Environmentalists And Business Leaders Urge Biden Administration To Go Bold On Climate Goals

In the run-up to the White House’s virtual climate summit on April 22-23, environmental groups and now major corporations are presenting a united front in calling for at least a 50% cut in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, when compared to 2005 levels.

The AP reports, Business leaders urge Biden to set ambitious climate goal:

More than 300 businesses and investors, including such giants as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Coca-Cola, are calling on the Biden administration to set an ambitious climate change goal that would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.

The target would nearly double the nation’s previous commitment and require dramatic changes in the power, transportation and other sectors. President Joe Biden is considering options for expected carbon reductions by 2030 ahead of a virtual climate summit the United States is hosting later this month.

The so-called Nationally Determined Contribution is a key milestone as Biden moves toward his ultimate goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Biden has promised to reveal the nonbinding but symbolically important 2030 goal before the Earth Day summit opens April 22.

“A bold 2030 target is needed to catalyze a zero-emissions future, spur a robust economic recovery, create millions of well-paying jobs and allow the U.S. to ‘build back better’ from the pandemic,″ the businesses and investors said in a letter to Biden.

“New investment in clean energy, energy efficiency and clean transportation can build a strong, more equitable and more inclusive American economy,″ they wrote. The letter was organized by the “We Mean Business” coalition, a group of companies that support action to accelerate the transition to a carbon-free economy.

An ambitious 2030 target would guide the federal government’s approach to sustainable and resilient infrastructure, as well as zero-emissions vehicles and buildings, and “would inspire other industrialized nations to set bold targets of their own,″ the group wrote.

Besides the tech and consumer products giants, companies with major energy holdings, including Exelon, General Electric, PG&E and Edison International, also signed the letter.

Meanwhile, dozens of European lawmakers, business executives and union leaderson Tuesday also urged the United States to slash its greenhouse gas emissions in half in the coming decade. They called for a trans-Atlantic alliance to tackle climate change and achieve a “just and sustainable transition” toward a low-carbon economy.

The letter from U.S. business leaders to the Democratic president comes as fissures between corporate America and the Republican Party have opened over the GOP’s embrace of conspiracy theories and rejection of mainstream climate science, as well as its dismissal of the 2020 election outcome. The most recent flashpoint was in Georgia, where a new Republican-backed law restricting voting rights drew harsh criticism from Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola, whose headquarters are in the state, and resulted in Major League Baseball pulling the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta.

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On climate, the business leaders told Biden they “applaud your administration’s demonstrated commitment to address climate change head-on, and we stand in support of your efforts.″

Millions of Americans are already feeling the impacts of climate change, they wrote, citing the severe winter storm that caused blackouts in Texas and other states, deadly wildfires in California and record-breaking hurricanes in the Southeast and Gulf Coast.

“The human and economic losses of the past 12 months alone are profound,″ they wrote. “Tragically, these devastating climate impacts also disproportionately hit marginalized and low-income communities who are least able to withstand them. We must act now to slow and turn the tide.″

While Biden has reentered the U.S into the Paris climate accord and made climate action a pillar of his presidency, more action is needed, the business leaders said. “An effective national climate strategy will require all of us,″ they told Biden, but “you alone can set the course by swiftly establishing a bold U.S. 2030 target.″

In a related development, Apple became the first major U.S. publicly traded company to endorse regulatory action by the Securities and Exchange Commission mandating disclosure of climate-related information to investors. Apple has made such disclosures for the past decade but said the SEC should make the disclosures mandatory.

“We’re determined to do our part to fight climate change & believe transparency is an important part of this,″ Apple vice president Lisa Jackson said Tuesday in a tweet. “We believe other companies should do the same,″ added Jackson, a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The New York Times editorializes, Trump Abandoned the Climate. This Is Biden’s Moment.

On April 22, Earth Day, the leaders of more than three dozen countries, among them 17 nations responsible for four-fifths of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, will convene at a virtual summit. The purpose is to discuss where the world goes from here on climate change and what each country must do to limit Earth’s warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels — a threshold beyond which scientists predict irreversible environmental damage.

All eyes will be on the person who organized the summit, President Biden. It is a bit melodramatic to call this a moment of truth for Mr. Biden, but it is a critically important moment for a new president who has promised to reclaim a leadership role for America on a pressing global issue that his predecessor foolishly abandoned. Likewise for a president who has pledged to make America’s economy carbon-neutral by midcentury and who has said he will work tirelessly to persuade other major economies to do the same. The ideas he presents must therefore be not only ambitious but also credible.

Anyone with the energy to slog through acres of verbiage will find the elements of a plausible strategy embedded in his $2 trillion recovery plan. The plan is not exactly what his energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, enthusiastically described as a “once in a century” chance to reinvent America’s energy delivery system. (One would hope for more such moments in this century.) But it offers a great deal more than one would deduce from the reactions of left-of-center groups. The Center for Biological Diversity, for instance, complained about the plan’s “gimmicky subsidies,” its fealty to free markets and its failure to end oil and gas drilling much more quickly.

Note: The level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is now higher than it has been in at least 3.6 million years, federal scientists announced last Wednesday. At that time, sea levels were as much as 78 feet higher, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, Greenland was mostly green, and Antarctica had trees. The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, which has caused the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere to rise to levels that cannot be explained by natural causes, scientists say.

CO2 concentration at the Mauna Loa Observatory reached a daily record of 421.21 Parts Per Million (PPM) on April 3. This is the first time in the recent measured record that PPM has topped 420 PPM. This map shows peak PPM values per year dating to the 1970s. Notice a trend? pic.twitter.com/K0Ioksncfb

— Steve Bowen (@SteveBowenWx) April 5, 2021

The plan has many moving parts, two of which are transformative. One is aimed at reducing emissions from cars and trucks, America’s biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Mr. Biden is betting heavily on electric vehicles, which today make up only 2 percent of the vehicles on the road. To “win the E.V. market,” as he put it (China being the main competitor), he proposes $174 billion to build half a million charging stations along the highways — a small fraction of what will be needed, but a good start — plus an array of tax credits aimed at persuading manufacturers to make E.V.s and equip them with batteries that can be recharged as quickly as one can fill up a tank of gas. Also, point-of-sale credits to get people to buy the finished products.

The second potential game changer is a national clean power standard — a federal mandate requiring that a certain (and steadily increasing) percentage of electricity be generated by zero-carbon or very-low-carbon sources like wind, solar, hydroelectric and nuclear power. All those E.V.s and residential heat pumps in Mr. Biden’s electrified America will need huge amounts of power, and it best be clean. One effect of this rule would be to hasten the transition from fossil fuels. Coal is already on its way out, and natural gas’s days are numbered unless some way can be found to capture the emissions from power plants that use it.

This proposal could have tough sledding in Congress not only because Congress has many devoted friends of oil and gas. Clean energy standards have traditionally been left to the states, 30 of which plus the District of Columbia have already adopted them. But there are encouraging signs of buy-in from big utilities, in much the same way as some of the big car companies, most recently General Motors, have embraced a future consisting mainly of E.V.s.

Here again, tax credits and subsidies loom large. For instance, credits for renewable sources like wind and solar power, for years subject to the whims of Congress, are given a 10-year extensionunder the plan and thus a degree of certainty they have never had.

As a whole, Mr. Biden’s climate plans, like the broader jobs plan of which they are a part, rely on private and public investment, and little mention is made of regulation, which occupied center stage in President Barack Obama’s emission-reduction plans. But Mr. Biden has not precluded regulation. The difference is that regulations will henceforth play a complementary role, albeit an important one.

Obama-era rules revoked by Mr. Trump will most likely be restored and perhaps strengthened — among them, rules aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions of methane from new and existing oil and gas facilities and rules to reduce carbon emissions from vehicles. The vehicle rules would be particularly important, since they would require manufacturers to produce steadily more-fuel-efficient cars before the transition to electric vehicles really kicks in, which could be a decade or two down the road.

One overlooked fact in the discussion of Mr. Biden’s plans is that the economics of clean energy are moving his way — due in no small part to the $800 billion economic recovery plan enacted in 2009 under Mr. Obama. That plan, which has been belittled as too small, included $90 billion or so in tax credits, loans and other incentives for clean energy projects, including weatherizing homes and jump-starting E.V.s. (There may not have been a Tesla had it not been for a timely loan under the program.) The effect on renewables like wind and solar was particularly striking, and the prices for both have dropped to the point that both compete favorably with fossil fuels.

A mostly renewable energy landscape is no longer a pipe dream. Nor is a less menacing climate.

Time is running out. The world must take bold actions now for our children and grandchildren if they are to have a future.