After four years unraveling Trump policies, issuing climate rules, conserving public lands and incentivizing clean energy, President Joe Biden’s allies are hailing him as one of the great environmental presidents of all time.
But Biden’s legacy will be determined in large part by his nemesis.
When President-elect Donald Trump assumes the White House next week, he’s expected to methodically begin knocking down Biden’s achievements, with energy and environmental policies at the top of his target list.
How far Trump will go, and whether his moves will hold up, remains to be seen. But with both chambers of Congress controlled by the GOP, four years of prep-work under their belts and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the second Trump administration could have more success this time around at getting its policy wishes.
Biden signaled that he’s worried about what lies ahead.
In his farewell address to the country Wednesday, Biden said that “powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis to serve their own interest for power and profit.”
“We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future, the future of our children and our grandchildren,” he said.
But come Inauguration Day on Monday, it’ll be out of Biden’s hands.
The incoming president campaigned on promises to undo Biden’s climate rules and legislative wins. And as Biden’s allies lavish praise upon him in his waning days in office, they are now entering a defensive posture as they hope to keep some of that work intact over the next four years.
Biden has been “quite remarkable” on the environment, said Gina McCarthy, who served as White House national climate adviser.
“I joined the administration because of his vision to look at environmental challenges — in particular climate but many others — as significant opportunities to improve people’s lives, to bring people more ability to manage their health, and to continue to expand labor and good jobs,” she said. “All of those things have come true.”
David Hayes, who served as a senior climate adviser in the Biden White House, said Biden ranks “right at the top” of environmental presidents. “Certainly in the modern era, no president has taken on the major environmental issues of the time more forthrightly than President Biden,” Hayes said.
Trump regularly derides Biden’s climate policies as the “Green New Scam” and has said he plans to rescind all unspent funds under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.
Current and former Biden climate officials are hopeful that political pressure from both sides of the aisle will help keep that law’s clean energy investments in place.
“We have opened up that path, and I think that path is unstoppable,” McCarthy said. “I don’t see Republicans or Democrats looking at this as an opportunity to reduce their investment potential or to reduce their ability to get labor out there, to reduce their ability to improve our education and bring more jobs to the table.”
Environmental advocates who battled against the first Trump administration are preparing to do what they can to uphold Biden’s legacy.
“There’s no question that the Biden-Harris administration has been the most pro-environment, pro-taking-action-on-climate-change administration we’ve seen yet,” said Matthew Davis, vice president of federal policy at the League of Conservation Voters.
“We certainly will work our best to make sure that their progress and all the benefits” flowing to communities and the environment across the country continue as best as possible under an administration “that has proved to be hostile at best to climate action and to helping communities.”
Davis credits the Biden team with redirecting industry in a way that will outlast their administration.
“We already know that demand for electric vehicles across the globe is skyrocketing. We also know that the cleanest, fastest, cheapest energy to put on the grid anywhere is clean renewable energy — things like solar, wind and geothermal,” Davis said. “Those trends cannot be stopped by Trump, as much as he might try.”
Not everyone in the environmental world is enamored by Biden’s record.
“His overall environmental legacy is at best mixed,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. This administration often prioritized “too much the symbolic action over the substantive thing,” Hartl said.
Climate is a prime example, Hartl said. “We can’t solve the crises of where we’re at right now purely through tax incentives that primarily benefit corporations and well-off Americans,” Hartl said. “Obviously it wasn’t all Joe Biden’s fault, but they just did not push the policies that the science and the facts and the realities of the day overwhelmingly demonstrated were needed,” he said.
Hartl expects Trump to pursue “anything that looks symbolically like a repeal” of Biden’s environmental policies. “I suspect they will do a lot of those petty vindictive things, because Trump ran on vengeance.”
Trump, for his part, hasn’t backed off of his campaign trail rhetoric on energy since winning the election. At a rally in December, Trump promised he’d start unraveling Biden’s legacy on his first day in office.
“I will sign Day 1 orders to end all Biden restrictions on energy production, terminate his insane electric vehicle mandate, cancel his natural gas export ban, reopen [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] in Alaska — the biggest site, potentially anywhere in the world — and declare a national energy emergency,” Trump said.
