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The Biden administration on Thursday began a process to amend federal procurement rules to require the U.S. government – the world’s largest buyer of goods and services – to factor the risks of climate change into its contracts.
Read the full story at NBC News.
The reports from 23 federal agencies examine how climate change will disrupt nearly all aspects of life, including more traffic and disease.
Read the full story in the New York Times.
Hundreds of scientists and policy experts left the government during the Trump administration. The jobs remain unfilled six months into President Biden’s term.
Read the full story at The Hill.
The White House has announced that Allison Crimmins will lead a major government report on climate change after the Trump-era pick for the job was removed earlier this year.
Crimmins, a climate scientist who spent almost a decade working at the Environmental Protection Agency, is now the director of the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
Read the full story at GreenBiz.
Haaland will oversee nearly 500 million acres of land — that’s one-fifth the land area of the U.S. and 70% of all public lands — and almost 700 million acres of natural resources that lay beneath it and its coasts.
Read the full story at The Verge.
President Joe Biden will start the process of phasing out the federal government’s use of gas-powered vehicles and replacing them with ones that run on electricity. The announcement is the fulfillment of a promise Biden made on the campaign trail to swap government fleet vehicles with American-made EVs.
Download the summary and explore the detailed recommendations.
After decades of inadequate action by the international community, climate change now poses a clear and imminent threat to our prosperity, security, and well-being. Only a focused and ambitious global response can avert the worst impacts. And as the last four years have demonstrated, American global leadership is indispensable to mobilize action at the required scale and pace. To rise to this unprecedented challenge, the next president and administration must elevate climate change to the first rank of America’s international priorities and make addressing the climate crisis a central organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy.
This agenda provides a governing blueprint for the next administration to lead a global mobilization from day one to address the climate crisis.
Starting from the position that addressing climate change should be a central organizing principle that informs all key areas of U.S. foreign policy, it lays out an ambitious yet achievable agenda with priority recommendations the next administration should pursue to chart a course towards greater climate stability.
All of the recommendations are firmly rooted in advancing U.S. interests, alliances, and global cooperation. Underpinned by a bold domestic agenda, the next administration can seize the opportunity to leverage the U.S.’s unparalleled influence to rally the international community to act at the speed and scale needed to meet the climate challenge.
Read the full story at Utility Dive.
President-elect Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to lead the U.S. Department of Energy, Politico first reported. The news elicited cheers from clean energy advocates who say it is a sign the next administration will act aggressively on climate change and clean energy innovation.
Biden is also expected to nominate Gina McCarthy, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama, to a new position overseeing domestic climate policy. Former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has been selected to become Secretary of Transportation.
“The fact that we’ll have a new position overseeing national climate policy demonstrates that the incoming administration will pursue ambitious action,” Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp said in a statement.
Read the full story in the Washington Post.
President-elect Joe Biden has chosen Brenda Mallory, a longtime expert in environmental law and regulation, to head the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, according to several people familiar with the decision who spoke anonymously because the appointment has not been publicly announced.
The nomination would place a veteran government official and conservation advocate in a key administration post, one who works closely with agencies to shape federal environmental and energy policy and to ensure individual communities have a voice in the construction of pipelines, roads and other potentially polluting projects.
Read the full story at NPR.
Climate activists have set a high bar for President-elect Joe Biden’s staff picks, asking that he exclude anyone with ties to fossil fuel industries. They’ve already been disappointed.
