The NPR Politics Podcast - Do Biden's Climate Executive Orders Have Teeth?

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

President Biden will "pause" new federal land leases for oil and gas extraction "to the extent possible" — but how much of an impact will that have on greenhouse gas emissions? Also: the US government will order 200 million more doses of coronavirus vaccine.This episode: White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, White House correspondent Scott Detrow, climate reporter Nate Rott, White House correspondent Tamara Keith.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Olivia from Kalira, Alabama, where I just realized I have been working from my bedroom for 42 weeks now. This podcast was recorded at... It is 1.46 p.m. Eastern Time, January 27th, and it is a Wednesday. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. Ah, yes, 42 weeks in the bedroom. And that's where I'm at right now, too. So that's great. Hey, there is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House, too. And also we have Nate Rott here with us. Hello. Hello. Hello.

And Nate, you cover, among other things, the fact that the planet is getting hotter. Yeah. Yeah. Super uplifting topics typically, you know, biodiversity crisis, climate change, all the good stuff. And you're here because we are going to talk about how President Biden is responding to climate change. And he issued some orders today on that very topic. And the big one that's going to get all of the attention or a lot of the attention is this decision.

And I will read this from your story this morning. Biden will order the Department of the Interior to pause new oil and gas leasing on public land and offshore water, quote, to the extent possible. Yeah, it's a little squishy, huh? It's a little squishy to the extent possible. I don't know how you measure that. And also review existing leasing and permitting practices related to fossil fuel development. So those are a lot of caveats. But this is a big deal because this is fossil fuel extraction or oil and gas drilling on federal lands, right? Yeah. So, I mean, what he's doing right now, and again, like, yeah, it is very squishy. And we haven't seen the full text of what it exactly looks like. But he's putting a pause on oil and gas leasing on federal lands, more so that there's nothing in there that says permitting at this point.

And we don't know how long that pause is going to be, right? Like that's going to be a really big question that we want to, we're going to want to figure out. There's definitely a belief, you know, certainly from the oil and gas industry that this is going to become a permanent ban. You know, that's what Biden said he wanted to do during his campaign. It's what a lot of environmental groups and climate activists have said they wanted to see. So what that will mean is that, you know, there will not be new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, public lands, which is, you know, a big deal because roughly a quarter of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels that are extracted on public lands. I should say there another caveat, right? I said fossil fuels because coal makes up a lot of those emissions. And this new executive order

does not address coal leasing on public lands in any way. Coal leasing, we should say, you know, has been in steep decline anyway, just because the marketplace for it is not so hot. Yeah, Biden made a lot of climate related promises running as a candidate. A lot of people have said, and it's definitely true, that he talked specifically about climate change more than any other presidential nominee had before. And a lot of the orders signed today at least start the process. There's a lot of things where you're not going to see immediate results or more action is needed, but started the process of putting these promises into place. Just a few different examples, starting the process of creating a civilian climate core, you know, this New Deal inspired idea of having this big mass of people out there to work on greening projects, to work on carbon sequestration and agriculture

is one of the specific things they mentioned. One other thing that's worth flagging is that Biden also announced an international climate summit for April 22nd. This would be kind of a symbolic thing of saying, look, the U.S. to lower its carbon footprint over the coming years. When John Kerry was talking to reporters today, he suggested that that new goal would be announced around or right before this big summit in April. And do environmentalists, environmental groups, I'm sure they're over the moon, obviously, after especially after the last four years where climate, even the talk of climate change seemed to be banished uh by the administration but how how are they feeling about these moves do they feel like they're going far enough at least for you know first steps from this administration there there was a ton of positive response um you know just just mostly about the amount of focus that's being put on this issue that advocates often feel gets

immediately pushed to the side for more pressing things, every time there's an economic crisis, things like that. I think going forward, again, as Nate pointed out, there's a ton of questions about how far this leasing pause goes. If that were to fully go into effect, that would be a pretty big deal when you look at the amount of greenhouse gases that come out of oil and gas drilled for on government land. But it is worth pointing out, the big thing here, massively overhauling the economy to lower greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades, which is really the main goal and the only goal that matters for this, that's something that's going to be really hard to do just through executive orders. That's going

to be something where you'll most likely need a bill going through Congress. And right now, that just seems very hard to do, given how narrowly divided Congress is, and given how many Republican lawmakers are still deeply skeptical of taking big steps on climate change. And the big thing about talking about overhauling the economy, you're talking about jobs and what you will hear from Republicans and what you will hear from Republicans and what you will hear from these oil and gas companies is concerns about job losses in the fossil fuel industry, in those oil and gas drilling jobs. And Nate, can you talk about like

the concern that, you know, people are going to be put out of work by some of these orders. Yeah, look, I mean, like, so there are, especially, you know, in the West, a lot of states that really depend on federal lands to do oil and gas leasing. So, you know, like in New Mexico and Wyoming and Alaska, these are states that have a huge amount of federal land. You know, that being said, though, like the oil and gas industry, they already have rights, drilling rights for more than 20 million acres of federal land that are not in production. So that's all those leases that I was talking about that they're sitting on that they could still do development on. And another really big thing here is that this today's announcements have absolutely

no impact on on oil and gas drilling on private lands. So, you know, in Texas and Pennsylvania, that's almost all private land that these activities are happening on. So there's still going to be a lot of production domestically of oil and gas that this executive order does not touch. And that issue is why throughout the campaign and continuing into the White House now, President Biden has made such a huge point about leading the conversation with jobs. He and his advisors, Gina McCarthy and John Kerry, when they appeared at the White House today, talked about this nonstop. They frame this as it's not about the jobs that might be lost. It's about the jobs that you could create as the country transitions to new energy. So they are constantly talking about the jobs to be had

installing solar panels, you know, installing turbines, converting the automobile industry to electric vehicles, the charging stations, all of the infrastructure that would be needed here is something that the Biden White House really wants to emphasize. And they feel like that is a way to sell this and maybe win some support, you know, even if the support from Republican lawmakers is lagging, getting more public buy-in to these big policies. I mean, I think that speaks to a growing recognition politically and just amongst the American public that like, look, climate change is not some future far away thing. It is happening right now. You know, temperatures globally have risen, you know, 2020 last year, essentially tied

2016 as the hottest year on record. There were catastrophic wildfires in Australia and the entire West, you know, California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado. And, you know, we had more hurricanes than almost ever before last year. So, you know, the effects of climate change are here, they are now. And so I think there's a sort of a recognition that we need to start doing something about it before we're sort of locked into these worst kind of climate change scenarios that scientists have been warning us about for decades if we don't cut our greenhouse gas emissions. OK, Nate, thank you for I mean, it is a it is a pressing message. It's not necessarily an uplifting message, but it's an important message. Thank you for sharing that. And we'll we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, we will be right back after a quick break to talk about the 200 million more doses of vaccine that President Biden wants to buy. We are still in the middle of this pandemic. And right now, having science news you can trust from variants to vaccines is essential.

NPR Shortwave has your back. About 10 minutes every weekday, listen and subscribe to Shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR. And we're back with a familiar face, although we don't see faces anymore. Hey, Tamara Keith, White House correspondent. Familiar voice, I guess. Let's go with that. Yes. Good to be here.

So yesterday, Biden announced a plan to buy 200 million more doses of vaccine, and the administration is now working with states to get these doses out efficiently. This seems like a big deal, Scott, because this would cover the entire population of the U.S. that is eligible to get a vaccine, right? Yeah, and it's worth reminding people that as of right now, children are not eligible for these vaccines at the current moment. So yeah, this would bring vaccine totals to the level where 300 million Americans could get fully vaccinated. Reminder, both of these vaccines take two shots right now. So we're talking about 600 million doses that the federal government would have acquired. This is not going to show up for

a while. Biden is talking about midsummer, late summer as the period where this extra surge of vaccines could be out and in a position where people can be getting the shots. But still, he was talking pretty confidently about a point in the summer where most Americans are vaccinated, which would be huge. Of course, at the same time, Biden made sure to qualify things, saying that's, of course, if everything goes right. And as we know, over the last couple months, this is a really complicated process. Just having the vaccine doses does not mean you are getting them the places they need to be and that people are there at the right time to get the shots.

I know that Biden also said that he's going to boost the amount of vaccines that states are getting in the short term. Are we clear on how that happens, how he's going to do that? Yeah, the additional vaccines that will be coming over the next few weeks are mostly from Moderna, which has sped up its manufacturing a little bit. Biden said 1.4 million more doses will be going out to states the next few weeks. He also made another change that state officials had really been calling for for a while. And he said that going forward, the federal government is going to give states a three-week forecast at how many vaccines

are coming down the line. Up until now, states only really knew what was coming the next week, and that made it really hard to put planning in place. So he's hoping a little bit more transparency and on-ramp gives states the ability to have better plans to get these two actual people. And Tam, part of this process is communicating with the public about what's going on. I know the White House COVID-19 response team held its first press briefing today for the Biden administration. What did they have to say? So it lasted a little bit under an hour. They took questions at the end. They started out with what amount of PowerPoint presentations from the CDC director and Dr. Fauci. And the message was

that, in fact, the holiday peak has happened and that the U.S. is past that peak, but that things are still really not in a good place in terms of the number of cases in the country, the level of viral spread. Dr. Fauci talked about these variants or mutants that are circulating. And I think what stood out about this briefing is that they really did not accentuate the positive. This briefing put a lot of emphasis on things that were not super encouraging. Things like, yes, they expect that 500,000 Americans will have died by the end of next month. You know, saying that they don't have all the vaccine that they want, that it's going to take months and months and months for everyone who wants a vaccine to get it. And Biden has taken this approach on the pandemic all along. You know,

it was a way to contrast himself with Donald Trump during the campaign. Biden quotes Franklin Roosevelt all the time. He's now got a giant painting of Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office. And this is this is one of those areas. He always says that that Roosevelt made a point to level with people during the Great Depression, saying it's going to be bad for a while before it gets better. And that's a line that Biden often repeats when it when it comes to this pandemic. OK, let's let's leave it there for now. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I also

cover the White House. And I'm Tamara Keith. I also also cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.