SOURCE:
https://www.innovateli.com/well-always-have-paris-biden-re-ups-activists-rejoice/
By GREGORY ZELLER - Janauary 21, 2021
Regional environmental activists are over the moon about President Joseph Biden’s swift action rejoining the Paris Agreement.
Anne Reynolds, executive director of the Albany-based Alliance for Clean Energy New York, and Joseph Martens, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, issued a joint statement Wednesday commending the new president, who – amid a flurry of environment-focused Inauguration Day executive actions – directed the United States to rejoin the international climate accord.
Reynolds and Martens called the reunion “an important first step” for the freshly minted president, who also placed a moratorium on drilling in the Arctic Refuge, revoked the March 2019 federal permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline project and ordered an immediate review of all federal agency regulations, guidance, documents and policies “promulgated, issued or adopted” between Jan. 20, 2017 and Wednesday morning.
In word and deed, this is a wholesale retconning of President Donald Trump’s environmental legacy – and no single action is more significant, or public, than rejoining the Paris Agreement. Two years after Trump announced his intentions, the United States officially withdrew from the accord in 2019, becoming the only one of the 2015 agreement’s 189 signatories to renege.
Reversing that mistake “shows the world that the United States is committed to providing global leadership” on environmental issues, according to Reynolds and Martens, who trumpeted the Biden Administration’s “efforts to transform the United States back into a global leader in the fight against climate change.”
Also thinking globally is Citizens Campaign for the Environment Executive Director Adrienne Esposito, who agreed that America rejoining the Paris Agreement is a shot heard around the world.
“What’s really exciting about it is America can lead the world once again in battling climate change,” Esposito told Innovate LI.
“Power plant emissions, emission reductions by cars … there are more than 100 environmental regulations that Trump dismantled by executive order,” she added. “And many of them pertain to energy regulations.”
Reversing those ill-conceived policies and rejoining the Paris Agreement actually create a minor dichotomy for the environmentalist set: In lieu of the international agreement’s restrictions, New York and other states worked hard to establish and enact their own greenhouse gas restrictions, many of which mirror – but don’t precisely match – the Paris Agreement’s requirements.
Albany was central to the creation of the United State Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 states and Puerto Rico “committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement,” according to the USCA website. While the alliance is having a positive effect, it includes a state-by-state smorgasbord of innovative environmental policies – some of which will need amending as the strict international metrics are reestablished.
“A lot of states stepped up when the federal government fell down,” Esposito noted. “A lot of states put in their own policies to reduce carbon dioxide, specifically New York.”
But the CCE exec considers this a good problem to have. Synchronizing carbon-footprint reductions and other metrics will be easier with everyone pulling in the same direction, especially as large-scale clean-energy projects proliferate under the Biden Administration.
For instance, coastal regions that have pushed offshore wind initiatives will now find the going much easier – including Long Island, which has multiple offshore-wind projects stalled in the siting stage and is struggling to establish itself as a centerpiece of national offshore wind-energy production, sometimes against the federal tide.
“We’ve been waiting for years for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to approve the offshore-wind areas of New York, and they just haven’t done it,” Esposito said. “If BOEM approves those, we can start issuing leases.
“And the new appointees at BOEM are favorable to wind power.”
While many states took environmental matters into their own hands during the previous administration, rejoining the Paris Agreement heralds a new age of domestic and international cooperation on climate change, according to the longtime activist.
“There was zero consideration for public health and environmental health in the Trump Administration – zero,” Esposito said. “States were more aggressive, particularly coastal states that are serious about transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables, because they knew they had to be.
“A lot of environmental policies that were voided by Trump will be reinstated,” she added. “And a lot of these state programs can be expedited.”