President Biden is preparing a slew of executive orders Wednesday building out the new administration’s agenda for tackling climate change, in what is being dubbed “Climate Day.” The moves on drilling for oil and gas, conserving nature and addressing the racial and economic disparities of pollution fulfill several campaign promises. They are meant to put the United States on the path to net-zero emissions by the middle of the century and come off the heels of Biden moving to rejoin the Paris climate accord and nix the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office.

President Biden delivers remarks at the White House. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The directives, coming on a day Biden officials hope is remembered more favorably than Trump’s multiple and largely fruitless “infrastructure weeks,” are already being hailed by environmentalists as necessary for slowing dangerous warming. And they’re being derided by the oil and gas sector and other industries for hampering economic growth.

Here’s some of what we’re expecting from the White House:
  • Oil and gas leasing: Perhaps biggest move is Biden’s expected decision to halt new oil and gas leasing on federal lands, as Juliet Eilperin and I reported. The drafted moratorium would not affect activity around existing leases, but would pause auctions for the right to drill on new parcels throughout much of the west as well as in the Gulf of Mexico. The order will also not restrict energy development on tribal lands.
  • Addressing environmental justice: The Biden administration will establish at least three different bodies meant to address the unequal impact of dirty air and water on poor and minority communities — an office of health and climate equity at the Health and Human Services Department, an environmental justice office at the Justice Department and a third interagency council at the White House, as Eilperin reports with Brady Dennis and Darryl Fears. The White House will also establish another cross-government group to help communities transition away from fossil fuels.
  • Protecting nature: Biden also is planning to instruct the government to set aside nearly a third of the nation’s land and water by the end of the decade for conservation. Biden pledged during the campaign to pursue that “30 by 30″ goal as means of blunting the buildup of greenhouse gases by sequestering carbon and preserving habitat for threatened plants and animals.
  • Tackling super pollutants: Biden will tell the State Department to send to the Senate the Kigali Amendment, an international agreement to slash the use of a group of human-made compounds that both contribute to climate change and deplete the ozone layer. The Trump administration never submitted the treaty to Congress despite the urging of both business groups and several congressional Republicans.
  • Kick-starting an “all-of-government” approach: Biden direct every agency to factor climate change into the decisions they make, including purchasing electric vehicles, getting power from carbon-free sources and bolstering the buildings and other federal facilities to the impacts of rising temperatures.

Many environmentalists said they hoped the halt on oil and gas leasing would lead to a more permanent ban.