LIVE: Biden Signs Executive Actions on Climate Change at the White House

President Joe Biden will take executive action on Wednesday to combat climate change, including temporarily blocking new leases for oil drilling on federal lands, ordering a review of fossil-fuel subsidies and other measures to overhaul the U.S. energy mix.

Biden will sign broad-ranging directives instructing federal agencies to consider climate change in everything from government purchases to national security. He will order U.S. intelligence authorities to estimate how climate change affects national security and tell agencies to do a better job assessing the threat.

“These executive orders follow through on President Biden’s promise to take aggressive action to tackle climate change and build on the executive actions that the president took on his first day in office,” the White House says in a fact sheet on the planned moves released Wednesday.

Much of the action has been telegraphed previously and builds on promises Biden made on the campaign as part of his bid to make the U.S economy carbon neutral by 2050. It’s not clear he’ll be able to do everything unilaterally.

For instance, Biden is directing federal agencies “to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies as consistent with applicable law,” and instead, seek “new opportunities to spur innovation, commercialization and deployment of clean energy technologies and infrastructure,” according to the White House.

However, while the Biden administration has some latitude to shift some funding for innovation at the Energy Department, abolishing tax incentives that support fossil fuel development, such as deductions for intangible drilling costs, would require action by Congress.

Still environmentalists were cheering the move as the boldest action by a president yet to confront the climate crisis and the fossil fuels that drive it.

“The era of putting polluters’ profits first is over,” said Josh Axelrod, senior advocate for the nature program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We can’t lock our children and grandchildren into decades more of the dirty fossil fuels of the past, and all the hazards and harms they bring to our public lands, oceans and coastal communities.”

Supporters of the fossil fuel industry said jobs would be lost. Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon, a Republican, said the president’s moves “will divide and alienate the very working-class American communities with whom the Biden administration has pledged to unite.”

“It is clear President Biden has caved in to a loud segment of the Democratic Party that is pushing to require all policies and decisions to meet a litmus test of climate change, regardless of consequence,” Gordon said in an emailed statement. “There are bipartisan solutions available that support the people working in oil and gas on federal lands as well as reduce carbon emissions.”

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