A glimpse at Biden’s climate plans

With most major American news outlets declaring Joe Biden as president-elect, it seems befitting to quickly look through some of his environmental commitments, to balance out how Trump was featured in the previous post!

Since the start of this month, the USA made 2 huge U-turns regarding its involvement in global climate change mitigation. The USA officially withdrew from the Paris climate agreement on 4 November 2020, years after then-president Donald Trump’s announcements to do so. Less than a week later, Joe Biden has pledged to re-join this international agreement following his inauguration in January 2021. To understand the latter’s plans, there seems no better way of doing so than hearing them from the man himself!

While many of Biden’s climate policies are elaborate and region-specific, his intent to invest USD$1.7 trillion in clean energy infrastructure within a decade, as part of a long-term goal to attain net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, ties in most closely with this blog’s underlying theme. Biden’s interpretation of “energy” is not confined to electricity alone – consistent with my first blog post, he also covered biofuels, vehicle electrification and public transport, amongst numerous other topics. Indeed, these plans are so extensive that the BBC described them as ‘the most progressive climate strategy the US has ever attempted’.

Before rushing to celebrate, however, the same BBC article highlights several significant limitations of Biden’s climate policies. For starters, Biden has only promised to ban fracking – a process where sand, water and various hazardous chemicals are injected at high pressure to crack non-porous rocks and retrieve the natural gas and oil within (depicted in figure below) – on federal land, which would only affect ~10% of all fracking activity within the USA. Furthermore, a Senate led by the rival Republican Party could frustrate Biden’s implementation of any major environmental protection laws, with any attempts at issuing presidential executive orders being potentially blocked by conservatives in the Supreme Court. Some progress would probably be made, but these could be restricted to the policies which can yield short-term economic gains.

Source: Howarth et al., 2011

Nonetheless, I maintain an attitude of cautious optimism with regards to the USA’s role in leading climate change mitigation efforts, since a commitment to tackling global warming is already a welcome improvement from the past few years. With that being said, I believe that future international climate agreements should have also present trade incentives for signatories alongside financial penalties for countries which pull out, as the absence of the latter renders it susceptible to being abused by populist politicians for their short-term political gains.