On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed a stack of executive orders related to immigration, the pandemic, government accountability, racial equality, and of course, energy and climate change. “I thought with the state of the nation today, there’s no time to waste. Get to work immediately,” Biden said a few hours after his inauguration. “There’s no time to start like today.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden had promised to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement on Day 1. He made good on that promise, and the U.S. will officially be back in the agreement in February following a 30-day period.
by Bloomberg
|Thursday, January 21, 2021
Biden s flurry of actions drew opposition from industry and, with Paris, even a key Senate Democrat.
(Bloomberg) President Joe Biden signed sweeping actions to combat climate change just hours after taking the oath of office, moving to rejoin the Paris accord and imposing a moratorium on oil leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Environmentalists said Biden’s actions some of which could take years to be implemented renew the U.S. commitment to safeguarding the environment and signal to the world that America has returned to the global fight against climate change.
Biden Orders Immediate Confrontation of Climate Crisis
On Jan. 20, President Joe Biden signed an executive order entitled, “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.” It establishes the Biden administration’s commitment to immediately work to confront both the causes and impacts of climate change by implementing policy guided by science. The order rolls back many actions taken by the Trump administration to loosen environmental standards and protections and calls on all federal agency heads to review and “consider suspending, revising, or rescinding the agency actions” that may be inconsistent with Biden’s articulated policy. It also effectively recommits the U.S. to the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, a multilateral treaty designed to reduce carbon emissions and address climate change, which President Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2017.