Climate and Environment

November 10, 2021

Dorothy Slater Hannah Story Brown

Blog Post 2020 Election/TransitionClimate and EnvironmentIndependent Agencies

A Fossil Fuel-Aligned Investment Executive Is Biden's Final Nominee to Manage Federal Retirement Funds

Harvard President Larry Bacow announced mid-afternoon on September 9th that the Ivy League university — whose 53.2 billion endowment exceeds the GDP of over 100 countries — would officially end its investments in fossil fuels. That announcement set off a domino reaction of divestment announcements from Dartmouth, the California State University system, Boston University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Toronto, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Netherlands’ largest pension fund, and hundreds of other groups. They appear to see the writing on the wall that fossil fuel investments, beyond being morally egregious, are also no longer profitable.

November 05, 2021 | The American Prospect

Eleanor Eagan Fatou Ndiaye

Op-Ed Climate and EnvironmentGovernment Capacity

A Missing Link in the Fight Against the Climate Crisis

With his legislative climate agenda hanging in the balance, President Biden turned to executive action this week in his attempt to “assert American leadership” at COP26 in Glasgow. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced sweeping new rules to curb methane emissions. Those standards, which the agency estimates would eliminate a greater volume of emissions between 2023 and 2035 than those emitted from all U.S. passenger cars and commercial planes in 2019, were rightly applauded. For now, however, these are just estimates. Ensuring that they turn into real-life emissions reductions that meet or exceed expectations will require that agencies have the capacity to promptly write strong new rules and, then, enforce them.

November 02, 2021

Eleanor Eagan Fatou Ndiaye

Report Climate and EnvironmentGovernment Capacity

Climate Capacity Crisis: Attrition at Climate Agencies and Immediate Steps to Address It

It has been over nine months since President Donald Trump left office, but on climate policy the federal government continues to show the scars from his disastrous presidency. At a moment when we do not have even a second to waste to avoid catastrophic climate change, agencies are struggling to build back better after attacks on scientific integrity and agency budgets left them without sufficient staff capacity and expertise. While the Biden administration has consistently affirmed its support for the federal workforce through rhetoric and action, New York Times reporting from this summer makes clear that the rebuilding is still not happening fast enough. 

October 26, 2021

Dorothy Slater

Blog Post Climate and EnvironmentExecutive BranchFederal ReserveFinancial RegulationTreasury Department

Yellen Is Empowering Powell and Selling Out the Climate

It is very possible that President Biden will show up empty-handed to COP26 in Glasgow next week. And that isn’t just because of the apocalyptic vanity of two Senators from Arizona and West Virginia. Many executive-led policies that are just a matter of political will have not been done, and some of those which have are pure paper tigers. Biden’s administration failed last week to take advantage of a lesser known, but extremely meaningful climate action opportunity. The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) released its long-awaited report on climate-related financial risk, which the President personally ordered months ago. And it was a complete flop. 

October 08, 2021

Dorothy Slater Zena Wolf

Op-Ed Climate and EnvironmentDepartment of JusticeExecutive Branch

How Biden Can Take On the Climate Crisis by Himself

President Biden has failed to live up to his promise to progressives to be a climate president. U.S. emissions continue to rise. Last week, 23 unique plant and animal species were declared extinct. A catastrophic pipeline oil spill in California is actively killing fish, birds, and wetland ecosystems. And in violation of treaty rights that are constitutionally the supreme law of the land, Biden allowed Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline to become operational on October 1, which will add emissions equivalent to 50 new coal-fired power plants and will inevitably spill. Biden is standing in support while water protectors are violently arrested and the Anishinaabe peoples living in the path of the project are terrorized and abused.

August 18, 2021

Eleanor Eagan

Newsletter Climate and EnvironmentDepartment of JusticeGovernment CapacityIndependent AgenciesUSPS

Who’s Afraid of Brett Kavanaugh’s Scorn?

The U.S. Court of Appeals is set to rule on the Biden Administration’s eviction moratorium sometime this week. No matter how it decides, however, it is already clear that those who argued against a new moratorium were wrong. A Trump judge has acknowledged that she must, begrudgingly, sustain it for now. By fighting, rather than preemptively surrendering, the administration has ensured that millions of Americans can stay in their homes for weeks longer. That is undoubtedly worth any embarrassment that government lawyers may feel from potentially eventually losing a case.