U.S. President Joe Biden’s National Climate Adviser shrugged off efforts by the previous administration to roll back Obama-era environmental regulations, noting that those policy actions were largely unsuccessful.

“[The Trump] administration was very unusual in terms of the wholesale turnabout they tried to make,” Gina McCarthy said at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit virtual conference on March 4. “But in the courts, even with new appointees under the Trump administration as judges, we still won over and over and over again because there is a law in our country. When you put on that black robe, you tend to want to do your job, and we have seen that time and time again.”

McCarthy, who served as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama, also reassured the oil and gas industry that Biden’s climate plan was not a zero-sum game. The administration’s support for cleaner fuels and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions is not an indication that it does not back a resilient and vibrant energy sector.

Reduction Goals Met

McCarthy’s assertion that the prior administration’s deregulation actions largely failed is bolstered by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. The institute tracked the Trump administration’s litigation attempts to use agencies to deregulate and to implement policies. It found that the administration lost in 152 of 189 court cases, or 80.4% of the time.

McCarthy lamented the loss of time to further climate goals during the prior administration but noted that some greenhouse gas reduction goals were met during the Trump era.

“I worked hard on the Clean Power Plan to say that we would get 32% reduction in the power sector of greenhouse gases by 2030,” she said. “And guess what? We surpassed that level back in 2019.”

Success is predicated on sending the right signals to the private sector concerning immediate health benefits and job opportunities, McCarthy said. Those near-term advantages, she said, will outlive any regulatory changes.

“I’m working hard to convince people that, yes, we lost time, but don’t think everything we did before was for naught,” McCarthy said. “Because clean energy is winning in the marketplace today and our job isn’t to look backward, it’s to look at the wealth of opportunities today and what we can bring to the table.”

The Biden plan to address climate change transcends simple greenhouse gas mitigation, she said. The administration is pursuing a value-based approach that involves investment in indigenous communities and communities of color to ensure they benefit from the technological innovation and job creation intended to accompany the clean energy transition. She called it “the opportunity of a lifetime” to reshape the economy.

“This is absolutely going to be about jobs,” McCarthy said. “This is absolutely about rebuilding community. This is absolutely about growing food the right way so that it’s healthy and accessible to everybody. This is absolutely about lowering air pollution that has come along with the burning of fossil fuels that we can avoid with cleaner renewable energy.”

Climate Corps

The Biden administration is pursuing climate change actions across a range of sectors, not simply greenhouse gas emission mitigation efforts by the oil and gas industry, McCarthy said. Among those are farming and agriculture, and forest management.

“If you talk to the scientists and you look at the science, our government can do better in the United States,” she said. “We’re really not looking at the opportunities as well as we can on our land, our natural resources.”

Biden’s team is looking to develop a Civilian Climate Corps, which would be similar to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. (the “tree army”) during the Great Depression. The organization would focus on reforestation and protecting biodiversity. “We can do so much with our land, our natural resources, to make them a vital opportunity to reduce carbon and complement our mitigation efforts,” she said.

Achieving the administration’s climate change goal of net-zero by 2050 can carry some risk.

“We’re not going to go down the road of getting to zero if that means we’re impacting our safety, our health, our viability of our essential services,” McCarthy said. “And there’s no need to do that, but we do need to think about all of these things, and mix and match them, while at the same time reducing the emissions on the whole as quickly as we can.”

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