White House should 'be unchained' with use of executive powers on climate: Democrats

As US President Joe Biden prepares to announce a series of climate-related executive actions in the coming weeks, Congress' leading climate proponents urged the White House on July 20 to pull out all the stops when it comes to using its executive powers.

On July 20, hours before he joined Biden in Somerset, Massachusetts, to announce the White House's new plans for climate action, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse,a Democrat, urged the Biden administration to "unleash" all possible powers to combat climate change following the recent collapse of the president's climate agenda in Congress.

"I encourage everybody listening in the Executive Branch: this is your chance," Whitehouse said during the Department of Energy's July 20 summit on carbon capture technologies.

Last week, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia pulled out of negotiations over a climate package that was seen as a scaled-down version of last year's failed Build Back Better Act. But that revised version, and all the proposed tax credits for clean energy projects, was scuttled by Manchin on account of rising inflation.

Without Manchin's support, Whitehouse called on the Biden administration to "be unchained" with its use of executive powers in lieu of Congressional action.

"I think it's well past time for the Executive Branch to be unchained and to go vigorously forward in all the areas of regulation at its disposal, in all the areas of litigation at its disposal, throughout the acquisition and purchasing system, and with a far more robust communication strategy about where we are in climate," Whitehouse said during the DOE summit.

On July 20, the White House announced that it will begin announcing several executive actions to combat climate change "in the coming weeks," beginning with two aimed at protecting communities from extreme heat and another aimed at expanding offshore wind opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet Representative Scott Peters, a California Democrat and chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change, still holds on to hope that a bipartisan pathway may still be available.

"I'm going to go with Yogi Berra and say, it's not over 'till it's over," Peters said during the summit. "That package will be important for carbon removal and for climate action overall. But whatever happens, we are stuck with each other, and we have to figure out how to advance additional climate policies together in the coming decades."

Direct air capture momentum

Whitehouse, one of the Democratic party's fiercest backers of climate solutions, also emphasized direct air capture(opens in a new tab) as a technology that the US should be prioritizing. While carbon capture and sequestration options are useful for reducing the carbon intensity of current emissions, direct air capture should be incentivized for its ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

"Obviously, direct air capture should be the highest priority," Whitehouse said. "If all you're doing is removing carbon from the smoke stacks that are adding carbon into the atmosphere, you're mitigating the damage that you're adding, but you're not eliminating or reducing the levels."

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in April underscored the key role carbon removal technologies will play in global decarbonization, both direct air capture and methods that remove carbon from emissions streams. But uncertainty still looms over the numerous pathways through which these technologies can best scale up.

According to the report, the global amount of carbon needed to be removed from the atmosphere in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius ranges between 20 gigatons and 660 gigatons over the next 80 years. With the world currently generating about 50 billion mt/year of additional CO2 emissions, that means that the globe will need to add 5 gt to 10 gt/year of additional carbon capture capacity in order to reach 2050 goals.

Enabling that rapid scale-up requires robust involvement from investors and start-ups to pursue innovation across a range of pathways. While land-use carbon solutions, like forest management and carbon farming, will play a role in the near term, technological solutions like direct air capture will be key for reaching mid-century climate targets.

Various companies and start-ups are responding to that call, said Clea Kolster, partner and head of science at Lowercarbon Capital.

"Just a few years ago, there were only about three companies that were focusing on direct air capture, and energy with carbon capture was generally considered to be an effort that the industrial sector would pursue," Kolster said during the DOE summit. "Today, you have almost over 100 companies that are focused on carbon dioxide removal."