As his final weeks in the White House wind down, President Joe Biden and his top aides are making a home-stretch sprint on climate action, finalizing multibillion-dollar clean-energy loans, supporting state-level action on EVs and setting a new national target for greenhouse gas reductions.
"I'm proud to announce an ambitious new goal: cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 60 percent by 2035," Biden said in a video statement released by the White House Thursday. The new target to control carbon pollution from across the economy is the latest U.S. commitment to meet targets in the international Paris Agreement on climate change.
President-elect Donald Trump, who will return to office next month, is likely to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, as he did in 2017 during his first term in office. But Biden and his climate advisers said work to fight climate change and shift to a clean-energy economy will continue.
"American industry will keep inventing and keep investing," Biden said. "State, local and tribal governments will keep stepping up."
The new climate target is part of a flurry of action this week by the Biden administration to get climate spending and policies in place before Trump takes office and attempts to roll back environmental regulations and unwind clean-energy supports.
"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," White House senior adviser for international climate policy John Podesta said in a press briefing on Wednesday previewing the announcement. Podesta said it is important to send a signal both to state and local governments in the U.S. and to other countries that despite the change in federal government, there will still be ambitious work on the issue.
"President Trump may put climate action on the back burner, but the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief," Podesta said.
In another major climate announcement on Wednesday, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan approved requests from California air quality officials to enforce the state's tough new standards on clean cars and trucks.
Under the Clean Air Act, California can request a waiver from the EPA to enact stricter emissions standards on vehicles to address the state's chronic air quality problems. The EPA granted waivers for California's new program to address smog-causing emissions from heavy trucks and its Advanced Clean Cars II regulations.
The ACC II rules are projected to sharply reduce disease related to air pollution and limit greenhouse gases from transportation. The program would phase out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035, accelerating the market for EVs.
"Today's actions follow through on EPA's commitment to partner with states to reduce emissions and act on the threat of climate change," Regan said in a statement.
The EPA was racing to complete the waivers before the end of Biden's term, but it is unclear if the California program will last. Trump has said he wants to do away with federal support for EVs, including removing California's authority to place stricter limits on gas-powered cars.
The U.S. EV market and the supply chain to build EVs and batteries in America have grown dramatically with generous federal support from the Biden administration, especially the Inflation Reduction Act.
A report this summer from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund found nearly $200 billion in investments in EVs since 2015, with more than half of that coming since the IRA's passage. Auto and battery makers have announced more than 200,000 jobs related to EVs, the report said.
Department of Energy officials charged with approving IRA loans finalized more than $17 billion for EV automakers in just the past two weeks. Stellantis and Samsung will get up to $7.54 billion to help build two EV battery plants in Indiana. And on Monday, the DOE announced it had finalized a $9.63 billion loan to a venture of Ford and the South Korean battery maker SK On to complete their Blue Oval battery and EV facilities in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Climate advocates are counting on the economic inertia of that type of clean tech spending to make climate action resilient to the coming changes in the White House.
"I find it very different than 2016 to be really honest—there is so much more investment," Angela Barranco, Climate Group's executive director for North America, told Newsweek. "It's already been Trump-proofed to some degree."
Barranco said Climate Group works with hundreds of companies in several aspects of clean energy and manufacturing, and she does not get the sense that they will change direction with the change in the White House.
"It's been kind of interesting to hear the kind of constancy of their commitment, that they're going to keep going," she said, "because it's already part of their bottom line."
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