To secure his legacy, President Joe Biden has issued a flurry of environmental and other regulations in the election year, including a landmark regulation that Coal-fired power plants to record chimney emissions or shut down.
Limiting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuelled power plants is the Democratic president’s most ambitious undertaking yet to curb planet-warming pollution from the energy sector, the country’s second-largest contributor to Climate change.
The power plant rule is one of more than 60 regulations Biden and his administration passed last month to achieve his policy goals, including a promise to cut carbon emissions that drive climate change. approximately halved by 2030. The regulations are being led by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) but also involve a number of other federal agencies. They are being issued in rapid succession as the Biden administration tries to meet a looming but uncertain deadline to ensure they are not repealed by a new Congress – or a new president.
“The Biden administration is in green blitz mode,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of the activist group Evergreen Action.
It’s not just the environment
The flood of regulations affects more than just the environment.
As the clock ticks down to Election Day, Biden’s administration has issued or proposed rules on a variety of issues, Forgiveness of student loans and affordable housing for Overtime payHealth and Compensation for passengers which are being unduly delayed as he campaigns for re-election against likely Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Overall, federal agencies broke records by issuing 66 major final rules in April, more than any other month during Biden’s presidency, according to the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. More than half of the rules – 34 – were are expected to have an economic impact of at least US$200 million, said the center.
This number is by far the highest that a new president has issued in a single month, according to the center. The closest was the 20 such rules that Trump issued in his last month in office.
Biden is not afraid to promote the rules. For example, he said went to Madison, Wisconsin, to promote his student loan relief measures after the Supreme Court rejected his original plan. Increasingly, Cabinet members are being dispatched across the country, often to swing states, to support the administration’s actions.
The problem with the rules
Once a new administration takes office, measures created through legislation can be more easily reversed than laws, especially when Congress is deeply divided.
“There is no better time to start than today,” Biden said on his first day in office as he began to clean up Trump’s legacy.
During his presidency Biden has restored protections for endangered species which Trump has withdrawn. He has also increased standards for fuel efficiencywhich caused the former president to reverse his decision.
The Ministry of Education Employment rule targets college programs that leave graduates with high levels of debt compared to their expected earnings. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development has reinstated a rule that aimed to eliminate racial disparities in suburbs and has scrapped it by Trump.
It is widely expected that if Trump wins the election in November, he would seek to reverse the regulations introduced by Biden.
Deadlines are approaching
The Congressional Review Act allows lawmakers to invalidate new laws after they are passed by the executive branch. Republicans in Congress used the once-obscure law more than a dozen times in 2017 to undo actions taken by former President Barack Obama. Democrats retaliated four years later by repealing three Trump administration laws.
The law requires a vote to be taken within 60 days of a rule being published in the Federal Register. This deadline varies depending on how long Congress is in session. Government officials believe that the measures taken so far this year cannot be reviewed by the law in the next Congress. Republicans, however, oppose almost all of the measures and have filed objections that could lead to a series of votes in the House and Senate in the coming months.
Biden is likely to veto any repeal attempt that lands on his desk before the end of his term.
“The rules are safe in this Congress,” said Michael Gerrard, who teaches environmental law at Columbia Law School, given the Democratic majority in the Senate and the White House. If Republicans take the majority in Congress and the White House next year, “anything is possible,” Gerrard said.
Rule-making to leave a legacy
In addition to the power plant regulations, the EPA also issued separate regulations for exhaust emissions from cars And TRUCK And Methane emissions of oil and gas drilling. The Interior Ministry has now restricted new oil and gas leases to 13 million acres of state oil reserves in Alaska and called on oil and gas companies to pay more for drilling on federal land and meet stricter requirements for cleaning old or abandoned wells.
Industry associations and Republicans criticized Biden’s actions as an overreach.
“This spate of new EPA rules ignores our nation’s ongoing challenges with electricity reliability and is the wrong approach at a critical time for our nation’s energy future,” said Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.
In addition to climate, the EPA also has a long-delayed ban on asbestos, a carcinogen that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year, and set strict limits on certain so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water. The EPA also called for more than 200 chemical plants nationwide to reduce emissions of toxic substances likely to cause cancer, especially in poor and minority communities already burdened by industrial pollution.
Although many of Biden’s measures were implemented only recently, they have been planned and restored or strengthened since he took office. more than 100 environmental regulations that Trump has weakened or eliminated.
The rules come two years after the Democrats introduced a Comprehensive law to promote clean energy It is widely celebrated as the most significant climate law of all time.
Taken together, Democrats say, the climate bill and Biden’s executive actions could solidify his position with climate-focused voters – including young people who put Biden in office four years ago – and help him defeat Trump in a likely rematch in November.
“Every community in this country has the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. “We have promised to listen to the people who suffer from pollution and to act to protect them.”
“Challenging times”
In addition to the vote in Congress, the regulations are also likely to be challenged in court by industry and Republican-led states; several lawsuits have already been filed.
“Part of our strategy is to make sure we understand the current court culture that we are in and make sure that every measure, every rule, every policy is more sustainable and as legally sound as possible,” Regan told a Conference of environmental journalists Last month.
However, looming over any executive action is the Supreme Court, where a 6-3 conservative majority is increasingly restricting the powers of federal agencies, including the EPA. groundbreaking ruling of 2022 limited the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming and established a separate regulation Regulations protecting millions of hectares of wetlands have been weakened.
A case pending in court could put the EPA’s “Good Neighbor” plan to combat air pollution on hold while litigation continues.
“We are living in difficult times in many ways, but we at EPA remain focused on our mission,” Regan said at the April conference. “And then we have to defend this case in court.”
There are also legal challenges to regulations issued by other authorities.
Republican-led states are Challenging the government’s new Title IX rules that provide expanded protections for LGBTQ+ students and new safeguards for victims of sexual assault. They are also Lawsuit to overturn a rule requiring background checks with buyers at gun shows and in front of shops.
Gerrard, a law professor at Columbia University, said the risk of executive actions being overturned by Congress or the courts “makes it difficult for either side to build any momentum.” That uncertainty also makes it harder for industry to comply with the rules because it is not sure how long the rules will remain in place.
Climate perseverance?
Gerrard and other experts said the climate law and the bipartisan infrastructure law The laws passed in 2021 are more permanent and will be harder for a future president to reverse. The two laws, along with executive actions, will put the country on track to meet Biden’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, environmental advocates say.
The climate bill, which calls for nearly $400 billion in spending to promote clean energy, will have ripple effects on the economy for years to come, said Christy Goldfuss, executive director of the Natural Resource Defense Council and a former Obama administration official.
She rejected complaints from industry and Republicans that the power plant regulation was a continuation of the Obama-era “war on coal.”
“It’s an attack on pollution,” she said, adding that fossil fuels like coal and oil are subject to the Clean Air Act “and must be cleaned up.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who led the lawsuit in the 2022 Supreme Court case, said the EPA is sticking to what he called Biden’s “Green New Deal” agenda.
“Unelected bureaucrats continue to try to pass laws rather than relying on elected members of Congress for their advice,” said Morrisey, the Republican candidate for the state’s governor.