Biden Sets New National Climate Goal, Challenging Trump’s Fossil Fuel Plans

The Biden administration on Thursday announced a new, more ambitious goal for curbing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade in a challenge to President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to maximize fossil fuel use that raises the stakes of the incoming Republican administration’s global negotiations over climate change.

Early in his tenure, President Joe Biden set a national target — known as a nationally determined contribution, or NDC, required of all parties to the international Paris climate agreement — of slashing carbon emissions 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade. The new NDC, which will be submitted to the United Nations, ups the U.S. target to 61% to 66% by 2035.

“The Biden-Harris administration may be about to leave office, but we’re confident in America’s ability to rally around this new climate goal,” John Podesta, Biden’s top climate adviser, said during a call with reporters, adding that, though the Trump administration “may put climate action on the back burner, the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief.”

“That’s not wishful thinking. It’s happened before,” Podesta said, noting that states, local governments and private industry rallied in support of climate action after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate pact during his first term.

Former Trump administration officials who remain in the president-elect’s orbit have suggested he may not only withdraw the U.S. again from the Paris accords, but also the foundational United Nations treaty that undergirds the annual negotiations over emissions. Doing so would effectively void the pledge from the U.S., the world’s largest source of cumulative carbon in the atmosphere, hampering efforts to persuade the poorer countries whose emissions will determine the future to forgo developing fossil fuels.

Last time Trump retreated from the Paris pact, U.S. states including California, Washington and New York ― economic powerhouses of technology, aerospace and finance ― joined together to promote state-level policies that kept the country aligned with global goals.

Taiwan lost its seat at the U.N. in 1971, when member states voted to recognize the communist government in Beijing as the rightful rulers of China. Yet the self-governing island democracy has routinely set climate goals.

“Subnational leaders in the United States can continue to show the world that American climate leadership is determined by so much more than whoever sits in the Oval Office,” Podesta said during the press call. “It happens on the ground in our cities and states, from Phoenix to Pittsburgh, from Boise to Baltimore, and I believe that with this new 2035 target as the North Star, leaders across America can show the world that we are still in this fight for a better future.”

When Trump took office the first time, he tasked top environmental regulators with halting and reversing most of the Obama administration’s rules to deal with planet-heating emissions and air pollution from power plants, tailpipes and industrial farms. Though the second Trump administration is expected to take the same ax to regulations from the Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior, the fate of the nation’s first major climate laws remains hazy.

Trump’s transition team said he would “terminate the Green New Scam and rescind all unspent funds from the so-called ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ and redirect them to spending on real infrastructure.”

Tax credits for energy efficiency upgrades and electric vehicles overwhelmingly went to upper-income homeowners and drivers, making the federal spending that those write-offs represent an easy target for populist Republicans seeking to brand emission-cutting policies as elitist. But similar measures in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to support manufacturing, nuclear energy and infrastructure to capture and transport emissions from fossil fuel plants look likely to qualify under the next administration’s definition of “real.”

Under Biden, the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office ― a little-known agency that famously provided an early loan to Tesla ― became the spear tip of the effort to get IRA dollars out the door. Among its biggest investments were billions the agency gave utility companies to do something the first Trump administration tried but failed to do: keep nuclear plants open. The LPO has announced a flurry of deals since the election to lend billions to battery companies, electric vehicle factories and a major transmission project in the Midwest. Most of the recent announcements benefit projects in states Trump won.

The core tax credits supporting construction of renewables like wind and solar have overwhelmingly gone to Republican-controlled states. GOP lawmakers may look to preserve the policy anyway to support the nuclear plants or gas plants with carbon-capture equipment that could also qualify.

Though controversial among some environmentalists, Biden’s original climate goals always depended heavily on newfangled nuclear reactors and carbon-capture technology that still faces serious hurdles to scaling up enough to meet the targets while continuing to serve as a top global supplier of oil and natural gas. By promising to “unleash” automakers to produce cars that are less fuel-efficient and to expand the already-historic build-out of gas-fired power plants to meet the nation’s growing electricity needs, Trump’s next term will put an even higher premium on those technologies to put Biden’s more ambitious goal anywhere within reach.

Ali Zaidi, the White House national climate adviser, told reporters that decarbonization efforts across the U.S. have reached “escape velocity” and America will continue to do its part to keep alive the goal of the Partis climate accords: limiting planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

“Today, the U.S. is adding more capacity to its grid than it has in decades — 96% of that electricity will be clean,” he said. “Helped by clearer rules and faster permitting, pioneering offshore wind farms are delivering clean power, retired nuclear plants are coming back online, America is racing forward on solar and batteries, not just the deployment but also the means to stamp those products ‘Made in America.’ The U.S. is mining everything from nickel to lithium, upgrading it, making the anodes and cathodes and the separators for batteries manufactured by union workers in factories that had once shut down.”

Recent analyses have made it clear what Biden’s climate investments are likely to mean for emission reductions, and conversely what Trump’s return to the Oval Office could do to stymie progress. Three independent research organizations last year found that the IRA could slash U.S. carbon emissions by 40% or more below 2005 levels by the end of the decade — closer to but still short of Biden’s previous target. On the flip side, a Carbon Brief analysis in March determined that a Trump victory would cause that number to drop to 28%.

Even if Trump and his team abandons climate action at the federal level, the Biden administration is confident that the nation can still achieve the new target’s lower 62% threshold.

“America is going to claim the biggest share of the economic prize that comes from the clean energy economy if we have a federal government that leans in and does what’s best for our economy, our people and the environment we will hand to future generations,” a senior administration official said ahead of Thursday’s announcement. “But the lower end of what we have laid out can largely be carried out without significant additional effort at the federal level. That’s not where we should aim as a country, but analytically we’ve grounded in multiple pathways, many of which do not rely on significant additional federal action.”

In recent weeks, climate and environmental advocates urged the White House to establish a new emissions target before exiting office, regardless of what Trump might decide to do with it.

Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement last week that an ambitious NDC could serve as “a guiding star” for continued climate action.

“Despite threats made by the incoming administration to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, announcing a robust 2035 U.S. NDC this year is important to galvanize more ambitious action from state and local policymakers in the United States, businesses and other major emitting countries,” Cleetus said.

In announcing the new target, Biden applauded his administration for “carrying out the boldest climate agenda in American history.”

“Together, we will turn this existential threat into a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform our nation for generations to come,” he said in a video statement.