Progressive environmentalists are mounting a long-shot bid to get President-elect Joe Biden to go beyond naming a climate czar and declare an environmental national emergency, borrowing a tactic employed by President Donald Trump to fund part of his border wall.
Invoking a climate emergency could give Biden the authority to circumvent Congress and fund clean energy projects, shut down crude oil exports, suspend offshore drilling and curtail the movement of fossil fuels on pipelines, trains, and ships, according to a research note by consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners.
“The president’s powers to address climate change through an emergency are very, very large,” said Kassie Siegel, an attorney with the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, which is lobbying Biden’s team to act. “This is No. 1 on the list of things the Biden administration should do.”
In a statement, Biden’s transition team didn’t explicitly address the question of a climate emergency, saying only that he plans to follow through on his policy platform to fight the climate crisis while creating millions of jobs.
Biden’s climate platform includes no mention of declaring a climate emergency. The national emergency question could be an early potential source of tension between climate groups and Biden.
It signals the tough fights ahead for the new president, as he walks a line between satisfying activists who backed his campaign and not promoting measures that would draw opposition from more moderate Democrats.
Many environmentalists were pleased to see Biden this week name former Secretary of State John Kerry as a special presidential envoy for climate, fulfilling the campaign promise to elevate the issue of global warming to the highest levels of the White House.
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Why declare a Climate Emergency when their is no Climate Emergency can we say Globalism?
There is a climate emergency. Taxation that could be spent on universal health-care, conservation or many other important things, or delivered in part as a tax cut to those doing it tough, is instead wasted on preventing the climate getting worse by, well, what exactly? 0.1 of a degree? Fahrenheit?
And that’s a worse-case scenario. Even then, the plant growth that doesn’t happen because of carbon dioxide reduction measures associated with this massive spending and the climate amelioration that doesn’t occur due to this is never taken into account.