Goodbye to the first climate president

These are the ​“carrots” of President Biden’s climate and energy legacy. But his administration has also broken new ground in imposing the ​“sticks” that climate experts say are needed to curb the unfettered extraction and consumption of planet-warming fossil fuels.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has taken the lead on this front.

The agency has finalized rules that clamp down on methane emissions from oil and gas operations, targeting a greenhouse gas with a significant impact on short-term global warming. The EPA revamped the Obama administration’s clean power plant rule, which was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, to slash emissions from power plants by the mid-2030s, laying a floor underneath the clean energy transition already underway. Biden’s EPA has also set vehicle emissions standards to further his goal that half of all light-duty vehicles sold in the U.S. be EVs or plug-in hybrids by 2030. It issued tough new standards on heavy-duty vehicle emissions shortly after.

In addition, the Biden administration has married social justice with its clean energy and infrastructure policies through its Justice40 Initiative, which requires that at least 40 percent of the benefits from these federal clean energy investments go to disadvantaged communities overburdened by pollution. Tens of billions of dollars are flowing to these communities to make solar panels more affordable, improve energy efficiency, and remediate the environmental harms of industrial and fossil fuel pollution.

As a result of Biden’s clean energy accomplishments, the U.S. is much better positioned to meet its Paris Agreement climate commitments, if still falling short. But that legacy is under threat in the coming election. 

Former President Trump, the Republican nominee, has vowed to once again pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, reverse the Biden administration’s regulations on oil and gas, vehicle, and power plant emissions standards, and promote fossil fuels as the country’s dominant source of energy. Project 2025, the policy platform featuring work from a number of former Trump administration officials, lays out a plan to repeal the IRA, reverse the EPA’s regulation of carbon emissions as a pollutant, and eliminate many of the federal agencies supporting clean energy and climate technologies, including the Department of Energy offices that have directed billions of dollars to building a cleaner and more resilient power grid.

In contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive new Democratic nominee, has a strong record on climate. She proposed a $10 trillion climate plan during her run for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and was a backer of the Green New Deal, the legislative agenda that faltered in the face of Republican opposition only to see many of its key elements added to the IRA.

Regardless of the election outcome, core parts of Biden’s climate legacy will remain vulnerable to legal challenges. The Supreme Court’s majority of conservative justices, including three appointed by Trump, has issued a host of rulings that have weakened the ability of federal agencies to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The strict rules issued by Biden’s EPA are now more susceptible to being overturned by federal judges under the court’s June decision overturning the so-called ​“Chevron doctrine.”

Still, Biden will leave the office having achieved more than many thought was possible on climate policy — and having given the country a fighting chance to transition away from fossil fuels at the urgent pace demanded by the climate crisis.

Whether the country makes good on that chance will be decided in the next election.