VIDEO: No declaration, but Biden views climate crisis as emergency in Somerset remarks

Colin A. Young

STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, JULY 20, 2022…..As Massachusetts climate policy negotiators close in on a compromise Wednesday afternoon, President Joe Biden made a stop in Somerset to highlight the environmental and economic promise of offshore wind and to pledge executive action to deal with the threats of climate change.

“As president, I have a responsibility to act with urgency and resolve when our nation faces clear and present danger and that’s what climate change is about. It is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger,” Biden said at Brayton Point, the site of a former coal plant that is being reimagined as a hub for the offshore wind industry. “The health of our citizens and our communities is literally at stake.”

And while the White House has said Biden is considering declaring a national climate emergency, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre shot that idea down Tuesday, saying that such an announcement would not be part of Biden’s remarks in Somerset.

Instead, Biden said that the climate situation is an emergency “and I will look at it that way.”

“We need to act. Just take a look around. Right now, 100 million Americans are under heat alert — 100 million Americans. Ninety communities across America set records for high temperatures just this year, including here in New England as we speak. And by the way, records have been set in the Arctic and the Antarctic, temperatures that are just unbelievable, melting the permafrost. It’s astounding the damage has been done. This crisis impacts every aspect of everyday life,” the president said in Somerset.

He promised that he would take unspecified executive actions in the next few weeks to address climate issues.

“In the coming weeks, I’m going to use the power I have as president to turn these words into formal, official government actions through the appropriate proclamations, executive orders and regulatory power that the president possesses,” Biden said.

A senior Biden administration official told reporters ahead of the president’s visit Wednesday that Biden wanted to highlight the “clear and present danger” that the changing climate presents to the country and that “going to Massachusetts is a great opportunity for him to lay that out in a place that really represents the playbook for what it means to tackle the climate crisis in a way that can unlock tons of opportunity for our workers, for our communities, and for our economy.”

Massachusetts has two offshore wind projects totaling about 1,600 megawatts under development and two more projects with contracts under review. If all four become operational — as is expected by the end of this decade — offshore wind will generate roughly 25 percent of Massachusetts’ current annual electricity demand, enough to power about 1.6 million homes, the Baker administration has said. The fledgling industry is also expected to generate thousands of jobs here.

Bay State Democrats turned out in force for Biden’s Somerset stop. U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and U.S. Reps. Bill Keating and Jake Auchincloss traveled from D.C. with the president aboard Air Force One, and the guest list in Somerset included Attorney General Maura Healey, House Speaker Ronald Mariano, Senate President Karen Spilka, Sens. Michael Rodrigues and Marc Pacheco, and Reps. Patricia Haddad and Sean Garballey, according to the White House pool report.

The president’s visit featured his announcement that his administration is taking steps to advance offshore wind lease opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico as well as off the coasts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, that FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program would be funded at an all-time high of $2.3 billion, and that $385 million will be made available through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to help with household energy costs including summertime cooling.

The Biden administration said that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued new guidance Wednesday that “provides for a range of flexible options including increasing funding for cooling assistance through the American Rescue Plan; establishing community cooling centers; and purchasing, distributing, or loaning efficient air conditioning equipment, evaporative coolers and electric heat pumps — a more energy-efficient alternative for providing cooling services — to vulnerable households and individuals.”

Biden, who was elected into office promising to take bold and meaningful steps to combat the climate crisis, has watched as Congress and the courts have stymied his efforts. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants with a ruling that “Congress did not grant EPA … the authority to devise emissions caps based on the generation shifting approach the Agency took in the Clean Power Plan.”

And U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the moderate Democrat representing a historically coal-mining state who holds tremendous sway over legislation in the evenly divided U.S. Senate, last week declared that he would not support Biden’s priority climate provisions if they were included in an economic package, leading the president to announce that he would take “strong executive action” to deal with climate issues in the face of Congressional inaction.

Progress on climate issues has, at times, been similarly fraught in Massachusetts. A 2016 clean energy law got the Bay State into the offshore wind and hydroelectric power games in a big way and while the state’s first (also the country’s first) offshore wind project is expected online next year, Massachusetts still has not received any of the cleaner power called for under that law.

The hydroelectric component of the 2016 law remains stalled as Maine’s court system and environmental regulators continue to reevaluate the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission project that was to bring Canadian hydro to Massachusetts after Maine voters last year effectively revoked the approvals for the project. That project’s permits were the subject of a hearing Wednesday of Maine’s Board of Environmental Protection.

Ahead of Biden’s trip to Somerset on Wednesday, the right-leaning Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance said that Biden would “be in for a surprise” in Somerset if he “thinks middle class Massachusetts people want to hear about his latest climate change policy that will add more regulations and continue to drive up energy costs.”

“What middle class people in Massachusetts want to hear from the President is his plan to lower energy costs, including the high cost of gasoline, natural gas, and electricity,” Mass Fiscal spokesman Paul Craney said.