PRESIDENT PUSHES CARBON NEUTRALITY
Executive orders call for actions to meet goals by 2050
President Joe Biden on Wednesday set in motion a plan to make the federal government carbon neutral, ordering federal agencies to buy electric vehicles, to power facilities with wind, solar and nuclear energy, and to use sustainable building materials.
In a series of executive orders, Biden directed the government to transform its 300,000 buildings, 600,000 cars and trucks, and use its annual purchases of $650 billion in goods and services to meet his goal of a federal government that stops adding carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2050.
From his earliest days in office, Biden said he intended to use the federal government as a model and to help spur the markets for green energy. The executive orders signed Wednesday set a timetable for the transition.
By 2030, Biden wants the federal government to purchase electricity produced only from sources that do not emit carbon dioxide, the most plentiful of the humancaused greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. By 2032, the Biden administration wants to see the emissions from building operations, such as heating, cut in half. And by 2035, all new federal car and truck purchases would also be zero-emissions.
The move comes as Biden is struggling to turn many of his climate goals into reality.
He has promised to cut America’s emissions from fossil fuels roughly in half by the end of this decade. But Congress has not yet approved a $1.7 trillion spending bill that would help achieve that target. The Supreme Court also appears poised to limit the federal government’s ability to use certain regulatory actions to tackle climate change.
Unlike most executive orders that undergo a lengthy and sometimes fractious
regulatory process before they are enacted, procurement rules can take effect almost immediately, said Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. He called the executive orders “very significant.”
Still, the orders could be reversed by a future administration. And the plan does not cover purchasing by the Department of Defense, which accounts for a large portion of the government’s energy spending. Clean energy
purchases could also cost the government more money in the short run, and many of the components like electric charging stations for an all-electric federal vehicle fleet have not yet been built.
Republicans already are mounting opposition to the plan. On Wednesday, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, denounced it as “disgraceful” and said the plan would harm workers in the fossil
fuel sector.
“This is not build back better,” he said in a statement. “It’s another backbreaking move to build bigger bureaucracy.”
The plan Biden set forth presents significant challenges for the administration.
Just 40 percent of the electricity purchased by the federal government now comes from renewable sources like wind and solar. The goal is to ramp that up to 100 percent in less than a decade. The federal government currently consumes just 1.5 percent of the nation’s energy, although it is a major player in certain states where it has significant operations, such as Virginia, California, Georgia and North Carolina.
In converting its power to wind, solar and other sources that don’t produce planet-warming emissions, the government intends to follow the path set by companies like Google, Apple and Walmart, which established tariffs or developed power-purchase agreements with local utilities to achieve their goals of 100 percent renewable energy, a senior administration official said.
The requirement to purchase only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035 is even more difficult.
Currently, electric vehicles represent only about 1.5 percent of the government fleet. In fiscal 2021 the administration purchased 650 electric vehicles, according to the administration, a number it hopes to increase severalfold this year and beyond. The government buys about 50,000 vehicles a year; many of those are replacements.
“That’s about half the annual output of one factory, about half of 1 percent of all vehicles sold every year,” said Steven Koonin, a physicist who was an energy undersecretary under President Barack Obama but who now serves as a fellow on climate change policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization. “It’s small potatoes.”