Where is US Government Leadership on the "Existential" Climate Threat?
While President Biden recognizes climate change as an “existential threat”, the US government response is not commensurate with the scale of the crisis.
As the United States celebrates its national Independence Day holiday this week, the nation finds itself grappling with several profound and arguably existential crises. The upcoming 2024 presidential election, now only four months away, is immensely consequential in terms of the threat of authoritarianism and whether the US will preserve its foundational identity as a constitutional democracy, and in terms of the climate crisis threatening the entire planet.
During the primetime presidential debate last Thursday between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, Biden managed to speak to the gravity of the climate crisis and drew a stark contrast between himself and his opponent on the matter. “If we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius at any one point there’s no way back,” Biden said. “The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and he didn’t do a damn thing about it. He wants to undo all that I’ve done.” It wasn’t the most eloquent exchange and Biden’s overall debate delivery is widely recognized as a dismal disappointment or even failure, prompting calls for him to withdraw from the race. There are real questions about whether he can defeat Trump this time around.
Should Trump retake the White House, many Americans fear, based on remarks and indications from the former president himself, that he may ultimately end American democracy, seek revenge and retribution against his perceived political enemies, and unleash more climate destruction while squandering any chance that the federal government will advance climate action during this critical decade. Trump failed to answer the simple question asked of him during the debate of will he take any action to slow the climate crisis. And he infamously told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would not be a dictator “other than day one” when he plans to use his executive authority to expand oil and gas drilling.
“The future of our planet is literally at stake in this next election,” Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. The impacts of a potential Trump 2.0 scenario, he said, even extend “beyond the nominal impacts on climate policy,” arguing it “would threaten the end of democratic governance in the US, and there is no path to climate progress in the US that doesn’t go through a functioning democracy.”
As I reported for Sierra, over a hundred right-wing organizations are already coalescing around a proposed policy agenda for the next Republican president called Project 2025, which aims for nothing less than a dismantling of the administrative state. This agenda would essentially eviscerate existing climate and environmental protections. If implemented, Mann told me, it would be “game over for climate progress in the US.”
This deeply deregulatory project got a head start through recent rulings from the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court. The decision issued on Friday in the case Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, legal experts say, upended 40 years of precedent by doing away with an administrative law norm known as the Chevron doctrine, which basically said that courts would allow deference to the expertise of federal agencies when statutory interpretations were ambiguous. In reversing this doctrine, the majority’s decision means that unelected judges will substitute their own judgment in matters of policymaking and regulations, as Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent notes. Legal experts say this will likely undermine agencies’ ability to defend existing rules or issue new ones on everything from workplace safety to curbing climate pollution. Sam Sankar, senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice, called it a “full-on assault against the power of the federal government to regulate in the public interest.”
The Chevron doctrine decision follows other rulings from the Court’s conservative majority that chip away at the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority, including the 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA that limited EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. As Pat Parenteau, a climate law expert and professor emeritus at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told the New York Times: “These decisions mean that Biden, if he gets a second term, is not going to be able to do much else on the environment, particularly on climate.”
While there has been some progress made on addressing the climate crisis under President Biden, notably the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act that provides hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and incentives for clean energy, the reality is that the US is way off track when it comes to reining in dangerous warming and fossil-fueled climate pollution.
Historically the United States is the largest contributor to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for more than 20% of the global total. The US is now the top oil and gas producer on the planet, and this extraction actually reached record levels under Biden’s administration. According to a September 2023 report from Oil Change International, the US is on track to be “the world’s largest expander of oil and gas extraction from 2023 to 2050, singlehandedly representing more than one third of planned global expansion.” The report therefore labels the US as “planet wrecker-in-chief.”
Climate Action Tracker, a project that tracks and evaluates countries’ progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, rates the progress of the US as “insufficient.” CAT notes that the US “is moving in the wrong direction regarding its domestic and international support for fossil fuels, compromising the achievement of its [Nationally Determined Contribution] and the global goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C.”
Just last week, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued its approval for a massive new liquified ‘natural’ gas (LNG) export terminal in Louisiana called CP2. The project’s expected greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent to that of 46 coal-fired power plants; author and environmental activist Bill McKibben calls CP2 “the biggest single climate bomb proposed for the planet right now.” The project still needs approval from the US Department of Energy, which has temporarily paused new LNG export authorizations. In announcing that pause in late January, President Biden once again referred to the climate crisis as an “existential threat.” He also promised his administration “will heed the calls of young people.”
But his administration has arguably failed on that promise when it comes to its treatment of the landmark youth constitutional climate lawsuit Juliana v. US, which was recently dismissed upon an emergency request from the Department of Justice to a federal appeals court panel. While the previous Obama and Trump administrations also tried to obstruct the 21 youth plaintiffs from putting the US government on trial over its pro-fossil fuel policies, ultimately it was the Biden administration that got the case quashed, potentially for good this time. Lawyers for the youth plaintiffs submitted a request in June for the full appeals court to reconsider, backed by supporting briefs filed just last week from groups such as Democratic members of Congress, law professors, and international experts on climate rights. “When you have the Department of Justice against you and judges who have not yet opened the courthouse doors to us, you wonder who’s going to stand up for you,” Juliana plaintiff Isaac Vergun said in a statement.
In other related news, two separate reports from expert energy analysts came out in June that are worth highlighting:
A new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis helps counter the gas industry narrative that new LNG exports are needed to help gas displace dirtier coal in emerging economies, especially in Asia. The report finds that by and large, imported gas is not displacing coal in China. The share of gas in China’s power sector has remained at just 3% since 2015, while the share of wind and solar has quadrupled over that time to 16%. China is prioritizing domestic energy resources, including coal and renewables, over LNG imports that also tend to more expensive. “Policymakers in both LNG exporting and importing countries should approach claims about the necessity of LNG as a ‘bridge fuel’ with a high degree of skepticism,” says IEEFA’s Sam Reynolds. “The case of China clearly shows that LNG has played a minimal role in displacing coal in the country’s largest coal-consuming sectors.”
The Rocky Mountain Institute’s report on The Cleantech Revolution, meanwhile, finds there has been exponential growth in three pillars of the energy transition – renewables, electrification, and energy efficiency. Cleantech costs have declined 80%, and much of this growth has been in China, which is “poised to be the first major electrostate.” The report finds the fossil fuel system faces “inexorable decline” and 75% of fossil fuel demand is threatened by rapidly growing cleantech alternatives, making stranded assets inevitable. According to the report: “Cleantech provides energy security: 86% of people live in fossil-importing countries today; renewable resources are 100 times larger than fossil fuels, and available everywhere…There is a race to the top as others try to catch up. Cleantech is now 10% of global GDP growth, and there is a race to lead the cleantech industries of the future. Meanwhile, as the world burns, so policy pressure will rise.”