A deal reached Thursday between President Biden and a bipartisan group of senators for $579 billion in new spending to repair the nation’s roads, rails and bridges does relatively little to fight climate change, an issue that the president has called an “existential threat.”
The deal does provide funding for public transit, passenger and freight rail, electric buses and charging stations for electric vehicles, all designed to try to reduce pollution from passenger vehicles and trucks. And it includes $47 billion to help communities become more resilient to disasters and severe weather caused by a warming planet.
Still, it contains few of the ambitious ideas that Mr. Biden initially proposed to cut the fossil fuel pollution that is driving climate change.
Democratic leaders and environmentalists are hoping those proposals can be included in a separate infrastructure bill that would pass through a fast-track process known as budget reconciliation. That process would not require Republican support and could be enacted with a simple majority vote.
But that’s a difficult proposition, as Senate rules require that legislation enacted through the reconciliation process pertain directly to federal revenue — such as taxes and spending. The Senate parliamentarian could determine that a clean electricity standard does not qualify.
A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Biden still intends to push for passage of a clean electricity standard, either in the reconciliation process or in a separate standalone bill.
Failure to pass bold climate legislation could make it difficult for Mr. Biden when he travels to Scotland this year for a United Nations climate conference, where he intends to try to persuade other nations to take aggressive steps to curb global warming. Mr. Biden has pledged that the United States will slash its planet-warming emissions roughly in half over the next decade. He wants to reposition the world’s largest economy as a leader in global efforts to halt warming.
“The United States right now has an opportunity to back up its ambitious claims with a detailed and defensible plan to honor those commitments. If we have that plan we’ll be able to compel other countries to make similar changes,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in an interview.
“If we don’t pass climate legislation through reconciliation, we won’t have the credibility to compel other countries to act at the scale and speed that’s needed,” Mr. Brune said.
Scientists have warned that the world needs to urgently cut emissions if humanity has any chance to keep average global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which experts say the planet will experience catastrophic, irreversible damage. Temperature change is not even around the globe; some regions have already reached an increase of 2 degrees Celsius.
Senate leaders are trying to load climate provisions into the reconciliation bill by way of tax incentives that could pass muster with the parliamentarian. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, has instructed the Democrats working on the budget bill to ensure that key climate components are included, according to a Senate leadership aide with knowledge of the talks. Those provisions include tax credits and incentives designed to prod power companies to reduce their emissions 80 percent by 2030, said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota is one of several Democrats who have said they will not support a budget reconciliation bill that does not include significant climate provisions. Ms. Smith said a package must include an electricity standard as well as major investments in clean energy.