The Energy 202: The campaign heats up for Biden to pick a Native American for his Cabinet

Picking a Native American to be the nation’s top public-lands manager would be history-making for a 171-year-old department that manages the U.S. government’s often tense relationship with tribes and oversees national parks and most other federal lands.

“Of course, it would be highly symbolic,” Haaland, a representative from New Mexico, said in an interview this month with our colleagues Juliet Eilperin and Darryl Fears. “A lot of native folks across the country would be proud.”

“We’ve come a long way,” she added, “and I’m happy that a Native American being mentioned for a Cabinet-level position is actually a thing.”

Both Indigenous candidates are up against another strong contender for the job in retiring Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), who has worked with Biden for decades on Capitol Hill and whose father served as interior secretary in the 1960s. 

Haaland and Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) already made history last year by becoming the first Indigenous women to serve in Congress. 

Now dozens of tribal leaders have joined more than 50 House Democrats in urging Biden to break another barrier by elevating Haaland to a Cabinet position. 

Actors and entertainers including Mark Ruffalo, Kerry Washington and Cher have also publicly backed Haaland. Julián Castro, once the youngest member of Barack Obama’s Cabinet, added it is “unconscionable” that an Indigenous person has never been a department secretary.

Those calls come as Biden has promised to build the most diverse Cabinet in history. The only Indigenous figure to achieve similar heights in the federal government was Charles Curtis, who had Kaw Nation heritage and served as Herbert Hoover’s vice president from 1929 to 1933. 

“In the throes of a human-caused climate catastrophe and a global pandemic that is arguably descended right from human species’ behavior on the planet, it is extremely earth shaking to have an Indigenous person potentially be at the helm” of the Interior Department, said Chase Iron Eyes, an activist and attorney who is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and who put together a petition of more than 120 tribal leaders and organizations backing Haaland.

The interior secretary is set to be one of the most important Cabinet members in enacting Biden’s ambitious climate plan. The next head of the department will be tasked with fulfilling Biden’s promises of unwinding the federal oil- and gas-leasing program and extending protections on U.S. lands and waters.

“She has the lived experience,” Iron Eyes said, “and is innately capable of representing the land, the animals and all those who would be under her charge.” 

The push for Haaland has reached a fever pitch in recent days after several left-leaning organizations, including the Sunrise Movement, a prominent youth-led climate group that campaigned for Biden, asked Udall to take his name out of consideration for the job.

“It would not be right for two Udalls to lead the Department of the Interior, the agency tasked with managing the nation’s public lands, natural resources and trust responsibilities to tribes, before a single Native American,” their letter read.

Interior oversees a suite of agencies that facilitate health care, schooling and other services to members of 574 federally recognized tribes. But the department, founded in 1849, has a blemished history of mismanaging funds held on behalf of tribes and, at times, expelling Native Americans from their ancestral lands. 

Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House Natural Resources Committee and one of Haaland’s highest-profile supporters in Congress, sees her potential nomination as a corrective to that legacy.

“This agency of Interior was created many, many, many years ago as we expanded west,” he said. “But it was also created to disenfranchise native people.”

“So here you have an opportunity to come full circle,” he added.

“When we think about our public lands — and the Interior Department manages all of those public lands — we have to include Native Americans in the conversation because this was all Indian country at one time,” Haaland told our colleague Karen Tumulty at a Washington Post Live event Friday. “They deserve to be consulted when decisions about our public lands are made, and we’ve seen that play out in real time during this administration.”

During the interview, Haaland said she “not being vetted” by the Biden team, though she added: “I think they need to make the choice first before the vetting happens.” Haaland and Biden offices are in conversation about a potential role, said a person close with Haaland who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

One thing Haaland would address as interior secretary, if picked, is the recent reorganization of two offices, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management. Those Trump administration actions, she said, have “made it harder for tribal nations and tribal leaders to actually have an opportunity to be in touch with the top people in the administration.”

Advocates for Haaland concede that Udall, a White man, has been a champion for Native Americans as the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Having served in both the House and the Senate for more than two decades, he would bring a considerable amount of experience to the department.

But Grijalva argues Haaland, a first-term representative, has enough experience, too, after serving as vice chair of his panel. “Any comment that she’s not qualified for the job is wrong, and a cheap shot,” he said.

Connor, a water rights expert, knows the department well too after a stint as its second-ranking official from 2014 to 2017. He also served in the department under President Bill Clinton and worked as counsel for Democrats on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

While countries around the world have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, activists were hoping that Saturday’s virtual Climate Ambition Summit, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate accord, would see countries adding more near-term targets to these plans. Many were disappointed by what they saw as incremental steps, Bloomberg News reports.

China, for instance, said it would cut emissions per unit of gross domestic product by 65 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, representing only a modest increase from the previous 60 percent target.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned that the world was not acting quickly enough to prevent catastrophic climate change, pointing to coronavirus relief packages around the world as a sign that nations had not internalized the climate threat.

“So far, the members of the G-20 are spending 50 percent more in their stimulus and rescue packages on sectors linked to fossil fuel production and consumption, than on low-carbon energy. This is unacceptable,” Guterres said.

The outgoing Trump administration was not represented at the event, but Biden released a statement pledging that the United States would rejoin the Paris agreement on the first day of his presidency. Biden also reiterated a campaign pledge of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

The giant asset manager has previously come under fire for not living up to its corporate rhetoric on climate change. BlackRock has often ranked at the bottom among its peers in terms of support for shareholder resolutions on climate.

But this may be starting to shift: Data in a new report from the company, which controls $7 trillion in funds, shows it supporting eight out of nine environmental proposals brought by shareholders since July 2020, CNBC reports. Blackrock’s investment stewardship report says the asset manager intends to continue this trend in 2021, citing research showing that support for shareholder proposals changes corporate practice whether or not the proposal passes. 

BlackRock’s report came amid a busy period last week in climate financing. A major public pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, backed a coalition of activist investors threatening to take over board seats at ExxonMobil. New York State’s $226 billion pension fund announced a plan to drop fossil fuel stocks by 2040, and the sustainability nonprofit Ceres announced that a consortium of investors managing $9 trillion in assets has committed to a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 or sooner.

Biden introduced the former Iowa governor as his nominee to run the Agriculture Department during an event in Wilmington, Del., on Friday. Biden said Vilsack would carry out an ambitious agenda that includes “American agriculture being the first in the world to achieve net-zero emissions,” in part by paying farmers for carbon capture, the Des Moines Register reports.

Vilsack echoed that sentiment in his remarks, saying that the nation would have an “incredible opportunity” to lead the world in combating climate change and reap “the new, good-paying jobs and farm income that will come from that leadership.”

U.S. authorities are holding Kang Juntao, 24, in federal custody in New Jersey on charges of money laundering related to a smuggling ring that shipped 1,500 endangered turtles from the United States to China. Prosecutors described turtles bound with duct tape and hidden in socks to bypass customs officials, Clare Fieseler reports for The Washington Post. Kang was extradited to the United States from Malaysia, where he had spent nearly two years in custody.

Prosecutors say that the operation sold five types of turtles, including the eastern box turtle, Florida box turtle, Gulf Coast box turtle, spotted turtle and wood turtle, all of which are considered endangered. A colorful female box turtle can fetch $20,000 in the black-market pet trade, authorities said.

The prosecution, a multiyear international effort that included undercover work by U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials, was complicated by the fact that Kang operated the smuggling ring from China, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Authorities instead tracked Kang’s vacation plans in 2019 to Malaysia, where an extradition request had already been processed.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is supporting research into the impact of exposure to perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) compounds, often called “forever chemicals,” on the coronavirus, according to a recently released letter.

The Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, publicized a Nov. 6 letter in which CDC Director Robert Redfield said the agency was studying the association between PFAS levels and antibody response to the virus. Redfield said in the letter to Rep. Daniel Kildee (D-Mich.) that research from the CDC and the Agency for Toxic Substances “may shed light on the potential impact of PFAS exposure on vaccine response.”

Raging wildfires in southeastern Australia in 2019 and early 2020 released sunlight-blocking particles that lingered in the upper atmosphere and potentially caused a brief cooling effect, Maddie Stone reports for The Post. The findings were published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment and presented at the virtual American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference this week. 

Scientists have become increasingly interested in understanding the fire-induced thunderclouds – known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds – seen in Australia because of “the possibility that extreme fire weather such as this could become more frequent in a warming world,” Stone writes.

Over the next three weeks, birders from around the country will join together to conduct a national bird census. The annual tradition back to 1900 and has become one of the biggest and longest-running citizen-science projects.