Biden Keeps Passing Smart Climate Policies

This year, the Biden administration has passed multiple policies that will cut billions of tons of carbon emissions

In the last few months, the Biden administration has quietly passed multiple federal policies that will transform the United States economy and wipe out billions of tons of future greenhouse gas emissions. 

The new policies have received little attention outside of wonky climate circles. And that is a problem.

Earlier this year, I wrote that Biden has done more to mitigate climate change than any President before him. For decades, environmentalists tried and failed to convince lawmakers to pass even the most marginal climate policies. It wasn’t until Biden took office that the logjam broke and the climate policies flowed. And yet few American voters are hearing this story in an election year of huge consequence.

It’s been two and a half months since I wrote that article. In that short time, the Biden administration has passed a handful of climate policies that will collectively cut more than 10 billion tons of planet-warming pollution over the next three decades, more than the annual emissions of India, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the entire continent of Europe—combined.

In today’s story, I’ll share a summary of three of these policies and the impact they will have over the coming decades.

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American homes are about to get much more efficient

One climate policy that flew under the radar recently was the administration's latest energy efficiency rule, unveiled at the beginning of May. The new rules will reduce the amount of energy that water heaters use by encouraging manufacturers to sell models with more efficient heat pump technology. The new regulation is expected to save more energy than any federal regulation in history. 

Most people give little thought to how the water in their homes is heated, but water heaters are the second-largest consumer of energy in the average American home and one of the largest sources of climate pollution in the country. 

That’s why the new rules will be able to cut 2.5 billion tons of emissions over the next three decades, equivalent to about half of the annual emissions of the United States. 

The new efficiency standards won’t just mitigate climate change though. The DOE projects that American consumers will save an average of $1,800 over the life of their water heater as a result of the new regulations. It will also reduce electricity demand on the grid at times of peak power, which could prevent the need for new fossil fuel power plants.

Coal power plants will finally shut down

A few days before the administration announced its water heater efficiency rules, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced another sweeping policy.

According to the new rules, existing coal power plants will need to either shut down or install carbon capture technology capable of removing 90% of their carbon pollution. The policy will also require any new natural gas power plants that provide baseload power—the ones that run throughout the day and night, as opposed to the peaker plants that only run for a small fraction of hours in the year—to install carbon capture technology. 

The new power sector rules are effectively a death blow to coal power in America, which has slowly faded over the last two decades but still emits more carbon emissions than almost every country in the world. 

The EPA projects that the power plant rules will cut 1.38 billion tons of emissions over the next three decades. 

In passing the rule, federal regulators are calling the utility industry’s carbon capture bluff. Ever since the first climate regulations cropped up decades ago, the owners of fossil fuel power plants have said that it's possible to burn fossil fuels to produce power without heating up the planet. But these same companies have invested little in the technology and, when they have, they’ve offered little evidence that carbon capture can work. 

Now utilities will have to either “put up or shut up,” according to Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems researcher and professor at Princeton, who explained the new policy in a recent podcast. 

If utilities can’t prove that carbon capture is cost-effective at scale, they will have to shut down their fossil fuel power plants and stop building all but the smallest and least-polluting new ones. 

Biden’s biggest executive climate action

The water heater rules and power plant regulations will help the country meet its goal of cutting emissions by 50% by 2030. But impactful as they will be, they weren’t the most important climate policy that the Biden administration passed in the last two months. 

That honor goes to the EPA’s tailpipe rules, which are set to transform the auto industry over the next decade.

Today the transportation sector is the largest source of climate pollution in the United States. Within the sector, passenger cars and trucks are the biggest contributors to emissions. While electric vehicle adoption has grown in recent years, America lags behind many other countries in decarbonizing its vehicle stock. 

The EPA’s new rules will force automakers to reduce the amount of pollution and carbon emissions that come from their vehicles. The federal policy doesn’t specifically mandate that automakers produce EVs or stop selling gas-powered cars but instead regulates the average carbon emissions per mile of a manufacturer's entire fleet over the next decade. That means automakers can still sell gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing trucks in 2035. They’ll just need to sell a lot more EVs or plug-in hybrids to bring their average fleet emissions down if they do.

Like the power plant rules, the EPA’s new auto regulations are designed to avoid being thrown out by a conservative and hostile Supreme Court. 

EVs could make up as much as 56% of passenger vehicle sales in 2030 as a result of the new rule, according to the EPA’s modeling. A staggering 7 billion tons of carbon emissions will be avoided over the next three decades.

Climate progress despite the odds

Viewed in isolation, each of these policies might appear incrementalist and unnecessarily convoluted. A federal law mandating economy-wide emissions reductions or banning the sale of gas-powered vehicles would certainly be more simple and effective. 

But climate policy isn’t written in a vacuum. The latest rules were written by a presidential administration whose party doesn’t have control of both chambers of Congress. They were written by federal agencies who know they will be sued and have to defend each regulation in front of a Supreme Court that has consistently ruled against any attempt to curb emissions.

This is the political reality of America today. Viewed in this context, the Biden administration's latest climate policies deserve praise—and, frankly, more attention.