Joe Biden will spend his first hours as president trying to obliterate much of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda, restore public land protections and reestablish the United States as a global leader on climate change policy.
Biden will sit in the Oval Office later today and sign a sweeping executive order to rejoin the Paris Agreement and undo President Trump’s rollback of greenhouse gas policies, said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser.
“We know rejoining [Paris] won’t be enough, but along with strong domestic action, which this executive order kicks off, it is going to be an important step for the United States to regain and strengthen its leadership opportunities,” McCarthy told reporters late yesterday.
The process of rejoining the Paris Agreement will begin today with a letter to the United Nations requesting U.S. membership. It will take 30 days for the U.S. to formally reenter the nonbinding global agreement to reduce emissions.
The administration will also rescind the permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, McCarthy said. The line transports crude from the western Canadian province of Alberta to refineries in Illinois and Texas and to other oil facilities in Oklahoma.