S&P Global outlined Biden’s first 100 days, quoting AEE’s Jeff Dennis on the administration’s approach to reestablishing many Trump-era EPA reservals. Read snippets below and the full article here.

One hundred days into office, U.S. President Joe Biden has made rapid progress in dismantling his predecessor's energy and climate agenda and implementing his own, according to policy experts.

Biden won the election on a campaign pledge to decarbonize the U.S. economy by midcentury, an effort he formally kicked off on Jan. 20 with a detailed executive order targeting former President Donald Trump's rollbacks of signature Obama-era climate policies. A week later, Biden signed another sweeping executive order establishing a "whole of government" approach to "tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad."... 

The EPA faces the jarring task of tackling multiple regulations to meet the administration's ambitious climate goals, while also working to rebuild and reinvigorate career staff ranks hollowed out over the Trump years.

The Sabin Center has documented 58 separate actions taken by the U.S. EPA during the Trump administration to "scale back or wholly eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures." Though the Trump administration recorded repeated losses as those actions were challenged in court, it issued much less stringent rules on a raft of environmental issues.

Jeff Dennis, managing director and general counsel for the business group Advanced Energy Economy, said EPA was likely working to craft "a durable, long-term approach to reestablishing" many of those reversals, grounded in statute and U.S. Supreme Court precedent and reflective of new technologies.

Notably, the Trump administration left in place the agency's 2009 endangerment finding, which the EPA has used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The finding stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that EPA had an obligation to determine if greenhouse gases may "endanger public health or welfare" and therefore require regulation, noted Cynthia Taub, who heads Steptoe & Johnson's National Environmental Policy Act permitting and litigation practice.

Read the full article here.