Washington — President Biden is caused by climate change on Wednesday, despite strong pressure to take positive action to reduce fossil fuel emissions that endanger the planet He said he would extend the existing federal program to help deal with the extreme heat.
West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin’s decision last week has led to an increase in the number of Democrats calling on Biden to break out of the clean energy law. Senate. That decision effectively destined Biden’s climate change agenda, forcing Democrats and Biden to look for other ways to reach their goals.
Manchin’s move is another tool that Biden wanted to use, following the Supreme Court’s June decision to limit the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate climate warming pollution from power plants. I gave a blow.
At a closed coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, which has been converted into a facility for manufacturing wind components, Mr. Byden has executive authority even after the two foundations of the climate agenda have collapsed and burned. Use to control fossil fuels that trap heat.
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our country and the world,” Biden said. His comment came as the heat wave disrupted Britain’s transportation network, melted the roofs of factories in China, and burned the south and west of the United States. “This is an emergency, it’s an emergency, and I see it that way,” Biden said, noting the lack of Republican support for his climate proposal.
Still, Biden’s actions announced Wednesday do little to help the United States significantly reduce its emissions. Instead, the president’s move is primarily to acknowledge that the country is already aware of the dire consequences of climate change and to mitigate its impact on homes and communities.
He has created an existing Federal Emergency Management Agency program to help communities, especially those in disadvantaged areas, build structures and programs that can withstand the intense heat, storms, fires and floods that climate change is already beginning to bring. Announced to allocate $ 2.3 billion from.
Apart from this, he announced the expansion of the Federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has been historically used to help people pay to warm their homes in the winter. The program is also used to pay for cooling homes in the summer and to build community cooling centers.
Mr. Byden also instructed the Ministry of Interior to open the door to build an offshore wind farm in the Gulf of Mexico after showing a move to expand wind power development on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts over the past year.
Whitehouse National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy told reporters, “It was important for the president to lay his arms in threads of the various tasks we could put together and lay them out in a comfortable way. “. For an event.
A modest development comes when Mr Biden faces an increasing call from members of his own party to declare a national climate emergency. Before Mr Biden spoke on Wednesday, a group standing outside the Somerset facility greeted the president with a banner “declaring a national climate emergency.”
In an interview, Mr. Biden’s International Climate Envoy, John F. Kerry, said Mr. Biden was “very close” to taking that step, when the declaration should be announced and how it should be. He said the debate within the administration was over as to whether it should be rolled out. , Not whether it should be done.
Understand what happened to Biden’s national agenda
“Better buildback.” Before being elected president in 2020, Joseph R. Byden Jr. clarified his ambitious vision for the administration under the slogan “Build Back Better,” invested in clean energy, and raised spending made in the United States. I promised to be directed at the product.
“The president has to decide when to do that,” Kelly said. “It’s a matter of timing.” After the Massachusetts incident, Biden told reporters that he hadn’t declared an emergency yet because he “trapped my authority.” It will be decided soon. “
Biden stopped short of the move on Wednesday, but the White House appeared to be testing the body of water by repeatedly referring to climate change as an “emergency” in fact sheets and presidential remarks.
However, White House officials remain wary of how powerful a formal climate state of emergency will be. The actions it can unleash could almost certainly cause Republican state proceedings and eventually derail them.
However, Mr. Biden’s slow development of new climate regulations on power plants and automobiles has also fueled frustration among many of the democratic foundations that the country’s turbulent conditions are in urgent need. However, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Law vs. Wade case, the surge in inflation, and now the failure of climate law have led Mr Biden to act primarily on Congress and Americans to detain his administration in court. He urged him to vote while avoiding drastic administrative actions that feared him.
The combination of parliamentary inaction and increasing crisis put Mr Biden in political detention just months before the midterm elections. With the possibility of the Democratic Party transferring power to the Republican Party, there is an urgent need to pass the bill quickly.
“There are very high expectations for quite a few issues from climate to democracy, and the hope of having an FDR-type climate heritage has been replaced by a reversal of the country’s 50-year-old rights. Young women have “There should be,” said Sean McElwee, founding executive director of Data for Progress, a liberal policy and polling organization. “It was depressing and I think it was probably too high.”
Over the past year, Biden has instructed the EPA to create new regulations to reduce emissions from the three largest sources of global warming in the United States: automobiles, power plants, oil and gas wells. The combination of these rules could significantly reduce the country’s carbon pollution, given the confrontation of inevitable proceedings from Republican states, experts said. However, the rule is not expected to be completed until 2023 or 2024, and its ambitions can still be weakened in response to political opposition from automakers, trade union workers and Swingstate voters.
Jody Freeman, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University who advised the Obama White House on climate policy, said: “But making some progress is better than not making progress, and over time, these rules can unleash unpredictable new technologies and benefits in the future. . “
Some Democrats see the slow and unobtrusive rule-making as a concession to Mr. Manchin, a coal senator who opposes many EPA rules. The White House hopes Manchin will return to the table in the fall to negotiate part of the climate change bill.
“I don’t know what Congress is expecting right now, or who the senator is,” McCarthy said. “But the idea that the president is starting here is to acknowledge the challenge.”
Without Congressional action to reduce greenhouse gases, it would be mathematically possible for Biden to meet the goal the United States promised to cut global warming emissions in half by the end of the decade. It’s almost impossible. Scientists say the United States must reduce its much pollution to share its share in order to prevent the Earth from warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the pre-industrial era. This means scientists cannot avoid the most devastating effects of global warming: deadly heat waves, widespread wildfires, catastrophic storms, floods and droughts, scientists say. It is a key value. By that time, the planet has already warmed up to 1.1 degrees Celsius.
“We only saw a few enforcement actions in parliament and the slow death of climate law,” Varshini Prakash, managing director of the Environmental Group’s Sunrise Movement, said in a statement. Stated. “Young people are tired of receiving scrap from our government.”
Kelly also emphasized the disastrous global consequences of not being able to pass US climate law.
“In Europe, we see the effects of rail trains that can’t move at high speeds due to fires, burning houses, melting runways, and warming metals,” Kelly said. Greenhouse gas emissions do not stop erupting into the atmosphere “just because people cannot act together and accomplish something.”
Kelly said the struggle to enact Biden’s former ambitious proposal has already raised concerns on the international stage.
Kelly said he had been contacted by a Chinese negotiator who asked him about the impact of the recent Supreme Court EPA case for a climate conference in Berlin earlier this week. Others asked if Mr Biden could fulfill his promise to cut US emissions by about half, he said.
“It’s very interesting to hear people from other countries ask if they can reach your goals,” Kelly said, saying that Congress’s negligence could be used as an excuse for other countries not to reduce emissions. He added that he was worried about it.
Kelly also said resistance to climate change efforts “emphasizes the story” among critics that the United States is a declining country.
“It’s a difficult argument to counter if you don’t pass the law,” he said.