July 22, 2022
It’s Time for Biden to Declare a Climate Emergency
By Lisa Herforth-Hebbert
The president has an opportunity to address the partisan failures of Congress and the Supreme Court by taking real actions to combat the crisis at hand.
At this point, climate change is an undeniable part of our reality. With wildfires burning like never before across Alaska and the West Coast, record heat waves, flooding, droughts, and extreme weather events, our nation’s leaders refuse to address the magnitude of the crisis, consistently failing to work across party lines for necessary solutions.
On Wednesday, President Biden announced new climate initiatives outside a former coal plant in Massachusetts, calling climate change an “existential threat to our nation and to the world.” But the president failed to go all the way by refusing to invoke a climate emergency. An emergency declaration would offer numerous opportunities for the federal government to curb carbon emissions and address the climate impacts that are driving the planet’s warming. For one, such a declaration would enable the Biden administration to access funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program for combating the impacts of heat waves, extreme weather events, and natural disasters and could enable faster implementation of critical mitigation strategies.
