President Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline in his first 15 days in office, vowed to abolish the federal government's fossil fuel subsidies, and began the process of unwinding Trump's catastrophic environmental legacy. And now a trio of Democratic lawmakers want Biden to declare as soon as possible a "climate emergency."On Thursday, along with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon introduced legislation that would require Biden to make such a declaration. The bill contrasts the intervention required during the wartime mobilization during the Second World War with the climate crisis and urges Biden to declare an emergency under the National Emergencies Act, thereby unlocking more than 100 new presidential powers to tackle the crisis.“It’s past time that a climate emergency is declared,”Blumenauer said in a statement. “This bill can finally get it done.” The proposed legislation follows a declaration last week by New York Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who encouraged Biden to declare an emergency in Congress to circumvent Republican heel-dragging. “If there ever was an emergency, climate change is one,” Schumer said.
The United States will not be the first nation to call climate change a problem. Similar "climate emergencies" have been proclaimed to date by 38 countries around the world, including Japan, New Zealand, and the European Union. But most of those declarations have been symbolic resolutions, and therefore have not come with any additional tools to combat the overheating earth. The National Emergencies Act, however, could grant Biden real powers in the United States: the president could use the declaration to reinstate a ban on exports of crude oil, send emergency relief packages to states, or even move billions of dollars of funding away from military programs and towards renewable energy production. In 2019, President Trump attempted to use the act to divert funds from the Pentagon to his proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but the courts and Congress rebuffed him.
These would be major, sweeping measures, but they may also anger Republican members of Congress, who are already denouncing as presidential overreach Biden's spree of executive orders and whose support Biden would need to resolve some of his other legislative objectives. Some have even suggested that declaring a national emergency, even though done with the best of intentions, acts as a final round of the democratic process. Given both the slim Democratic majority in the Senate and the fact that its only aim is to allow Biden to use his presidential powers, the bill looks like a long shot at the moment. In 2019, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a similar resolution that gained support from several senators and politicians but never reached a vote in the Democratic-controlled Chamber. Still, the new bill may serve as a powerful symbol, a sign that Biden is increasingly forced to move rapidly on climate change, whether or not Republicans like it.
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