WASHINGTON — With the largest and most powerful tools that President Biden had hoped to use to fight climate change now stripped away, the White House is assembling smaller, less potent policies that could still help the nation reduce its planet-warming pollution, though not at the levels that Mr. Biden once promised.The evident death in the Senate of Democrats’ climate change legislation, which was to have been the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions, comes just weeks after the Supreme Court handed down a decision that sharply limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, the nation’s second-largest source of greenhouse gases.Legal scholars say that the justices’ decision will, in turn, set a precedent that could limit the federal government’s authority to enact future climate regulations on other major sources of heat-trapping emissions, including cars and trucks.Experts say that the gutting of those policies now makes it all but impossible for the United States to meet Mr. Biden’s target of cutting the nation’s emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. That is the amount that scientists say the United States must reduce its emissions in order to do its part to avoid the most catastrophic near-term impacts of climate change.Understand What Happened to Biden’s Domestic AgendaCard 1 of 6‘Build Back Better.’ Before being elected president in 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. articulated his ambitious vision for his administration under the slogan “Build Back Better,” promising to invest in clean energy and to ensure that procurement spending went toward American-made products.A two-part agenda. March and April 2021: President Biden unveiled two plans that together formed the core of his domestic agenda: the American Jobs Plan, focused on inf …
Four Ways the United States Can Still Fight Climate Change – The New York Times
