration will have to simultaneously get its own house in order and appeal to others to get global climate momentum moving in the right direction (or moving further in the right direction). Internationally, China, perhaps anticipating a Biden victory, announced a pledge to reduce its emissions to net-zero by 2060, which was a huge advance if complemented by domestic action to make it a reality. This was followed by similar announcements by South Korea and Japan. The Biden administration will likely make a similar kind of commitment, but the true test will be whether it can implement such policies domestically, where Congressional support for climate action has been blocked in the Senate for years. 

The United States has much work to do domestically to finish fully decarbonize the electricity sector, electrify the transport sector, and reduce emissions from buildings. There are a host of investments and regulations that the Biden administration can pursue, some of which may find support in the U.S. Senate where the Democrats now have a narrow majority. 

What stands in the way of Biden achieving these goals?

Well, U.S. Senate rules still require a 60 vote majority to avoid a filibuster, and that narrows the realm of feasible policies that can conceivably be passed through that chamber. There are some executive actions that Biden can take and has already taken in his first days in office, such as re-joining the Paris Agreement, but it is not yet clear how far he can go to address domestic emissions. Biden is already pursuing restoration/revival/updating of Obama-era rules on methane and vehicle efficiency that were gutted by executive order by the Trump administration. Other steps such as requiring that all electricity come from clean sources by 2035 might be harder to implement through executive action. 

As you know, President Joe Biden has selected John Kerry as the new special envoy for the climate. In late November of last year, Kerry stated that Biden is right to recognize that “Paris alone is not enough.” What does this mean?

The Paris Agreement was a down payment on what was needed to address global climate change, but the commitments to reduce emissions are not enough to avoid dangerous climate change even if fully implemented. This was known at the time. The hope was that countries would gain some positive experience reducing emissions and ratchet up their ambition over time. Indeed, the mechanism of the Paris Agreement has countries revisit their earlier targets (so-called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs) and increase them every five years. 

The first such occasion to increase them was this year, but the negotiations were delayed because of the coronavirus outbreak. So, the 26th UN Climate Change Conference at the end of this year will really be the time when we expect to see enhanced ambitions from states to reduce their emissions and align with the Paris Agreement’s goals of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels. Given that global temperatures are already more than 1C above pre-industrial levels, it may be difficult to meet that the 2-degree target, especially since countries have largely not been on track even to meet the modest goals of the Paris Agreement. The coronavirus has temporarily contributed to a large decrease in emissions, perhaps as much as 7.5% in 2020, but at great cost to human welfare. The world will need to see such large decreases in emissions every year for a number of years but without the dislocation and suffering engendered by the COVID outbreak.

On a different note, the past few years saw the rise of mass movements fighting for climate action. What do the horizons of climate activism look like under the new Biden administration? 

Climate activism movements, like Fridays for the Future, created pressure for action and demonstrated, for the first time in countries like the United States, that there might actually be a voting constituency that would support climate action. Activism can be successful when there are political actors in power that support those goals. These groups were not effective in changing the Trump administration because it was impervious to their influence, but these groups are key constituencies for the new Biden administration.