President Biden seized on climate change as a core priority when he took office, saying days after his inauguration, “We’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis, and we can’t wait any longer.”
The new president spent his first full year in office trying to match his policies with his words. His administration has worked aggressively to make that ambitious agenda a reality — even as success has come in fits and starts.
Much of Biden’s work involved restoring dozens of environmental protections unraveled by Donald Trump’s deregulatory frenzy, but it also includes dozens of new climate policies.
The Washington Post Each policy shift has been logged The Biden era, across industries and agencies. If you’ve been following our Award-winning tracker This quiz was a breeze in the past year.
Permit Keystone XL pipeline
Shrinking Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument
To help developing countries, the U.S. will pay its share of the Green Climate Fund
Gascoyne, N.D., has miles of unutilized pipe for the Keystone XL pipeline (Andrew Burton/Getty Images). Biden was inaugurated just a few days later. The presidential permit was canceled Keystone XL was the pipeline that would transport heavy bitumen (tar sands) from Alberta, Canada to Gulf Coast refineries.
Barack Obama, during his second term, blocked the cross-border permit on the grounds of climate change. He claimed that heavy crude oil transport would accelerate climate change. Trump revived the project once he took office by awarding TC Energy the permit, but Biden’s move amounted to the fatal blow. In June 2021, the pipeline’s developer announced it would no longer pursue it.
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In its first year, the Biden administration targeted or overturned roughly three-quarters of the policies of the Trump White House — nearly 170 So far. Among them: Biden rejoined the Paris climate agreement, which the United States left under Trump, and he temporarily halted oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
According to the Biden administration approval of 3,557 permits for oil & gas drilling on public lands in its first year. An analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity, compared with the Trump administration’s first-year total of 2,658. The majority of them, issued by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, were on federal land in New Mexico.
Biden stopped new federal oil-and-gas leasing just one week after he took office. But, a federal judge halted that policy in June 2021. Temporarily stopping federal oil or gas auctions is easier than halting permits on existing leases. A federal judge on Thursday invalidated a major offshore oil and gas lease sale the Biden administration held last fall in the Gulf of Mexico, ruling the government did a flawed analysis of the drilling’s climate change impact.
Denying critical habitat protections of the rusty-patched bumblebee
Oil and gas drilling allowed in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Transport projects should be subject to environmental reviews
The northern spotted owl’s habitat is being destroyed
A 2018 photo of a rusty-patched Bumblebee (Kim Mitchell/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Biden officials have defended the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision in 2020 to deny designating critical habitat for the rusty patched bumblebee, which the Trump administration initially delayed listing under the Endangered Species Act. The Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups are challenging that decision in federal court, arguing in a recent brief, “Although the rusty patched bumble bee was once common and abundant throughout much of America, the survival of this native pollinator now hangs in the balance.”
In the past two decades, the population of the bee, once widespread in the Midwest has fallen by 88 per cent.
Restoring energy efficiency standards for washers & dryers
Reduced production and imports of hydrofluorocarbons
More efficient lightbulbs
Automobiles must meet stricter fuel efficiency standards
New York window air conditioners The Environmental Protection Agency proposes to reduce the production and use hydrofluorocarbons. These highly potent greenhouse gasses are commonly used in air conditioners and refrigerators. (Jenny Kane/AP) Unlike several of Biden’s more controversial climate policies, the single biggest step he has taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions enjoys bipartisan support: a program to cut the production and use of chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, by 85 percent over the next 15 years. The rule, which was finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency in September, implements a law that Biden had enacted one year before he assumed office.
These chemical compounds, which are used in refrigeration systems and air conditioning, are not long-lived in the atmosphere. However, they are hundreds to thousands more potent than carbon. By 2050, federal officials project, the program will cut 4.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent — nearly the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as three years’ worth of pollution from the U.S. power sector.
Since his inauguration, Biden has protected 5,827,854 acres, or 9,106 square miles, of public lands and waters — an area nearly the size of New Hampshire. This record — which means Biden has protected more land and water in his first term than his three immediate predecessors — rests largely on the president’s move to reverse Trump’s decision to scale back safeguards for three large national monuments established by Democrats: Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument In the Atlantic Ocean.
Biden also established new marine protected zones: the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary (which covers 615,680 acre) and the approximately 52,000-acre Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary. National Estuarine Research Reserve of Connecticut This allows you to add acreage to more that a dozen national refuges.
Public health rules may be affected by a restriction on the scientific studies that can be used.
The Willow project in Alaska was granted drilling permits
The Pacific walrus has been denied Endangered Species Act protections
A female Pacific whaler resting at Point Lay, Alaska. (U.S. Geological Survey/AP). More than half a dozen federal courts ruled that Trump administration violated law since Biden was elected. This includes EPA policies that limit tribes’ and states’ rights to object to projects that affect their water quality, and one that keeps chlorpyrifos (a pesticide linked with neurological damage in infants and fetuses) on the market.
Biden was inaugurated on the day that the U.S. Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Circuit was created tossed out Trump’s Affordable Clean Energy rule, which was aimed at easing greenhouse gas limits on power plants.
Carrie Jenks is the executive director of Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. She stated in an email, that these rulings have made it much easier to repeal some Trump-era rollbacks. “Courts’ decisions over the past year rejecting many of the Trump administration’s rules enabled the Biden administration to focus on replacing policies to be consistent with the administration’s priorities.”
The U.S. withdrawal form the Paris climate accord
Reduction of showerhead efficiency requirements
Drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Limits on methane leakage from oil and gas operations
Trump dismantled a 2016 EPA regulation that required oil companies to detect methane leaking from certain equipment and repair them quickly. This was just a few months before he left office.
Congress approved the Obama-era rule in a bipartisan vote. Biden signed the Congressional Review Act resolution, wiping Trump’s rollback off the books.
Carbon dioxide emissions should be taxed
Mandating federal government to transition to clean, zero-emission vehicles
Offers tax rebates on electric vehicle purchase
Extending the Clean Air Act’s scope
Biden would love to see all the policies listed above enshrined. Biden used his executive power to direct the U.S. government to develop a plan to make its fleet of 650,000 vehicles more environmentally friendly over time. Congress has the power to tax or spend and it determines the boundaries of the agencies that can regulate them. Therefore, approval from Capitol Hill would be required for any other items on the list.
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Allowing the importation of elephant trophies
How new pesticide approvals can affect endangered species is changing the way agencies consult
Reducing federal waterway protections
To combat overseas cookstove pollution, we need to reduce funding
Trump flip-flopped multiple times on the question of importing elephant trophies from overseas, first lifting an Obama ban before suggesting he might block them because he considered hunting elephants a “horror show.” But his administration made these imports legal, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service A lawsuit was settled with hunting groups Last year, to start processing import permits again.
