Biden has promised to do just that once he takes office. But with these lame-duck final actions, that task gets a whole lot harder.
The administration is checking off its to-do list by finalizing about a half-dozen rule changes since Election Day.
One of the biggest, just finalized this week, is a set of restrictions making it more difficult to enact public health protections.
Going forward, the Environmental Protection Agency must consider all of the economic costs of curbing an air contaminant, while ignoring any indirect benefit that comes from cutting the pollution.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the move was “all about transparency,” but it will have the effect of tying the Biden administration’s hands in combating air pollution — at least, that is, until it repeals the new requirements on cost-benefit analyses.
Another rule, finalized this week by the Energy Department, will allow manufacturers of home appliances in some circumstances to design their own energy-efficiency tests for their products. Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, is concerned that will lead to cheating consumers out of savings on their electricity bills.
“The new rule is an invitation for abuse,” said deLaski. “The incoming Biden administration should move swiftly to undo this rule.”
And although it’s not technically a rollback, the agency also locked into place existing standards on soot pollution when it had the opportunity to fortify them this week – a move public health experts were urging in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Higher levels of fine particulate matter have been associated with more deaths from covid-19.
In total over the past four years, the Trump administration has finished rolling back at least 134 environmental safeguards, according to a Washington Post tracker.
There are at least another 49 environmental rollbacks still in the works across the federal bureaucracy.
Even in its waning days, the Trump administration is proposing new rollbacks it has little time to complete. Last month, for example, the Interior Department announced it wants to water down safety rules for drilling offshore in the Arctic.
If Democrats win both of the Senate runoffs elections in Georgia, they will have the chance to strike down recently completed Trump-era rules with a law called the Congressional Review Act. Short of that, the Biden administration will likely have to go through the whole months-long rulemaking process again to reverse the regulations.
Some things will be hard to wind back. The Bureau of Land Management is working quickly to auction off the rights in drilling in portions of the nearly 1.6 million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a pristine habitat for polar bear and other animals. It is difficult for Biden’s deputies stop a company from drilling once a lease is sold.
With Inauguration Day looming, officials in Alaska took the unusual step of setting Jan. 6 as the date for the lease sale before the completion of the official “call for nominations,” a step that allows companies to identify tracts on which they want to bid. Matt Lee-Ashley, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, thinks the rush makes the lease sale more vulnerable to legal challenges.
“This whole boondoggle can and should be tossed in the trash by the courts or the next administration,” he said.
Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.
Power plays
John Kerry says he will approach his role as climate envoy with “humility” – and openness to talk to oil companies.
The former secretary of state said that his first step as the National Security Council’s dedicated climate official under the Biden administration will be rejoining the Paris climate accord, which was signed five years ago this weekend.
“It’s simple for the United States to rejoin, but it’s not so simple for the United States to regain its credibility,” he told NPR in one of his first interviews since accepting the post. He said that he would approach the job with “humility” as he seeks to convince other countries that the United States will follow through with its commitments.
Kerry spoke optimistically about the direction of the marketplace, which he said was moving toward clean energy globally. He also said that he intended to meet with oil companies: “I’m listening to what their needs are,” he said.
That willingness to consult with oil and gas companies sparked a backlash from the Sunrise Movement, the youth climate group, which tweeted that oil companies were “the root of the problem” and “shouldn’t get a say in how we fix it.”
Meanwhile, global leaders will speak at the virtual Climate Ambition Summit this Saturday. The summit is co-hosted by the United Nations, the United Kingdom and France, in partnership with Chile and Italy, to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris agreement and encourage countries to present more-ambitious climate plans.
House Republicans are pushing back against the Fed’s plans for climate regulation.
In a letter to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell and Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles, 47 GOP lawmakers discouraged the central bank from imposing tests on lenders to measure their vulnerability to climate change, Politico reports. “The organized pushback by the Republicans is a preview of what the Fed and other financial agencies face as they begin to address economic fallout from global warming and a possible transition away from reliance on fossil fuels,” Politico writes.
Powell said last month that he believed climate change posed a material risk in the financial system. The Fed has also indicated interest in joining an international effort by central banks and regulatory groups to mitigate financial shocks arising from climate risks..
The American Clean Power Association taps Heather Zichal as CEO.
Zichal was a top adviser to President Barack Obama and has also worked with Kerry, who called her selection “strategic and smart” in a statement to Axios. She has also worked at the Nature Conservancy and as the executive director for the Blue Prosperity Coalition.
Zichal will head the new 800-member renewable-energy group, which launches Jan. 1 and stems from an expansion of the 46-year-old American Wind Energy Association to include other renewable energy, Axios reports.
Thermometer
The world’s largest iceberg could imperil a penguin colony.
The mass of ice, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island, is closing on South Georgia Island, a British territory in the south Atlantic Ocean. While the movements of the iceberg, which broke off an Antarctic ice shelf in 2017, depend on ocean currents and are still uncertain, a crash seems more likely than not, our colleague Andrew Freedman reports.
“Should the iceberg, which is about 93 miles long and 30 miles wide, become grounded just off the coast, it could become difficult for the millions of king and macaroni penguins, seals and seabirds to find food, such as fish, forcing them to travel long distances around the iceberg. In addition, blue whales feed just off the coast of the island, and this could complicate their access to krill.”
The human footprint
Masks, gloves and disinfectant wipes are littering the California coast.
The same items that save lives by protecting people from the coronavirus are ending up as trash that can disrupt delicate ecosystems, our colleague Scott Wilson reports.
“Since the pandemic began early this year, masks have become a go-to item of the national wardrobe, especially here along the California coast where mask-wearing rates are high. But many are careless with the new accessory and, in windy places like many along this state’s 840-mile coast, the masks and other products are ending up on sidewalks, skittering into storm drains, blowing onto beaches and ending up in the Pacific Ocean and its bays,” Wilson writes.
The state’s coming rainy season is expected to wash even more urban debris out to sea, where the plastics in masks can harm ocean wildlife. In a recent coastal cleanup effort held over the month of September — during which volunteers collected 70,000 pounds of trash — masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment ranked 12th out of 50 categories of recovered debris.
Human-made materials may now equal the weight of all life on earth.
The mass of everything humans have ever built or made — from planes to plastic bags — is now equal to approximately 1.1 trillion metric tons, the same mass as all living things on the planet, according to a study published in the journal Nature. “The finding may bolster the argument that Earth has entered the Anthropocene, a proposed geologic epoch in which humans are the dominant force shaping the planet,” National Geographic reports.
While some outside scientists, and even the authors themselves, admit that it’s hard to be precise about when exactly the Earth will be more artificial than biological by mass, the overall historical sweep is clear and dramatic. The authors estimate that at the start of the 20th century, the mass of human-created stuff only weighed in at about 3 percent of global biomass.
Disturbed by the amount people throw away, one couple opened a zero-waste store.
Mason & Greens, which opened in Old Town Alexandria, Va., in March, sells grocery and boutique items with little to no packaging. It’s part of a movement that’s pushing to minimize garbage through reusing materials, recycling, and reducing consumption, spurred over growing concerns about the impact of waste — particularly plastics — on the planet, our colleague Jessica Wolfrom reports.
Whereas most Americans throw away about five pounds of trash per person, store owners Justin and Anna Marino estimate that they fill a single trash bag about once every two weeks from their store, which is open seven days a week and has seven employees.
Extra mileage
A humpback whale was spotted near the Statue of Liberty.
The Coast Guard confirmed sightings of the whale in New York Harbor on Tuesday but said it would not get involved unless the animal became endangered, NBC News reports.
The New York parks department noted an uptick in whale sightings around the city, a pattern that may stem from abundant food and improved water quality.
