Janet McCabe earned both her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University. Photo from Creative Commons.
By David Holmquist
In November 2017, I participated in a panel discussion on climate change policy in Indianapolis, headlined by a then-former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assistant administrator named Janet McCabe. She had left EPA at the beginning of the Trump administration and taken a post as director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. When asked what could be done to thwart the administration in its effort to roll back environmental protections, Ms. McCabe offered some ironic assurance.
She recalled how frustrated she had been with the time it took to formulate and implement federal regulations—she had worked on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which was over three years in the making. She then expressed some small comfort in the fact that it takes at least the same amount of time to retract them.
In a further irony, Ms. McCabe is now at the forefront of the Biden administration’s effort to restore those protections. In April, she was confirmed by the Senate as the Deputy Administrator of EPA.
According to an ongoing analysis by The Washington Post, the Biden agenda aims to reverse 235 Trump administration environmental and energy policies, while at the same time advancing more than 40 initiatives of its own. The analysis was first published on January 21 and is updated frequently. As explained in a footnote to the analysis, it draws on data from a variety of federal government departments, the environment and energy law programs at Harvard and Berkeley, Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity.
The analysis divides these policies into seven categories:
✦ Air pollution and greenhouse gases
✦ Chemical safety
✦ Drilling and extraction
✦ Infrastructure and permitting
✦ Accountability
✦ Water pollution
✦ Wildlife
All of the policies in each category are further broken down (with color coding) along two additional vectors: their status (overturned, targeted, or not yet targeted) and their degree of difficulty (easy, medium, difficult). Each entry has a brief description with a “read more” link that links to further information. One can dive as deeply as one wishes. It’s an extraordinary piece of journalism.
Finally, one can expand a short list of “latest actions” to reveal all of the individual issues tackled since inauguration day, in chronological order. It is stunning to see all of the more than 50 actions taken on just the first day of Biden’s term, and to follow the trajectories of more than fifty additional targeted (so far) reversals.
The most anticipated of those was rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, but there were other significant climate policy initiatives taken on day one, including a lawsuit filed to reestablish the social cost of carbon at $51 per tonne CO2; restoring rules that limit mercury emissions from power plants; moving forward with Obama-era rules around energy efficiency in manufacturing facilities and other product sectors; restoring an Obama-era executive order promoting climate resilience; and restoring tighter fracking rules on federal and Indian lands. Another significant reinstatement—that of the Obama-era methane rule for oil and gas operations—was accomplished through the Congressional Review Act by a vote in Congress on June 25. The CRA allows for Congress to overturn a regulation finalized within the past 60 days, and was invoked by the Biden team on day one to void Trump’s last-minute attempt to gut the rule.
In the area of chemical safety, the administration has moved to reinvigorate the strict regulation of PFAS, the ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, rules for evaluating the risks of toxic substances, rules for evaluating the risks of pesticides to endangered species, and standards for the storage of volatile organic liquids. Thankfully, it seems that EPA scientists will once again play a leading role in chemical regulation.
In the area of environmental governance, which the analysis refers to as “Accountability,” the administration targeted six actions and has achieved all of them. Three Trump-era rules have been overturned:
✦ The Interior Department’s “Open Science” rule, which limited the types of scientific studies the department could use to formulate regulations
✦ A Justice Department policy that curbed funding of environmental projects by way of legal settlements
✦ The EPA “Scientific Transparency Rule,” which restricted the use of scientific studies in establishing public health regulations. This rule had been vacated by a federal court in Montana.
And three new policies have been put in place, focused on climate and environmental justice:
✦ President Biden ordered a report on the likely effects of climate change on migration.
✦ Biden also mandated that 40 percent of federal investments in sustainability go to disadvantaged communities.
✦ And he established an interagency council to coordinate new environmental justice offices in federal departments and agencies. Such a council was established by President Clinton in 1992, and operated with various levels of administration support until it was effectively disbanded in 2017.
The Biden agenda is ambitious, to say the least. Much of it will need to be accomplished through congressional action, where partisanship will make the “difficult” actions all the more so. And it will take time—those measures that are, or come to be, in the courts can take as long as five years to resolve. There is a complicated procedural decision tree for implementing or changing regulations at various stages of their life cycle, as shown in this flowchart from a paper published by the Harvard Law School Environment and Energy Law Program.
Thirty-nine down, one hundred and ninety-four to go. Stay tuned.
