Biden's New Climate Rules Nearing Completion

As President Joe Biden reaches the halfway point in his first term, his administration is planning to impose major climate policies that will touch everything from the cars Americans drive to the electricity they use. This is a pivotal moment for the president's climate agenda.
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Biden has promised to combat climate change, accelerate renewable fuels and decarbonize the nation’s power grids by 2035. As president, he has pledged that the US will at least halve its greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade. The Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping climate law, is set to help the US reach that goal, policy analysts say, but success also depends on a host of other policies to force emission cuts and spur efficiency.
Now that the IRA has been enacted, the focus shifts from Congress to federal agencies. A large number of new measures are needed to implement the law’s climate provisions, but officials are also working quickly to finalize separate, long-planned regulations around issues like emissions from power plants, vehicle pollution and business disclosures of climate risks.
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"It's time to get moving," said Trevor Higgins, an acting senior vice president at the Center for American Progress. "Whether it's the rules for vehicles or soot or smog, all of them have to get done."
The next two years are critical for the Biden administration's environmental agenda. Political and legal pressures mean that major measures must be proposed and finalized soon in order to increase the chances of them surviving legal challenges and opposition from Republicans in Congress.
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Regulations finalized in the final months of an administration are particularly vulnerable to being overturned through a simple majority vote in the House and Senate, under the Congressional Review Act. And if a different party wins the White House in the next election, the new administration may opt not to vigorously defend the previous administration's rules in court. That puts a premium on earlier action.
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Activists are urging the administration to take quick action to write regulations targeting greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution from power plants.
"We don't want to take any chances," said Charles Harper, a power sector policy expert at the advocacy group Evergreen Action. "The climate crisis is so urgent and these power sector rules are so vital to President Biden's agenda."
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Biden is seeking to marshal a "whole-of-government" response to the climate crisis, with work underway across the executive branch. At the Department of Energy, work is underway on energy efficiency standards that help cut power demand and related emissions. The Interior Department is honing its plan to stifle venting and flaring of natural gas from wells on public land. And the Securities and Exchange Commission has advanced a proposal to require public companies to disclose how they are managing climate-related risks.
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The president is also under pressure to use special executive powers to designate marine sanctuaries and protect other lands, preventing an array of activity on them, including future oil and gas development. On his seventh day in office, Biden signed an executive order promising to conserve at least 30% of US lands and waters by the end of the decade. But the administration "needs to act with more urgency to actually keep those commitments in sight," said Jenny Rowland-Shea, director for public lands at the Center for American Progress.
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One of the biggest challenges facing the EPA is finishing rules that haven’t yet been proposed – including measures limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and vehicles. “They’re already running up against the clock for those,” said Amit Narang, a regulatory expert with Public Citizen.
The administration is also up against a regulatory process that can take months, if not longer, due to requirements for publishing proposed rules and subjecting them to public comment.
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Officials have not proposed a power plant regulation yet, as Congress is still developing the Inflation Reduction Act and the Supreme Court is scrutinizing a related measure. The Supreme Court's ruling can help officials determine the most legally durable approach.
The Environmental Protection Agency has imposed new tailpipe emission standards on cars and light trucks through model year 2026, but has not yet advanced the next tranche of requirements governing vehicles produced later this decade. The transportation sector is the largest source of US greenhouse gas emissions today.
Reducing methane emissions is a key priority in the fight against climate change, as methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. However, the administration has moved slowly on advancing an EPA plan to clamp down on methane emissions from oil and gas wells. The EPA outlined an initial blueprint on methane in 2021, then only fleshed it out with a supplemental proposal released during a UN climate summit last November, setting the stage for possible finalization this year. By March, the agency is also seeking to propose its plan for assessing new fees of at least $900 per ton on methane released from certain oil and gas operations, under a mandate from the Inflation Reduction Act.
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Republicans in the House of Representatives, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, have vowed to provide tough oversight of the Biden administration’s energy and environmental policies. This will include hearings grilling agency officials and other scrutiny that could complicate rulemaking.
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One of the challenges we face is simply recovering from staffing and operations cuts under the Trump administration. Agencies that develop environmental rules have been severely depleted in terms of human resources, and some of them have stopped collecting the data necessary to do the regulatory work,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said on the sidelines of the UN climate summit in November. “We’ve been working to rebuild that.”
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The Inflation Reduction Act will provide more resources and staffing to federal agencies, though hiring delays could reduce some of the benefits.
The law also provides funding for clean energy and climate programs that have the potential to reduce emissions significantly. However, this also means that agencies must now establish programs to comply with the law, as well as write stricter rules to enforce it.
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According to Harper from Evergreen Action, the influx of new funding from the IRA is both a blessing and a curse for the EPA. On one hand, there are now more resources available to tackle pollution across the country. On the other hand, the agency needs to be diligent in how it spends this money to ensure that it is used effectively and fairly.