POLITICO: ‘Climate agenda under Biden has been stifled’ – White House climate office draws fire as actions stall – ‘Collapse of Biden’s legislative agenda’

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White House climate office draws fire as actions stall
BY ZACK COLMAN | 06/03/2022 05:01 AM EDT
Gina McCarthy was one of two marquee climate appointees that the president brought into his administration. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The collapse of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda is drawing new scrutiny to the White House’s efforts to confront global warming — and Democrats’ complaints that his own Climate Policy Office is getting in the way.

The office headed by domestic climate policy chief Gina McCarthy has held up progress on multiple fronts, nine Democrats inside and outside the administration told POLITICO — accusing it of too often placing political considerations and relations with Congress ahead of weaning the nation off fossil fuels.

The office’s micromanaging of other government bodies has weakened the Interior Department’s efforts to rein in oil and gas leases on federal lands, stalled a redo of federal ethanol policies and slowed White House efforts to address pollution in low-income and minority communities, said the Democrats, who include congressional staff and current or former Biden administration officials. They were granted anonymity to discuss politically sensitive issues.

In some cases, they said, McCarthy’s office appears to be avoiding court fights or potential disruptions of negotiations with lawmakers such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). And that’s preventing regulators such as the Environmental Protection Agency from doing their jobs, the critics said.

“Instead of letting them do the business of writing rules, proposing them and publishing them, [the climate office] at their discretion will pull everything back and ask questions and delay,” one administration official said.

The criticism comes at a delicate moment for Biden, who came into office calling climate change one of the “four crises” facing the U.S., and who promised to put people to work upgrading the power grid with renewable energy and making millions of electric vehicles while cleaning up heavily polluted areas. Now, spiking gasoline prices and Russia’s war in Ukraine have forced the White House to devote efforts to boosting fossil fuel supplies at home and in Europe. Meanwhile, recent news reports indicate that McCarthy may be close to stepping down.

The White House countered that it has notched significant climate achievements, many of them embodied in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that Biden signed last year. The law — drafted with help from the office — approved tens of billions of dollars for deploying technology intended to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gases from industry, installing electric vehicle charging stations and hardening the power grid against the effects of climate change.

But the detractors say Biden’s agenda is already suffering from Democrats’ travails in Congress, where Manchin’s opposition doomed efforts to approve more than $500 billion in climate spending last year. They said the climate office’s modest accomplishments and seeming lack of urgency are failing to fill the gap — which in turn threatens to dampen progressive voters’ enthusiasm for Biden’s presidency.

“There is a general sense that a number of these things were slow-walked or watered down,” said a Democratic staffer in Congress whose office serves on committees with climate policy oversight, referring to rules and executive actions the administration has taken.

Biden created the Climate Policy Office last year to implement his goal of putting the country on a path to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To head it, he recruited McCarthy, a veteran regulator who had led the creation of major climate rules as Obama’s EPA chief.

McCarthy was one of two marquee climate appointees that Biden brought into his administration — along with John Kerry, the former U.S. senator and secretary of State who serves as his chief climate envoy. She sits adjacent to White House senior adviser Neera Tanden in the West Wing, and is in close contact with chief of staff Ron Klain and his deputy, Bruce Reed, noted American Clean Power Association CEO Heather Zichal, who was a climate adviser in the Obama White House.

Her supporters say her office has advanced many actions that would have fallen by the wayside without dedicated pressure, such as working to ensure that federal agencies keep climate change at the forefront of their rulemaking. They say the White House office is drawing heat because its actions have been overshadowed by congressional Democrats’ failure to move their climate legislation.

“There’s been a huge focus on legislation these first two years — rightly so to try and get something done,” said Center for American Progress’ Christy Goldfuss, who ran the White House Council on Environmental Quality under Obama. But because of the nearing midterms, she said, “that window is going to close. Then the administrative agenda becomes incredibly important.”

Others on the environmental movement’s left flank have called for dismantling the Climate Policy Office, seeing its existence as more of an impediment than a driver of climate action. They have said they would rather let the agencies and their experts do the work.

“With that czarship in place the climate agenda under Biden has been stifled,” said Jean Su, energy justice director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that frequently sues the federal government over policy decisions. (Su is not one of the nine Democratic officials who have aired their unhappiness with the office.)

Much of the office’s criticism from Democrats on and off Capitol Hill focuses on the period before December when Manchin torpedoed hopes of passing Build Back Better, which would have spent hundreds of billions on clean energy and electric vehicle tax credits. 

During that run-up, for example, the climate office edited an Interior Department review of oil and gas leasing on federal land and decided to quietly release it the day after Thanksgiving, a Democratic Hill staffer said. The review, which called for restarting oil and gas lease sales, largely ignored the effect that increased fossil fuel extraction would have on climate change — despite Biden’s promises to end oil and gas production on federal land.

….

Agencies sent the White House Office of Management and Budget data and methodology in December to define what constitutes a “benefit” for Justice40, but it has still not finalized that definition. And while the Biden administration last week tallied the money it has already committed to the effort, a separate administration official said “progress has been frustrating and slow.”

“While we wait, the White House expects Black and brown communities to be grateful for table scraps,” the official said.

In an email, a White House spokesperson rejected all the complaints about the office’s performance as untrue. And supporters of the office say it is an effective public messenger for Biden’s agenda and liaison to industry and environmentalists.

“We need solutions on steroids,” said Jane Lubchenco, the deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “CPO is trying to provide the kind of coordination that enables that to happen.”

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