Jan 21, 2021 7:00 AM

Biden Returns the US to the Paris Climate Accord. Will It Matter?

Biden’s first-day actions signal that he’s serious about global warming. But he’s got to make up for four years of lost time.

With the stroke of a pen from his new desk in the Oval Office, President Joe Biden pulled the US back into the Paris climate accord on Wednesday, an international agreement that experts say is vital to getting the world’s nations to slow the emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The executive order—the third of 17 executive orders or actions issued on his first day in office—means that US officials now will begin calculating a new target for the nation’s overall carbon emissions by the year 2030.

That target, in turn, will require federal, state, and corporate decisionmakers to set new standards for factories, cars, and power plants to use cleaner energy to meet that goal—while likely offering both incentives and penalties to reduce overall energy use by all US residents.

If that wasn’t enough climate action, Biden also signed an order canceling the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have brought crude oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, an amount of petroleum whose production, refining, and burning would create the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions from 35.5 million cars per year. Another executive order signed Wednesday directs federal agencies to block former president Donald Trump’s previous weakening of federal rules that limited the release of emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling operations, to revise vehicle fuel economy and emissions standards, and to update appliance and building efficiency standards.

Along with his dogs Major and Champ, Biden is bringing with him to the White House a big team of climate change experts, including new senior climate advisers in the Departments of State, Treasury, and Transportation, as well as in the National Security Council and Office of the Vice President. Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy is being tapped to head a new White House office on climate policy; former secretary of state John Kerry will be Biden’s new international climate envoy; and David Hayes, a former deputy interior secretary, was named Biden’s special assistant on climate policy, The New York Times reported.

Experts say these first-day moves will set the US on a better path to fight climate change at home and abroad. “The Paris announcement is really important because it puts the US back in the global conversation,” says Jake Schmidt, managing director for the international program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It means Biden can also use the influence of the US to drive other countries to act more aggressively on climate change. We’ve been making the case that we need to have a climate-first foreign policy.”

That approach might work in negotiations with countries like Mexico or Brazil, two nations whose current populist leaders have blocked investment in renewable energy (Mexico) and boosted deforestation (Brazil), Schmidt says. If either nation wants to secure trade agreements with the US, Biden might require them to make climate progress in return. Meanwhile, smaller nations are looking to Biden’s election as a return to normalcy and hopefully progress on climate change, especially in countries that are feeling the heat from rising sea levels and increasing tropical storms.

But experts also warn that there are plenty of hurdles ahead. Trump’s four years were marked with disdain for science, the weakening of environmental regulations, and outright denial of the perils of climate change. In fact, one of Trump’s own early executive actions was announcing that the US would withdraw from the Paris agreement, which the US had joined in 2016 under then-president Barack Obama. (The withdrawal process began in 2019 and became official on November 4, 2020—the day after Trump lost his reelection bid.)

And despite Biden’s fast start, the Earth will continue to heat up over the next decade as lawmakers and policy experts debate how best to slow down society’s petroleum addiction. In fact, 2020 was either tied or in second place for the warmest year on record, according to data released by federal scientists last week. It’s a dangerous trend that climate scientists say will continue even if carbon emissions were stopped today.

Still, Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris accord means that the US will at least take baby steps, along with other nations, to lift the curse of climate change, a human-caused catastrophe that is leading to more frequent and more powerful storms, increased droughts, and intense rainfall across the planet. “With the US coming back and saying, ‘We are in this still, and we are going to be actively engaged now,’ it’s a significant commitment,” says Janine Felson, a research fellow at the Melbourne University Sustainable Society Institute and a former climate negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States. “We know that we only have a decade to turn things around to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees warming.”

That’s the number that scientists say must not be surpassed by the year 2050 to prevent the worst effects of climate change. “Now, there’s hope at least that things won’t be as bad,” Felson says.

Representatives of the 190 nations that signed the Paris agreement are scheduled to meet in Glasgow, Scotland, in November for the next round of talks on implementing the Paris agreement, known as the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP26. That’s where members of the Biden administration will likely present their 2030 climate emissions goal, and where nations will be pressing one another to keep their green promises. “I think of Paris as a system of institutionalized peer pressure,” says Elliot Diringer, executive director of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC. “With the world’s largest economy in, rather than out, that system stands a better chance of success.”

That said, the Paris goals are voluntary and rely on accurate reporting by each nation. Nobody gets punished or kicked out if they don’t do their part. Diringer says Biden’s ambitious domestic climate policies need to successfully cut greenhouse gas emissions, but they also need to withstand any future political shifts in Congress or the White House. “The biggest challenge is assembling bipartisan support in Congress,” says Diringer, who was a former senior adviser at the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Clinton administration. “The policies need to be not only ambitious but durable; they need to stick.”

During his campaign for president, Biden pitched the idea of reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era work program, but updating it as a climate workforce that would tackle problems like forest management and wildfire prevention. He also said his goal was to have the US power sector become carbon-neutral by the year 2035, with the rest of the US economy to catch up by 2050.

Diringer says Biden’s team has a lot of work ahead to crunch these emissions numbers and see if they are doable. “It’s important that the target be both credible and achievable,” Diringer says, “and also to take into account what climate plans states and cities are doing. There will be a considerable amount of quantitative analysis, and a dose of political judgment, as to how far we will be able to get in the next four years to get these policies in place.”