President Joe Biden will roll out a series of executive actions to confront the mounting effects of global climate change following another stalled legislative push from the president and Senate Democrats to secure billions of dollars in climate and clean energy investments.
Biden will detail the first of those steps Wednesday during a visit to the shuttered Brayton Point coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, which is now being transformed into a manufacturing facility for submarine cables that will be used on offshore wind farms now being developed off the East Coast.
Biden’s executive push will include actions to further advance the rapidly growing U.S. offshore wind industry as well as better safeguard communities affected by extreme heat, a White House official said.
The president will make it clear that “since Congress is not going to act on this emergency, then he will,” the official said. “In the coming days, he will continue to announce executive actions that we have developed to combat this emergency.”
Last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) ruled out any new climate spending in a scaled-down social spending package, seemingly upending months of negotiations on Capitol Hill. Manchin subsequently said he was still open to a bigger deal that includes climate funding and that he just wanted to see July’s inflation numbers first. But public outrage had already ballooned. Climate and environmental advocates condemned the coal state Democrat for negotiating in bad faith and demanded that Biden immediately use his executive powers, including declaring a national climate emergency, to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
Reporting earlier this week from The Washington Post and other media outlets indicated Biden was considering, even likely, to sign an emergency declaration as soon as today. But by Tuesday, the White House had at least temporarily sidelined the idea.
“The climate emergency is not going to happen tomorrow, but we still have it on the table,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said during a Tuesday briefing. “I don’t have a date circled in the calendar.”
In the 18 months since Biden took office, many climate activists, environmental groups and progressive Democrats have repeatedly called on the president to lean into his executive authority to confront the global threat, including halting new oil and gas leases on federal lands and blocking new pipelines and other fossil fuel projects.
That pressure only grew after Manchin torpedoed the climate talks on Capitol Hill last week. Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.) joined those calls, urging Biden to use the Defense Production Act to boost clean energy technologies.
“The potential to enact the legislation is dead,” Merkley told reporters previously. “This then frees up the president to use the full powers of the executive branch. And those full powers certainly include a climate emergency.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
