Volts podcast: how Biden can address climate change through executive action
In this episode, Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner, attorneys at the Center of Biological Diversity, discuss which executive actions President Biden could take to aggressively address climate change, and what might happen if he did so.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
It now seems fairly clear that no climate legislation is going to pass this Congress before the midterm elections. After the midterms, Democrats are highly unlikely to retain control of both houses, so there likely will not be any federal climate legislation in the US for many years to come. This is, obviously, to the country's immense shame.
That means Biden finds himself in the same situation that Obama ended up in: if he wants anything at all to get done on climate change during his term, he's going to have to do it himself, through executive action. He has already begun announcing some executive orders.
However, there is a case to be made that the president has the power to do much, much more. Two senior attorneys at the Center for Biological Diversity — Jean Su, director of CBD’s energy justice program, and Maya Golden-Krasner, deputy director of its Climate Law Institute — have been aggressively making that case for the past three years, laying out a broad suite of actions available to a president and accompanying them with arguments rooting those powers in statutory authority.
They've just released a new report called “The Climate President’s Emergency Powers,” which digs into what it would mean for Biden to declare a state of emergency over climate change and what sort of statutory powers that would grant him.
In this moment of utter legislative failure, I wanted to talk to Su and Golden-Krasner about the kind of things Biden is capable of doing, which actions he ought to prioritize, how he should think about the hostile Supreme Court, and the political optics of governing so aggressively and unilaterally.
Alright. Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner of the Center for Biological Diversity. Thanks for coming to Volts.
Maya Golden-Krasner
Thanks for having us.
David Roberts
So there's a lot to discuss, a lot to discuss here. So I just want to start maybe with this sort of background assumption. Let's just assume, for the sake of our conversation, that Build Back Better does not miraculously rise from the ashes and pass in the next, whatever, however much time we have to pass it a week or two. Let's just assume that it's dead dead. That legislation is dead dead. And that, as all odds are pointing to that, all the prognostications now say that Democrats are almost certainly going to lose at least one House of Congress in the midterms, which will mean legislation is dead for the rest of Biden's term.
That leaves us with what Biden can do on his own. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again, as they say on Battlestar Galactica. This was exactly the situation Obama found himself in, as we all remember. So it's a little depressing to be back here, but let's make the best of it. So the other thing I wanted to say, just by way of preparation is I think it's fair to say that you all, that the CBD, has what I would characterize as a sort of maximalist interpretation of Biden's executive powers. Extremely sweeping.
Your 2019 report on the executive powers available to the President. I mean, if you read through that whole thing, I mean, jeez, Biden could just sort of revolutionize all of government, and all of industry, and justice, and there's almost nothing he couldn't do under some legal authority or another. So I might be, throughout this, playing a little bit of devil's advocate, trying to pus
