A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

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And just like that, President Biden’s first 100 days were over. Or nearly: This largely symbolic period ends on Thursday. TNR’s Kate Aronoff will be weighing in on Biden’s climate record thus far, but for now, here’s a brief recap of the past few months.

On Day One, as promised, Biden revoked the Keystone XL pipeline’s permit. TNR’s Nick Martin took the opportunity to make the case for canceling all pipelines currently under construction. No luck as of yet: The Biden administration has been strangely passive about the Dakota Access Pipeline, inclined to let things play out in the courts. Also in his first days, Biden signed an executive order to have the United States rejoin the Paris Agreement, and directed federal agencies to update their fleet with “clean, zero-emission vehicles.”

Deb Haaland was confirmed and sworn in as secretary of the interior, a huge step in a complicated history of Native representation in government, Nick wrote, as well as a reversal of the recent tradition of the Interior Department being run like a colonizers’ and oil drillers’ theme park.

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The administration did abandon Elizabeth Klein as nominee for deputy secretary after Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski objected—an interesting case study not just in Murkowski’s veto power but in her attempt to balance the interests of the oil industry and her Native constituents. How this Interior Department will deal with a long, problematic legacy of drilling on public lands and helping to broker drilling deals with Indian Country remains to be seen.

Biden announced an infrastructure plan that included $500 billion for clean energy investment. Is that enough? Kate convincingly argued that, unfortunately, it’s not.

Progressives and climate activists have not given up on the Green New Deal. For a look behind the scenes, check out Kate’s piece on the different groups and the proposals they’ve been coming up with. Or read her story on why one of the key differences between the GND approach and Biden’s may actually be strategic, not ideological.

Finally, Biden held a climate summit last week, pledging to cut emissions by 50 to 52 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. “The UNFCCC’s own standard baseline for judging reductions is against 1990 emissions levels, not those from 2005,” Kate noted. “That means the pledge is in reality a much more modest 43 percent reduction by 2030.” (The administration also let Bill Gates speak at the summit, for reasons passing all understanding. Gates may cosplay as a climate expert, but he isn’t one. What he is, Kate explained in March, is an evangelist for private sector innovation as a response to crisis: “Socialize the risk, in other words, and privatize the reward.”)

Incidentally, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the summit to attempt to get rich nations to pay his administration not to continue presiding over rampant destruction of the Amazon rain forest. As Andre Pagliarini observed, rich nations probably should be paying poorer nations as part of an equitable climate response, but Bolsonaro really can’t be trusted to protect either the Amazon or the many people living within it.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Stat of the Week

That’s the gap between the emissions that countries admit to and “the emissions calculated by independent models,” according to Washington Post reporting of a new study.

Good News

Electric vehicles are slowly finding favor with people who think Honda Civics are girly and prefer to drive cars built like Panzers.

Bad News

Bogus culture wars over environmental issues remain something of a national pastime. Read Nick Martin’s take on a bizarre weekend of conservatives claiming Joe Biden was going to steal America’s steaks.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Halting the Vast Release of Methane Is Critical for Climate, U.N. Says

This summary of a new U.N. report—and generally shifting international awareness around the importance of reducing methane emissions—is worth your time, and very relevant for evolving debates about fracking, oil-well capping, meat, and more (all sources of methane emissions):

The report, a detailed summary of which was reviewed by The New York Times, singles out the fossil fuel industry as holding the greatest potential to cut its methane emissions at little or no cost. It also says that—unless there is significant deployment of unproven technologies capable of pulling greenhouse gases out of the air—expanding the use of natural gas is incompatible with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement.

The reason methane would be particularly valuable in the short-term fight against climate change: While methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, it is also relatively short-lived, lasting just a decade or so in the atmosphere before breaking down. That means cutting new methane emissions today, and starting to reduce methane concentrations in the atmosphere, could more quickly help the world meet its midcentury targets for fighting global warming.

Hiroko Tabuchi | The New York Times

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