For those of us convinced that the United States must take immediate and strong actions to counter climate change, help is on the way. President-elect Joe Biden has nominated a number of leaders with climate expertise, and the selections indicate that he wants to take a whole-of-government approach to this central challenge.
Biden appears to have taken cues from a 300-page blueprint laying out a holistic approach to the climate. Drawn up by the Climate 21 Project, it took a year and a half to develop, and its recommendations, The Washington Post reported, include creating a White House National Climate Council that is “co-equal” to the Domestic Policy Council and National Economic Council.
Creating a well-structured National Climate Council (NCC), the report maintained, “would publicly elevate climate change as an issue of sustained national importance in the next Administration and beyond. Establishing an NCC would also make it unequivocally clear to the Cabinet, the Congress, business leaders, activists, and the general public who within the White House is principally responsible for organizing and executing on climate change policy.”
As envisioned by the Climate 21 Project, an assistant to the president for climate change would direct the NCC, while a deputy would be principally responsible for mitigation policy. In addition there would be three special assistants overseeing: 1) international policy; 2) policies related to the clean energy transition, the energy workforce, and tax and financial-sector issues; and 3) coordination with the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).
One of our co-founders, former Idaho Congressman Walt Minnick (D), endorses such an approach. Back in 1971, he served as staff director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, established by President Richard Nixon to tackle the emerging global crisis involving heroin and other illicit drugs. The committee formulated new federal policies designed to curtail the flow of these drugs into the United States, creating the Drug Enforcement Administration and new federal drug treatment agencies. Its members included appropriate Cabinet members, agency heads and senior White House staff. “The problem was so serious and so broad,” said Minnick, “that you needed to directly engage the president and enlist the heads of a broad range of federal departments and agencies to solve it. A like approach and priority is essential to deal with a challenge as enormous as climate change.”
The most striking aspect of Biden’s approach is his determination to incorporate climate in his economic policies. “Climate change is going to touch every part of our economy, and climate change policy is going to require us to change the way we power and fuel every part of our economy,” said Joseph E. Aldy, a Harvard University economist who served as special assistant to President Barack Obama on energy and environment.
Officials at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged Biden and Congress to include clean energy components in an infrastructure package in a news briefing earlier this year. “That could be a big piece in the stimulus negotiations,” said Tim Profeta, director of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a co-author of the Climate 21 Project’s blueprint.
“Our economic understanding of climate action has evolved over the past decade,” Andrew Steer, president of World Resources Institute, wrote in a Fortune magazine op-ed. “We have strong evidence that climate policies promote strong and equitable economic growth. Smart action on climate change will increase economic efficiency, drive innovation and new technologies, and reduce investment risks. This is why Biden said on the campaign trail that when he thinks of climate change, he sees jobs. And it’s why many labor unions and manufacturers have gotten behind Biden’s proposed climate plans.”
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomber is also advocating a whole-of-government approach. He recently published an op-ed arguing that some of the most important steps the new administration could take “have nothing to do with the Environmental Protection Agency” and involve measures like incorporating climate impacts into the Housing and Urban Development’s building standards and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s disclosure requirements.
The Department of Agriculture is yet another agency that can play a major role in climate, in part because it oversees the 193 million-acre National Forest System. "The agriculture sector accounts for about 10% of current overall U.S. emissions, while U.S forests sequester the equivalent of about 15% of carbon dioxide emissions from combustion of U.S. fossil fuels annually," according to the Climate 21 Project.
Biden sent an immediate signal that he is ambitious about tackling climate when he named former Secretary of State John Kerry as the nation’s international climate czar. “Climate change is the national security, public health, environmental, and moral issue of our time, and there is no one better suited to coordinate a bold international response to this crisis than John Kerry,” said Senator Ed Markey (D-MA).
Biden said that Kerry “will be matched with a high-level White House climate policy coordinator and policymaking structure...that will lead efforts here in the United States to combat the climate crisis and mobilize action to meet the existential threat that we face.”
We continue to believe, as do most leading economists, that a price on carbon is the most efficient and quickest way to make progress on the climate front. We will be carrying that message to Capitol Hill and the new administration.