President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s victory marks a new day in the fight for bold, just and equitable climate policy in the United States. It means that the US will now have a leadership that believes in science, knows that climate change is real, and is committed to supporting united and multilateral action.
Biden has assembled a climate team with stunning speed, creating new positions of power within the White House to focus on climate (John Kerry with an eye on the international impacts and Gina McCarthy on domestic goals). He moved instantly on executive orders to both create new regulations and rollback the rollbacks of the previous administration. He moved on day one to reinstate America’s role in the Paris Climate Agreement, which was accomplished on February 19, 2021. He has asked his cabinet to look upon every action through the lens of climate. You might be interesting in following some of his executive actions at The Washington Post’s page tracking his environmental progress.
The democrats now control the White House and Congress, although in the Senate it will take Vice President Kamala Harris to break a tie vote, complicating Biden’s legislative agenda. The president will, nonetheless, will have a wide array of tools — from expanding renewables on federal lands to pushing the financial industry on climate change — that could put the U.S. on a trajectory to decarbonizing its electricity sector by 2035. His goal to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles was given a huge boost in early February by GM’s announcement that it would shift to 100% electric vehicles by 2035.
For more on what he has already accomplished and what he plans to accomplish, go to Biden’s Climate Plan and to the LAWS AND LITIGATION section where you will find extensive information on what is happening within the federal government, from the Executive branch to the Legislative and Judicial branches.