‘We Needed More Time’: As Biden Leaves Office, His Climate Legacy Remains Incomplete 

In his four years in office, President Joe Biden dedicated more federal attention to climate action than any previous president, breaking a decades-long impasse, and worked to ensure vulnerable people and places benefitted from that action. 
He signed the first comprehensive U.S. legislation to address climate change, two bills that together devoted an unprecedented $700 billion to moving the nation toward cleaner energy. A new industry that will manufacture and develop energy technologies of the future is taking shape in plants being built across the country.
He protected more public lands and federal waters than any other president, 674 million acres, declared both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts off-limits to oil and gas drilling and dedicated 10 new national monuments, many of which honor sacred and significant tribal sites.
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And he elevated environmental justice as a policy imperative, directing 40 percent of climate funding to communities overburdened by pollution, retooling the way environmental health impacts are measured and investing, for the first time, in reconnecting neighborhoods that federal highways bisected.
But one other superlative looms over all the climate accomplishments of Biden’s presidency: The United States now produces more oil and gas than any other nation in history, churning out greenhouse gas pollution that has erased the climate gains that otherwise would have been realized as wind and solar energy installations increased. U.S. carbon pollution essentially held steady in 2024, a year that scientists have confirmed was the warmest on record, according to a preliminary accounting by Rhodium Group.
In order to meet its goal, under the Paris Agreement, of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030, the U.S. would have to cut its emissions 7.6 percent annually for the next five years. Only in recessions have emissions fallen at that rate.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to abandon the Paris Agreement after he takes office this week. Dismissive of the science of climate change, Trump is determined to undo Biden’s policies and pump out even more oil and gas. As a result, climate advocates are viewing Biden’s climate legacy with unease.
“Two things are true,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesman for the youth-led climate advocacy group the Sunrise Movement. “One is that President Biden did more than any other president to tackle the climate crisis and really kick-start development of a renewable energy economy. That is historic and really game-changing. And at the same time, oil and gas production is at record highs, and the policies that Donald Trump is foreshadowing spell out the worst reality for our generation’s future.”
In the end, Biden was not able to build the political consensus to do what the science says is needed: reduce U.S. reliance on fossil fuels.
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