President Joe Biden called climate change an “emergency” during a Wednesday speech and vowed to use executive powers to bypass Congress, days after Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) dealt a death blow to his sweeping legislative agenda.
“Since Congress is not acting as it should, and these guys here are, but we’re not getting any Republican votes, this is an emergency,” Biden said from the podium in Somerset, Mass., apparently gesturing at Democrats around him. The president stopped short of issuing a national climate emergency, but said he would use executive powers to address the issue.
“As president I’ll use my executive powers to combat climate crisis in the absence of Congressional action,” Biden added.
Biden’s new executive actions include $2.3 billion in funding for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program to “help communities increase resilience to heat waves, drought, wildfires, flood, hurricanes, and other hazards.” Another order issued guidance expanding how the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) can help deliver “efficient air conditioning equipment, community cooling centers, and more.”
The president further pledged to expand offshore wind opportunities and jobs in another executive action, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, the mid- and southern Atlantic coast, and Florida’s gulf coast.
Biden’s announcement comes a week after Manchin said he would not vote for measures pertaining to climate change in a reconciliation bill, killing the Democrats’ hopes of enacting sweeping legislation.
The executive actions were fueled by pressure coming from Democrats, citing recent heat waves across the U.S. and record-high temperatures and wildfires in the U.K. and Europe broadly.
“Failing to mitigate climate change today means living in a future of ‘unprecedented’ headlines: unprecedented heat, unprecedented flooding, unprecedented devastation… We need to do everything we can to address this crisis,” Democratic Delaware Senator Tom Carper said Wednesday.
If Biden declares a national climate emergency, which the White House said he is considering, he will have more unilateral power to issue executive actions, including stopping offshore drilling.