On Earth Day 2024, Biden Continues to Implement Historic Climate Action, Conservation Programs

by NewsPhotosFeatures

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday, Apr. 22, 2024 Monday, Apr. 22, 2024 at 4:30:39pm PDT

New Yorkers protest to end fossil fuels. The Biden Administration has made historic progress on climate action and environmental protection © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com

By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com, editor@news-photos-features.com

It’s not just rhetorical flourish or pandering promises. President Biden has taken historic actions in devising and implementing real, innovative programs and achieved unprecedented progress in tackling the climate crisis and protecting the environment in a way that benefits all Americans, cuts costs for households, and creates good-paying jobs and careers.

The programs are detailed, but taken together, they achieve the necessary transition from a carbon-based economy and society, to one that is based on clean, renewable and sustainable infrastructure.

A full week of important environmental announcements, began on Earth Day, April 22, with President Biden announcing that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has selected 60 entities receiving $7 billion through the Solar for All grant competition to deliver residential solar projects to over 900,000 households nationwide, and a guarantee of at least 20 percent energy cost savings per household. The grant competition is part of EPA’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, funded through the Inflation Reduction Act.

President Biden also announced new actions to stand up the American Climate Corps – his groundbreaking initiative modeled after FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps that developed such national park sites as Prince William Forest Park where he traveled for Earth Day. Beginning in 2024, the climate corps will put more than 20,000 young Americans to work fighting the impacts of climate change today while gaining the life-changing skills to join the growing clean energy and climate-resilience workforce of tomorrow. (Apply to join the American Climate Corps through a newly launched website, ClimateCorps.gov.)

Meanwhile, President Biden is taking major steps in his historic conservation agenda to protect 30 percent of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030.

Biden is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any president in history – essential to preserve biodiversity and stem the record rate of extinction due to human activity and loss of habitat.

A landmark United Nations report found that up to 1 million species are threatened with extinction, many within decades. The report finds that natural habitats are declining in rates “unprecedented in human history,” as species extinction is accelerating “with grave impacts on people around the world now likely.” (https://now.tufts.edu/2019/05/21/extinction-crisis)

So far, Biden has brought 41 million acres of lands and waters under protection -- from establishing new national monuments like Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni on the outskirts of the Grand Canyon and Camp Hale high in the Colorado Rockies, to strengthening protections for treasures like the Tongass National Forest and Bristol Bay in Alaska.

Significantly, the Interior Department released a rule to help guide the “balanced management” of all 245 million acres of America’s public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. Essentially, this rule requires that conservation and recreation - of natural habitat, cultural resources, recreation areas - be put on equal footing with resource extraction for licenses. This would actually comply with Congress’ mandate 50 years ago, but up until now, the BLM tended to tilt its decisions to benefit mining and drilling. The rule will help to ensure the BLM continues to protect land health while managing other uses of public lands, such as clean energy development and outdoor recreation.

Earth Week coincides with National Park Week and the administration just launched Conservation.gov, a new resource hub to connect people with information, tools, resources and opportunities to support land and water conservation. This includes finding outdoor recreation places, how to volunteer on public lands, and a financial assistance tool to access grant opportunities.

Throughout Earth Week, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing additional actions to build a stronger, healthier future for all: helping ensure clean water for all communities; accelerating America’s clean transportation future; cutting pollution from the power sector while strengthening America’s electricity grid; and providing cleaner air and healthier schools for all children.

The administration’s strongest-ever pollution standards for cars and trucks will reduce carbon emissions by more than 7 billion tons while also slashing emissions of other pollutants and tackling pollution from fossil fuel power plants. This administration is replacing every lead pipe in America so that everyone can drink clean water, cleaning up toxic waste sites and partnering with communities to remove dangerous "forever chemicals" from their water supplies.

Biden’s Justice40 Initiative set a standard of directing 40 percent of the overall benefits of Federal clean energy, clean transit, and other investments that fight climate change to communities that are overburdened by pollution and disadvantaged by under-investment.

A critical theme throughout these policies, is that instead of environmental protection and climate action being “feel good” activities, they are critical to the nation’s economic prosperity, each family’s financial security, and each person’s health and well-being.

“Through clear vision and big, bold steps, the President has continued to move the United States to a leadership position on climate change; taken unprecedented and historic action. He is making sure that this doesn't just represent opportunity or possibilities for few but, really, comeback opportunities for communities all across the country and an economic surplus that's accessible to all Americans, whether it's by entering pathways to a climate career or plugging into the savings that come from clean energy,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi told a press briefing on the initiatives.

Climate change isn’t some long-off abstract, but demonstrated almost daily with devastating and tragic disasters - superstorms, wildfires, droughts, heat waves, floods – that are making the earth quite literally uninhabitable. This week we are being warned of global catastrophe due to record-warm oceans killing the coral reefs that are ground-zero for the food supply.

“Unless earth gets obliterated by an asteroid or experiences some similar catastrophic event, the planet could go on for several billion years. But without the biosphere that makes it possible for us to eat and breathe, humanity could not survive,” writes Craig Foster in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/opinion/earth-day-octopus-teacher.html)

“This work has never been more urgent,” Biden stated in proclaiming Earth Day 2024. “Climate change is the existential crisis of our time; no one can deny its impacts and staggering costs anymore. Today, I encourage all Americans to reflect on the need to protect our precious planet; to heed the call to combat our climate and biodiversity crises while growing the economy; and to keep working for a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all.”

Contrast to Trump, MAGA Republicans

But you aren’t hearing any of this. Because the whole focus is on Trump, sitting in a New York courtroom arguing that paying hush money to defraud voters in the 2016 elections was “democracy” and “that’s just politics.”

The contrast to Biden is stark. As is Trump and the MAGA Republicans’ climate, environment, economic and public health policies. The MAGA Republicans were pushing through six “home appliance freedom” bills, basically doing their darnedest to reverse any semblance of climate action in favor of Big Oil.

Reminder what the 2024 election is about: Trump continues to call climate change a hoax (and thinks wind turbines cause cancer); appointed fossil fuels lobbyists to head the EPA and Department of Interior and most of his nominees had fossil fuel ties, so it is no surprise he rescinded national monument status for Bears Ears and other protected lands and promoted drilling (asked his “solution” to inflation, Trump said, “Drill. Drill. Drill.”). He rolled back over 125 environmental rules that protected public health, clean air and clean water and his donors continue to sue in the Supreme Court to overturn the EPA’s ability to protect water and air; gutted regulations on power plant pollution; rolled back clean car standards which increased pollution and raised fuel costs for families; tried to eliminate the EV tax credit and other green credits and rebates; and promises to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act which is funding historic climate action programs, scrap new pollution rules and increase reliance on fossil fuels – again.