Joe Biden unveils new climate funding, but stops short of declaring emergency
- The modest measures include support for wind energy, but the US president’s climate agenda has already been derailed by major setbacks
- Both the US and Europe are facing a historic heatwave, and 100 million Americans will be under heat warnings this week
US President Joe Biden said that climate change is an emergency but stopped short of a formal declaration, announcing a modest package of executive actions and promising more aggressive efforts.
Biden made the comments during a visit to Massachusetts and as a historic heatwave batters Europe and the United States. Some 100 million Americans from New York to Las Vegas will be under heat warnings this week.
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world,” Biden said on Wednesday. “This is an emergency, an emergency, and I will look at it that way.”
The announcements included new funding for cooling centres and pushing for new offshore wind projects in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
Still, those actions fall short of demands by Democratic lawmakers and environmental activists who want Biden to formally declare a climate emergency, which would enable the use of the Defence Production Act to ramp up production of a wide range of renewable energy products and systems.
Biden is under increasing pressure after conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin said last week he was not ready to support key climate provisions in Congress, a critical loss in the evenly divided Senate.