Welcome to The First 100. Each week, Grist’s journalists will break down the biggest news out of Washington, D.C., as a new presidency takes shape and the federal government (hopefully) makes meaningful moves toward addressing the climate crisis. Thanks for subscribing!
— Nikhil Swaminathan, executive editor
Howdy! I’m Shannon Osaka, and today is Day 3 of the Biden administration.
This week, the new president made some big, symbolic gestures — but concrete climate action could be right around the corner.
A mere five hours after he was sworn in as president of the United States, Joe Biden put pen to paper on executive orders to cancel the permits for the partially completed Keystone XL pipeline and rejoin the Paris Agreement.
These are big, sweeping decisions that rightfully got a lot of media attention — but for the moment, they’re more symbolic than substantive. While Keystone XL has been a target of climate activism for over a decade, the falling price of oil has made the pipeline much less viable economically. Many economists suspected the market was already on its way to canceling the project.
Rejoining Paris, meanwhile, is just the first, baby step toward showing other countries that the U.S. is getting serious about climate change. When December’s United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, comes around, the Biden administration will be expected to do much more than just show up. It will need to promise a 45 to 50 percent emissions cut by 2030, compared to 2005 levels — and more importantly, have a plan for getting such a policy through Congress.
These early gestures are a start, but the real test of the new administration’s focus on climate will come in the following weeks (and months and years).
The good news is that, in the same executive order that revoked Keystone’s permits, Biden provided a roadmap for his administration’s next big climate actions. He asked the Environmental Protection Agency to review dozens of rules finalized by the Trump administration. Those reviews don’t sound sexy, but the actions that spring from them will be crucial to actually cutting carbon emissions over the next four years. More on that below.
