The Democrats’ environmentalist coalition is a diverse bunch. Some, such as Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, favor economic development so long as it is “clean” or “sustainable.” Others, such as Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, abhor the very notion of profit and call urgently for an end to capitalism as we know it. They all tend to agree on what they oppose (mostly fossil fuels, in word if not in deed) but less often on what they’re actually for.
This division will present President-elect Biden with some tough choices, especially given the primacy of the environment among his stated priorities. One difficult question that Biden will face right away is what to do about Trump’s environmental deregulatory initiatives. Many of these moves reversed Obama policies, but others actually built on them. And many of Trump’s more controversial deregulatory moves reverse Obama regulations that were even more controversial.
For example, under Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency enacted a series of astonishingly ambitious measures to curb carbon emissions. These rested on constitutional and statutory grounds so thin that they worried more than a few prominent Democrats — and outraged Republicans. That was particularly true of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which would have replaced both coal and (eventually) natural gas with renewable energy as the nation’s primary source of electricity, even though by its own admission the EPA has no statutory authority to regulate electrical-power generation.
Obama officials knew that the Clean Power Plan faced a steep uphill battle in court, and they must have known from the start that if the Democrats lost the 2016 election, the plan would be as dead as fried chicken. As it turned out, the Supreme Court shelved the plan until Trump did what any other Republican president would have done and replaced it, with a rule focused mostly on clean coal.
Given Biden’s prominent goal of rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change, his administration will almost certainly have to attempt something like the Clean Power Plan again. That is because the Paris Agreement is not enforceable, much less self-executing, and consists merely of promises by the signing governments to reduce carbon emissions to assigned levels by whatever means they can find. France, for example, has relied heavily on taxing gasoline, a policy that sparked the crippling “yellow vest” protests starting in late 2018. There is no escaping the deeply regressive impact that any government-imposed reduction in carbon emissions must have, but the impact is much easier to hide in electricity prices than at the pump. So Biden will almost certainly ask his EPA to undertake a renewed push for renewable energy in America’s power sector.
A reprise of the Clean Power Plan will likely have to be even more ambitious than Obama’s plan was, because fewer years now remain to achieve the goals of Paris by the agreement’s deadlines. This is true even though the U.S. has, ironically enough, led the world in reducing carbon emissions over the last decade, mostly because of the shale boom and the consequent migration from coal to natural gas as the main source of America’s electricity.
And yet a reprised plan will face even more daunting challenges than the first one did. Preliminary court rulings on Obama’s original plan were hardly propitious, and the federal judiciary is significantly more balanced now after Trump’s appointment of hundreds of constitutionalists to the bench.
Moreover, meeting the Paris targets on a shortened time frame would require the rapid construction of vast new wind and solar farms, hydroelectric projects, nuclear plants, and transmission lines over long distances. But these renewable-infrastructure projects have to go through the same federal permit-application and environmental-review process as other kinds of infrastructure projects. And compared with, say, Australia, the Hydra-headed American system for authorizing major infrastructure projects is a horror show of red tape, endless delays, conflicting authorities, and abusive levels of arbitrariness.
Trump came to office committed to streamlining the process, and he moved quickly to set significant reforms in motion, an effort I was intimately involved in at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The previous administration had left us good ideas to work with. Obama officials realized that the system needed to be reformed, or else the effort to “save the planet” from climate change might sink in a sea of red tape. Trump ultimately reformed the process in a number of significant ways — reducing to two years the amount of time that federal agencies are given to complete their environmental reviews and act on permit applications, imposing page limits, and reducing the scope for litigation that can snarl those projects lucky enough to get permits at all.
Predictably, many environmentalists cried foul, but I can attest that the administration bent over backwards to accommodate the concerns of technical experts throughout the overwhelmingly Democratic federal bureaucracy. As a result, renewable-energy projects made possible by Obama-era tax credits have benefited from Trump’s reforms. Whatever their feelings about Trump himself, the whole renewable-energy sector had a keen interest in the lasting success of Trump’s reforms, not least because of the much shorter timetable imposed by rapidly sunsetting tax credits and by the broader goals of reducing carbon emissions quickly.
This has produced a strange and little-reported situation, in which Trump officials trying to get renewable projects through the streamlined process keep running into buzzsaws where NIMBYism and radical environmentalists have combined to stymie them. (Since leaving the White House, I have seen this firsthand as a paid consultant to several such projects.)
That situation could become a major dilemma for the Biden administration, pitting White House officials committed to rapid reductions in carbon emissions, such as Brian Deese, Biden’s nominee to head the National Economic Council, against agency officials with more parochial concerns. Biden’s nominee for secretary of the interior, Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, is a Native American and an outspoken advocate of the preservation of tribal lands and natural habitats, particularly on federal property. Which way she turns when she faces the dilemma between conservation on federal land and rapid deployment of renewable infrastructure on federal land could determine the fate of both Trump’s infrastructure reforms and Biden’s climate goals.
Nor is infrastructure reform the only aspect of Trump’s deregulatory effort that Biden would do well to embrace. Trump officials were by and large quite committed to preserving a clean and vibrant natural environment for future generations. They enacted a historic clean-oceans policy directly targeting the problem of ocean pollution and may have made more progress cleaning up polluted Superfund sites across the Rust Belt than any administration in decades. The overlap between “conservative” and “conservation” is not just a coincidence after all.
What Trump officials did oppose was the adoption of environmental regulations that impose huge costs on American society without actually protecting the environment. Of course, for some environmentalists, there is no such thing as an unjustifiable cost, because the cost is the point. For some of them, stopping economic development is the best way to protect the environment. These environmentalists will call the most reflexively for Biden to reverse Trump’s regulatory reforms, and Biden would do well to consider the pros and cons of their appeals more carefully than they do.
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