Biden Climate Czar: U.S. Climate Action Is 'Bringing the Whole World Along'

When President Joe Biden named Ali Zaidi his top climate advisor in September 2022, Zaidi stepped into the role at a contradictory moment for the country's approach to climate change and energy.

The Biden administration has taken historic action to promote clean energy, and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act unleashed massive investment in renewable power, EVs, batteries and other clean technology.

But the U.S. is also the world's top oil and gas producer and some of Biden's decisions have enabled further development of fossil fuels, the main cause of climate change.

In an interview with Newsweek, Zaidi described an administration that is transitioning away from fossil fuels in a way that is "clear-eyed, pragmatic and meeting the American people and the market where it is."

One of the ways the Biden administration is tackling the climate problem is by reducing the emissions of methane from oil and gas production. Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas. It is the main component of natural gas and while it does not last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it has a far more potent warming effect in the short term.

Some scientists say methane reductions could be the single fastest way to slow the rate of warming in the near term.

Methane escapes from landfills, agriculture and other sources, but the petroleum industry is also a major emitter, leaking, venting or flaring large amounts from pipelines, wellheads and production facilities.

Research shows that most of those sources could be plugged at relatively low cost and the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund calculated that the methane the petroleum industry wastes each year in the U.S. could fuel 10 million homes.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed fining oil and gas companies for excessive methane emissions, part of a flurry of recent action to improve detection of methane leaks and ratchet down emissions, which have been rising globally.

In this exchange, which has been edited for length and clarity, Zaidi outlined some of the ways the U.S. is targeting methane emissions, and he defended the administration's record on climate action.

Newsweek: Is 2024 going to be the year that we get serious about controlling methane?

Zaidi: I think we really elevated the prioritization and urgency to tackle methane, which is a super-polluting greenhouse gas, from day one of this administration. If you rewind the clock to the first Executive Order that President Biden signed, he actually set out a timeline in the Executive Order to issue rules to tackle methane from both new and existing sources of methane in the oil and gas sector, both at the EPA and then also directed the Interior Department to tackle waste that was escaping, royalty-free, from production activities on public lands. That was day one.

We passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure law late in 2021 with a massive investment to cap wells that had been abandoned, that are leaking methane into the atmosphere and dumping toxics into our communities. Because of that we're now thousands of wells into this effort, holding oil and gas companies accountable and cleaning up this legacy form of waste.

That same bill included dollars to pair with standards that we've been advancing through the Department of Transportation to patch up pipes that are inherently unsafe because they're leaking methane and could explode, but also are unsafe in terms of the climate crisis. So that's mobilized massive investment.

We've, of course, passed the Inflation Reduction Act and we've been all along leveraging this really robust domestic action for progress overseas. You see that most recently in the Sunnylands statement in the U.S.-China relationship and dialogue on climate change. China, which for so long had avoided even accounting for methane emissions, in the Sunnylands statement made a commitment to include methane and other non-CO2 gases in their accounting and start to work at that challenge.

So, look, is 2024 going to be another big year of making progress under this administration to tackle climate change, take on methane pollution and create a bunch of jobs doing that? Absolutely. But I guess I disagree with the premise that this is the inflection point. I think the inflection point started to be forged really on day one of this administration.

Talk to me a little about monitoring and enforcement. As I understand it, several of these programs rely on voluntary reporting from the oil and gas industry. What can be done to improve monitoring and accountability?

In July of last year, we established a new cabinet-level methane task force that brings together the whole of government around specifically this question of proactive methane leak detection and data transparency. And that includes agencies like NOAA and NASA, with really incredible capabilities around measurement, monitoring, verification. We built into the rules themselves a focus on leveraging innovative technology around methane monitoring.

We also have really helped work with state and tribal governments to leverage the increasing satellite capability we have. In 2022, we detected more than 500 super-emitting events using those satellites and we're making that data ubiquitous and seamlessly available to state and local agencies and regulators.

Thanks to the president's Investing in America agenda, we have the tools to invest in this technology and scale up these solutions, and I think that's going to allow us to have a great deal of ambition going into 2024.

We've talked a lot about methane from the production of oil and gas, but less about the product itself—the oil and gas. And that, of course, is a much larger overall contributor to climate change. How do you respond to critics who look at these efforts and say, "OK, great, but this is just sort of nibbling around the margin of the main problem," which is the need to end the use of fossil fuels?

We've got to take on all of the sources of greenhouse gas pollution and the president's agenda on this is very clear. He didn't set a target for decarbonizing part of the economy, he didn't set a target for decarbonizing most of the economy, he set a target for net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by 2050—and getting halfway there within the decade. That's massively ambitious, and the way you do it is by transitioning away from fossil fuels and, in the near term, making sure that we're cleaning up our act everywhere we can.

If you think about methane emissions—which, by some analysis, methane is responsible for about half of a degree [Celsius] of warming that we're seeing right now—I think you've got to have a multi-pronged strategy. Taking on methane isn't about missing the forest for the trees, it's part of a multi-pronged strategy, the end goal of which is clear: net-zero emissions economy-wide.

That kind of leads to the bigger issue here: Despite this administration's historic support for clean energy, the U.S. is still, under this administration, the world's biggest producer of oil and gas. Can we really claim to be a climate leader and be the world's fossil fuel leader?

The United States has an incredible opportunity to drive progress around the world in every sector of the economy. I was at the D.C. Auto Show [on Thursday], and the U.S. auto industry is writing the next chapter of automotive history. They're doing it by helping to propel zero-emissions vehicles, electric plug-in hybrids, hydrogen into the marketplace. That reduces demand for oil and gas.

You see us leading the world increasingly in technologies like heat pumps, where the president has invoked his emergency powers under the Defense Production Act and now, we are seeing manufacturing of that technology. Again, it will reduce the demand for fossil fuels in the coming years.

We see that in even the hard-to-decarbonize sectors, places like the industrial sector where we make steel and cement. For the first time, folks are thinking it's within reach to decarbonize those sectors, thanks to the president's investment in technologies like green hydrogen, where he's unleashed tens of billions of dollars of private investment to propel that technology forward.

I think these tools are increasingly at hand and we are working really hard to deploy them and we're doing it in a way that I think is motivating the rest of the world. We do that clear-eyed, pragmatic and meeting the American people and the market where it is.

So, look, we've got a real innovation and ingenuity and energy advantage here in the United States, that comes with responsibility. And I think the way President Biden has been leading on this is to work aggressively and ambitiously to scale up, at real speed, the technologies we need to decarbonize every sector of the economy. That's having an effect here in the United States, but it's really bringing the whole world along.