Five ways the United States can still fight climate change

Five ways the United States can still fight climate change

WASHINGTON — Featuring the largest and most powerful tools President Biden had hoped to use to fight climate change now stripped awayThe White House is putting together a smaller, less powerful policy that could still help the nation reduce planet-warming pollution, though not at the level Mr. Biden had once promised.

the obvious Death in Senate of Democrats Climate Legislationthat would have been at the center of Mr Biden’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions comes just weeks after the High Council has passed a decision that severely limits the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, the second largest source of greenhouse gases in the country.

Legal scholars say the judges’ decision, in turn, will set a precedent that could limit the federal government’s ability to enact future climate regulations for other major sources of heat-trapping emissions, including cars and trucks.

Experts say scrapping those policies now makes it nearly impossible for the United States to meet Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting the country’s emissions by 50 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. That’s it. amount that scientists say the United States should reduce. emissions to do its part to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change in the near term.

And if the world’s largest economy doesn’t keep its word on cutting emissions, analysts say, it will lose any leverage to force other countries to cut their emissions.

“Manchin’s decision and the Supreme Court decision destroyed the building the Biden administration was building to meet this very ambitious climate target,” said Michael Wara, a climate policy expert at Stanford University.

“And they’ve only got a few pieces left and now they’re trying to put together a structure with these few, smaller, less coherent pieces,” added Mr. Get ready. “It’s much more difficult. The 50 percent target was incredibly ambitious, even with all the tools Biden had. But with what they have left, they can still achieve a significant part of that.”

Here are a few ways federal and state leaders can still reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

Vehicles are the nation’s largest source of global warming pollution, and experts say ending the use of gasoline-powered cars soon is crucial to avoiding the worst effects of climate change. Mr Biden has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation to write a transformative new ordinance to curb tailpipe pollution and accelerate the country’s transition to electric vehicles.

At its most ambitious, the new regulation, likely to be completed by 2023 or 2024, would force automakers to sell enough electric vehicles to meet Mr Biden’s target that half of all vehicles sold in the United States would be fully electric by 2030. But after the Supreme Court decision curtailing the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the agency may scale back its ambitions for fear that such a bold new move could also be overturned by the courts.

Coal and gas-fired power plants are the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. While the Environmental Protection Agency has been prevented by the Supreme Court from enacting a sweeping, ambitious rule that would shut down coal and gas power plants, the agency still plans to issue a more modest rule that would shut down electric utilities. force them to lower their energy costs slightly. greenhouse gas emissions, and possibly to install technology to capture and capture carbon dioxide pollution, although that expensive technology is not yet widely available.

The agency also plans stricter limits on other types of pollution from power plants — such as mercury, smog and soot — that are not greenhouse gases. The idea is that tackling those pollutants could force electricity companies to clean up or shut down the dirtiest facilities, such as coal-fired power plants, which produce more carbon dioxide than gas-fired plants.

Carbon dioxide produced by the combustion of fossil fuels is the world’s most abundant and dangerous greenhouse gas, but methane, which is emitted into the atmosphere from leaks from oil and gas drilling sites, is a close second. It stays in the atmosphere for a shorter time than carbon dioxide, but packs a bigger punch while it lasts. By some estimates, methane has 80 times the heat-holding capacity of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years in the atmosphere.

In the coming months, the EPA plans to enact stricter new regulations to curb methane leakage from oil and gas wells, a move that could remove a significant portion of the country’s overall greenhouse gas pollution. Legal experts say that unlike the rules for power plants and cars, the methane rule has a good chance of weathering legal challenges.

Absent federal action on climate change, state-level climate policy will play a more important role. Just under half of states have already implemented significant climate policies. Leading the way is California, which is expected to finalize first-in-the-nation regulations in the coming weeks that will require all new cars sold in the state to be electric or zero-emissions by 2035. Seventeen other states are poised to adopt the same rule when it passes in Sacramento.

California also requires 100 percent of its electricity to be generated from carbon-free sources by 2045. Twenty-one other states have some version of that clean electricity standard, and several are enacting legislation for even stricter versions.

Experts say that if enough states continue aggressive carbon reduction plans, it could help the United States cut its emissions, though not to levels close to what could be achieved by federal action.