Goodbye to the first climate president

On January 20, 2021 — his first day in office — President Joe Biden signaled his intention to make climate change a serious priority: He rejoined the Paris Agreement, which his predecessor Donald Trump withdrew from in 2017. It was an encouraging start for a candidate who had promised to deliver big on climate while on the campaign trail.

Now Biden, who announced Sunday he would drop out of the 2024 presidential race following weeks of pressure from Democratic voters and lawmakers, is set to leave the office having followed through on that promise.

No other U.S. president has accomplished as much to shift federal policy in support of cutting greenhouse gas emissions — and Biden has done so in a way that is bringing the production of key clean energy technologies to the U.S. and revitalizing the country’s struggling manufacturing sector.

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in a party-line vote in 2022, is the most important climate legislation in U.S. history, directing what could add up to more than $1 trillion in federal tax credits and tens of billions of dollars of grants and incentives to manufacture and deploy everything from solar and wind power to industrial decarbonization technologies.

Most of these incentives are set to remain in place for a decade after the law’s passage, giving U.S. clean energy developers, investors, and manufacturers a level of long-term certainty that had been sorely lacking in the tax-credit policies of the previous decades.

This law alone has delivered swift and staggering results. More than $100 billion of private investment has been committed to building U.S.-based factories that make everything from solar panels to EV batteries. Over 90,000 jobs have been created in the process, most in Republican-led states. Clean energy installations have surged to record highs. Power sector emissions are showing signs of decline.

“Thanks to Joe Biden, America seized a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lead on deploying, innovating, and manufacturing clean energy, bringing badly needed energy resources and cost savings to consumers and businesses at a time when energy demand is rapidly rising,” Alex McDonough, treasurer of nonprofit group CE4A Action, said in a statement.

But the IRA is not Biden’s only legislative accomplishment on clean energy.

The bipartisan infrastructure law passed in 2021 funneled billions of dollars into the much-needed deployment of EV chargers and earmarked $5 billion for clean, electric school buses. It also established large-scale ​“hubs” that aim to kickstart earlier-stage climate technologies like carbon removal and clean hydrogen. Biden helped shepherd the law through a divided Congress, where it managed to pick up a handful of Republican votes.

These are the ​“carrots” of President Biden’s climate and energy legacy. But his administration has also broken new ground in imposing the ​“sticks” that climate experts say are needed to curb the unfettered extraction and consumption of planet-warming fossil fuels.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has taken the lead on this front.

The agency has finalized rules that clamp down on methane emissions from oil and gas operations, targeting a greenhouse gas with a significant impact on short-term global warming. The EPA revamped the Obama administration’s clean power plant rule, which was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, to slash emissions from power plants by the mid-2030s, laying a floor underneath the clean energy transition already underway. Biden’s EPA has also set vehicle emissions standards to further his goal that half of all light-duty vehicles sold in the U.S. be EVs or plug-in hybrids by 2030. It issued tough new standards on heavy-duty vehicle emissions shortly after.

In addition, the Biden administration has married social justice with its clean energy and infrastructure policies through its Justice40 Initiative, which requires that at least 40 percent of the benefits from these federal clean energy investments go to disadvantaged communities overburdened by pollution. Tens of billions of dollars are flowing to these communities to make solar panels more affordable, improve energy efficiency, and remediate the environmental harms of industrial and fossil fuel pollution.

As a result of Biden’s clean energy accomplishments, the U.S. is much better positioned to meet its Paris Agreement climate commitments, if still falling short. But that legacy is under threat in the coming election. 

Former President Trump, the Republican nominee, has vowed to once again pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, reverse the Biden administration’s regulations on oil and gas, vehicle, and power plant emissions standards, and promote fossil fuels as the country’s dominant source of energy. Project 2025, the policy platform featuring work from a number of former Trump administration officials, lays out a plan to repeal the IRA, reverse the EPA’s regulation of carbon emissions as a pollutant, and eliminate many of the federal agencies supporting clean energy and climate technologies, including the Department of Energy offices that have directed billions of dollars to building a cleaner and more resilient power grid.

In contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive new Democratic nominee, has a strong record on climate. She proposed a $10 trillion climate plan during her run for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and was a backer of the Green New Deal, the legislative agenda that faltered in the face of Republican opposition only to see many of its key elements added to the IRA.

Regardless of the election outcome, core parts of Biden’s climate legacy will remain vulnerable to legal challenges. The Supreme Court’s majority of conservative justices, including three appointed by Trump, has issued a host of rulings that have weakened the ability of federal agencies to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The strict rules issued by Biden’s EPA are now more susceptible to being overturned by federal judges under the court’s June decision overturning the so-called ​“Chevron doctrine.”

Still, Biden will leave the office having achieved more than many thought was possible on climate policy — and having given the country a fighting chance to transition away from fossil fuels at the urgent pace demanded by the climate crisis.

Whether the country makes good on that chance will be decided in the next election.