President Joe Biden is using some of his last days in office to promote aggressive climate change goals, even as his successor plans to scrap them.
Biden is in Brazil for the G20 summit after becoming the first president to set foot in the Amazon rainforest. He said both the United States and Brazil are working toward a clean energy transition in keeping with the Paris climate agreement.
“History is watching us,” Biden said in remarks Tuesday morning in Rio de Janeiro. “I urge us to keep the faith and keep going. This is the single greatest existential threat to humanity.”
Ahead of the speech, the White House released a fact sheet highlighting the “Brazil-U.S. Partnership for the Energy Transition” in which both countries share a goal of reducing emissions and keeping a goal of seeing temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius or less as outlined in the Paris accords.
But Biden leaves office in two months, and those plans will be in major jeopardy when he does.
On Saturday, Trump named Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to be his energy secretary and a member of the newly formed “Council of National Energy.” Liberty is an oilfield service firm and a fracking company.
“Chris has been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in Energy,” Trump said of Wright. “He has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, and Oil and Gas. Most significantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Energy Independence, and transformed the Global Energy Markets and Geopolitics.”
Trump is promising to scrap “totally unnecessary” regulations, and while Wright’s selection received GOP and oil industry praise, climate change activists reacted with horror.
“Any nominee, including Chris Wright, who ignores the stakes in this global clean energy race — or fails to recognize the urgent challenge of climate change — should concern all of us,” Environmental Defense Fund Executive Director Amanda Leland said in a statement.
“If the Trump administration blocks investments in energy efficiency and clean energy technologies, it will jeopardize the health of communities across our country, destroy job opportunities, and make our nation less competitive,” Leland said.
Trump may or may not pull the U.S. back out of the Paris agreement, which he did during his first term in 2020 before Biden reinstated it. In June, the Trump campaign signaled it would leave the agreement again if Trump won the election.
Despite this, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has said that the president-elect had a mandate to follow through on his pledge to withdraw from the agreement.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” she said in a statement. “He will deliver.”
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The juxtaposition between the outgoing and incoming administrations was on full display this week, with Biden speaking in the rainforest and promising to promote a clean energy transition that Trump has rebuked.
“I have much more to say,” Biden said toward the end of his speech before stopping himself. “I’m not going to.”