![]() “A crucial set of jobs we need to generate are associated with providing low-income and environmental justice communities with access to renewable energy and energy efficiency services,” Ashmore says. We can tilt the other way with different kinds of investments.”īiden has said that these kinds of investments in clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and other types of climate resilience can translate into more jobs. “The setup we have currently is a result of previous government decisions that have tilted the balance towards fossil fuels. “There doesn’t need to be a contest between protecting our resources and environment, and protecting people,” Phillips says. Other non-congressional actions could look like canceling fossil fuel leases on public land, limiting ways for companies to explore for natural gas, stopping pipelines like Line 3 and the Dakota Access Pipeline, and much more. Sarah Phillipsīiden seems to be working through a lot of these pathways already, Phillips says, like using the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to pass rules and regulations, such as limiting planet-warming chemicals and pollutants used in various sectors. ![]() There doesn’t need to be a contest between protecting our resources and environment, and protecting people. ![]() This includes administrative duties, executive actions, and other duties within government agencies that can wield their power for the good of the climate. Since the votes for a Green New Deal or any large climate agenda are not there, it’s crucial that Biden use all of the alternative pathways available, she says. Alternative pathways, she says, help make big changes without needing congressional votes. “Environmental policymaking for the last 30 years has gone to alternative pathways rather than big legislation,” says Sarah Phillips, a historian of modern American environmentalism and a BU College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of history, who specializes in New Deal policies that led to current environmental politics. That is why utilizing every possible path for change, other than laws and legislation, will be critical for meeting those goals to ultimately save our own species, and millions of others, on the planet. With so much at stake, and a lot of policy decisions to keep track of, there is still a long road ahead to transforming the energy economy in a short window of time, with no singular path to get there. It’s a new way forward after four years of environmental regulation rollbacks by the Trump administration, which Biden and his team have already begun reinstating. “ decade is a crucial window in which we need to cut emissions dramatically in order to have a chance of meeting the ultimate goal of being carbon neutral by 2050, which is what the science informs us our goal must be,” says Jacqueline Ashmore, clean energy researcher and executive director of BU’s Institute for Sustainable Energy. To move the US further along the carbon-free path, President Joe Biden has announced his administration’s goals for reducing the country’s greenhouse gas pollution by 50 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. These climate change–fueled disasters can sound like biblical plagues, but the quicker the economy transitions to a clean energy economy, scientists agree that more frequent and even worse disasters will be avoided. For decades, climate experts have warned of the dire consequences of failing to lower planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels-from deadly heat waves to droughts to severe floods.
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