Biden’s big climate week

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It’s been a busy first week for the Biden administration. The president revoked the Keystone XL pipeline’s permit, rejoined the Paris Agreement, and ordered a two-month pause on new drilling leases and permits on federal lands. On Wednesday, The New York Times reports, he is set to extend that pause, order a review of current leases and permits, direct federal agencies to cut fossil fuel subsidies, and establish climate change as a national security priority by instructing the intelligence community to come up with the first National Intelligence Estimate on climate change.

So why do some oil analysts still expect fossil fuels to have a good year? TNR’s Kate Aronoff tackled the subject this week. Fossil fuel interests may be denouncing some of Biden’s moves in the press, but Oslo-based energy consultancy Rystad Energy last week predicted a “Biden boost” for oil and gas—an extra 350,000 barrels per day in 2021 and 900,000 in 2022.

“The mechanism isn’t complicated,” Kate wrote. “There’s a stubborn link between growth in gross domestic product and greenhouse gas emissions. Even the greenest of recoveries is likely to boost both growth and emissions in the near term by putting people back to work and boosting consumer spending. Unless economic recovery policy includes sweeping, rapid changes to electrify and decarbonize the country and actively curtail fossil fuel production, even a stimulus that’s green on many other fronts could help emissions climb for years to come.”

It’s a hard thing to wrap one’s head around: The progress made on basic elements of climate-related policy in the past week is both infinitely better than what came before and just a tiny portion of what needs to happen to avert catastrophe. Climate journalist David Wallace-Wells had a good thread about this last week. “The world has emitted a quarter of all the carbon it has ever produced in the twelve years since Joe Biden was inaugurated as vice-president in 2009,” Wallace-Wells wrote. In other words, 400 billion tons of carbon have been released since the last Democratic president who wanted to fight climate change took office. “This is not a thread about the new president, or his old boss.… It is about how fast things have moved since, and are moving now, and how much force is required to change that momentum.”

Keeping that in mind, here’s a look at some of the other developments this week. By the way, check out Nick Martin’s coverage of Duke Energy’s coal ash settlement with the state of North Carolina, if you want some rage with your afternoon tea.

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That’s the number of climate change legal cases filed worldwide in 2020, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme—almost double the 884 cases filed three years ago, in 2017. Courts, it concludes, are going to be a major factor in the climate fight going forward. (That’s not wildly encouraging where the United States is concerned.)

This is a big one. Melting of the polar ice sheets, a new paper finds, is now on track with the “worst-case” scenarios outlined by climate scientists.

The New York Times has published a useful overview of where the climate fight stands after Biden’s first week. It won’t be news to those who have been following these topics closely, but it’s a great resource for catching up. “The Democrats’ razor-thin majority is no guarantee of action,” Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman remind readers. “In the Senate, Democrats are 10 votes short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster that would almost certainly come with legislation that would replace coal and oil with power sources such as wind, solar and nuclear energy, which do not warm the planet.”

Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman | The New York Times

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