WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 (CNA) - US President Joe Biden on Wednesday (Jan 20) announced America's return to the international Paris Agreement to fight climate change, the centrepiece of a raft of day-one executive orders aimed at restoring US leadership in combating global warming.
“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear now.”
The announcements also included a sweeping order to review all of former President Donald Trump's actions weakening climate change protections, the revocation of a vital permit for TC Energy's Keystone XL oil pipeline project from Canada, and a moratorium on oil and gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that Trump's administration had recently opened to development.
The orders by the newly sworn-in president will mark the start of a major policy reversal in the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China, after the Trump administration pilloried climate science and rolled back environmental regulation to maximise fossil fuel development.
Biden has promised to put the United States on a track to net-zero emissions by 2050 to match the steep and swift global cuts that scientists say are needed to avoid the most devastating impacts of global warming, using curbs on fossil fuels and massive investments in clean energy.
The path will not be easy, though, with political divisions in the United States, opposition from fossil fuel companies, and wary international partners concerned about U.S. policy shifts obstructing the way.
"We got off track very severely for the last four years with a climate denier in the Oval Office," said John Podesta, an adviser to former President Barack Obama who helped craft the 2015 Paris Agreement. "We enter the international arena with a credibility deficit."
Biden's orders also require government agencies to consider revising vehicle fuel efficiency standards and methane emissions curbs, and to study the possibility of re-expanding the boundaries of wilderness national monuments that had been reduced in size by the Trump administration.
While environmental advocates were thrilled by the orders, industry groups and conservatives criticised them.
Alaska's Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy mocked Biden's decision to shut down oil and gas work in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, saying the new president "appears to be making good on his promise to turn Alaska into a large national park."
The American Petroleum Institute, the nation's top oil and gas industry lobby group, meanwhile, said it believed blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline was a "step backward".
"This misguided move will hamper America’s economic recovery, undermine North American energy security and strain relations with one of America’s greatest allies," API President Mike Sommers said.
