Live Updates: Biden Signs an Array of Executive Orders Focused on Climate Change

Video player loading — On Wednesday, President Biden signed a series of executive orders aimed at combating climate change through job creation, and included a ‘pause’ in fossil fuel leasing.CreditCredit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

President Biden on Wednesday signed a series of executive orders that aim to “confront the existential threat of climate change” across the federal government while emphasizing job creation and tackling racial inequity.

“In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis. We can’t wait any longer,” said Mr. Biden, speaking at the White House. “We see it with our own eyes. We feel it. We know it in our bones. And it’s time to act.”

The president cast many of the executive orders as opportunities for job creation, among other things pledging to use the purchasing power of the federal government to buy a vast fleet of zero-emissions vehicles. “This will mean one million new jobs in the American automobile industry,” he said.

Wednesday’s executive orders also set broad new foreign policy goals, including specifying that climate change, for the first time, will be a core part of all foreign policy and national security decisions.

Mr. Biden’s international climate envoy, John Kerry, said earlier in the day that the United States would host an international climate change summit on Earth Day, April 22. “The convening of this summit is essential to ensuring that 2021 is going to be the year that really makes up for the lost time of the last four years,” said Mr. Kerry.

He pledged that by that date he would announce a new set of specific targets detailing how the United States would lower its carbon dioxide emissions under the terms of the Paris Agreement, the international climate accord from which former President Donald J. Trump had withdrawn, and which Mr. Biden has rejoined.

Gina McCarthy, the top adviser on domestic climate policy, said she intends to move forward quickly to implement new policies to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. “Here at home we have to do our part,” she said.

Mr. Biden has already ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to begin the process of reinstating the federal government’s single largest policy to curb carbon dioxide emissions — an Obama-era rule that had been designed to cut greenhouse tailpipe pollution from automobile tailpipes, which Mr. Trump rolled back last year.

Federal agencies also will be ordered to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies “and identify new opportunities to spur innovation.” Separately, Mr. Biden called on the campaign trail to overhauling tax breaks to oil companies — worth billions of dollars to the oil, coal and gas industries — to help pay for his $2 trillion climate change plan, although that plan is expected to face strong opposition in Congress.

The breach of the Capitol might encourage domestic extremists to target other government facilities or elected officials, the Department of Homeland Security said. — Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York Times

The United States will face heightened threats from violent extremists emboldened by the assault on the Capitol for weeks, according to a rare national terrorism warning released on Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security.

“Information suggests that some ideologically motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence,” the terrorism bulletin said.

The breach may have encouraged domestic extremists to target elected officials and government facilities, according to the advisory, which was issued by the acting secretary of homeland security, David Pekoske. (Mr. Biden’s nominee for secretary of homeland security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate.)

The extremists are motivated by issues including coronavirus restrictions, the results of the 2020 election, police use of force and a strong opposition to immigration, according to the agency.

“D.H.S. is concerned these same drivers to violence will remain through early 2021,” the warning said.

Despite the ongoing threats and the near disruption of the peaceful transfer of power, some public officials have sought to encourage a return to normalcy. Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., posted a tweet on Wednesday encouraging residents to tell business owners to take down boards that had been put up in anticipation of the riots.

The Homeland Security Department will periodically release bulletins to the public to warn of potential threats to national security. But the decision to release a warning about the threat of domestic terrorism is a pivot from the Trump administration, in which some White House officials sought to suppress even the use of the phrase “domestic terrorism.”

A former homeland security intelligence chief also said in a whistleblower complaint filed in September that Mr. Trump’s Homeland Security Department directed analysts to downplay the threat of white supremacy in a threat assessment that had been delayed for months. The threat report eventually singled out white supremacy as a lethal threat after the whistleblower complaint prompted backlash from Congress.

John Kerry, President Biden’s global envoy for climate change, is a principal member of the National Security Council. — Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

John Kerry, the new American envoy for climate change, has spent the last few days repeatedly telling world leaders that the United States is ready to help the world “raise ambition” to address global warming. Doing so, however, could mean big changes for America’s role in the world.

Foreign policy experts say that the Biden administration’s efforts must extend far beyond rejoining the Paris agreement, the global pact by nearly 200 governments aimed at slowing climate change. Taking on climate change will require a reassessment of issues as broad as the United States’ priorities in the Arctic and helping fragile countries deal with the fallout of climate risks.

“It changes defense posture, it changes foreign policy posture,” said John D. Podesta, a former Obama administration official. “It begins to drive a lot of decision making in foreign policy, diplomacy and development policy.”

The first acknowledgment of that shift is expected on Wednesday, with the White House directing intelligence agencies to produce a National Intelligence Estimate on climate security, and telling the secretary of defense to do a climate risk analysis of the Pentagon’s facilities and installations.

“Addressing climate change can, and will be, a central pillar of the Biden administration’s foreign policy,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, who served as a deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush and now leads the Geopolitics of Energy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. “It means infusing the issue of climate and environment into our trade policies, our foreign aid programs, our bilateral discussions and even our military readiness.”

A portion of the ExxonMobil Baytown Complex in Baytown, Texas, on Feb. 17, 2020. The previous July, an explosion and fire at the Baytown Olefins Plant left dozens injured. — Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

As President Biden prepares on Wednesday to open an ambitious effort to confront climate change, powerful and surprising forces are arrayed at his back.

Automakers are coming to accept that much higher fuel economy standards are their future; large oil and gas companies have said some curbs on greenhouse pollution lifted by former President Donald J. Trump should be reimposed; shareholders are demanding corporations acknowledge and prepare for a warmer, more volatile future, and a youth movement is driving the Democratic Party to go big to confront the issue.

But what may well stand in the president’s way is political intransigence from senators in both parties. An evenly divided Senate has given enormous power to any single senator, and one in particular, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who will lead the Senate Energy Committee and who came to the Senate as a defender of his state’s coal industry.

Mr. Biden has already staffed his government with more people concerned with climate change than any other president before him. On his first day in office, he rejoined the Paris agreement on climate change.

But during the campaign, he tried to walk a delicate line on fracking for natural gas, saying he would stop it on public lands but not on private property, where most of it takes place.

A suite of executive actions planned for Wednesday does include a halt to new oil and gas leases on federal lands and in federal waters, a move that is certain to rile industry. But that would not stop fossil fuel drilling. As of 2019, more than 26 million acres of United States land were already leased to oil and gas companies, and last year the Trump administration, in a rush to exploit natural resources hidden beneath publicly owned lands and waters, leased tens of thousands more.

If the administration honors those contracts, millions of publicly owned acres could be opened to fossil fuel extraction in the coming decade.

The real action will come when Mr. Biden moves forward with plans to reinstate and strengthen Obama-era regulations, repealed by the Trump administration, on the three largest sources of planet-warming greenhouse emissions: vehicles, power plants and methane leaks from oil and gas drilling wells.

It may take up to two years to put the new rules in place, and even then, without new legislation from Congress, a future administration could once again simply undo them.

The United States is “43rd in the world” in its ability to track potentially dangerous new mutations of the coronavirus, according to President Biden’s coronavirus czar, who used the White House’s first public health briefing to issue a stark warning that the nation will remain vulnerable to the deadly pandemic unless Congress quickly passes a virus relief bill.

“We are 43rd in the world in genomic sequencing — totally unacceptable,” said Jeffrey Zients, Mr. Biden’s Covid-19 response coordinator, who also warned that the federal government still faces shortages of personal protective gear and other essential supplies that it will not be able to buy if Congress does not pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue plan.

Scientists have warned that, with no robust system to identify genetic variations of the coronavirus, the United States is woefully ill-equipped to track dangerous new mutants, leaving health officials blind as they try to combat the grave threat. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the president’s senior adviser for Covid-19, who also spoke during the briefing, said the National Institutes of Health is now working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on research aimed at adapting vaccines so that they “have on the ability to neutralize these mutants.”

The virtual briefing, which Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the new C.D.C. director, attended along with other officials, was laden with scientific details, clearly an effort by the new administration to make good on the president’s pledge to be more transparent than his predecessor about the administration’s response.

During the briefing, Dr. Walensky also pleaded with Congress for additional money, saying scientists “really need to have access to those resources to do the amount of sequencing and surveillance that we need in order to detect things when they first start to emerge.”

One variant, which has surged in Britain and burdened its hospitals with cases, has been increasingly detected in the United States. Federal health officials have warned that the variant, which is more contagious, could become the dominant source of infection in the United States by March, and would likely lead to a wrenching surge in cases and deaths that would further overwhelm hospitals. Other variants spreading in South Africa and Brazil have also caused concern.

On Monday, the drug makers Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech reported that their vaccines were effective against variants discovered in Britain and South Africa. But they are slightly less protective against the variant in South Africa, which may be more adept at dodging antibodies in the bloodstream. That has underscored a realization by scientists that the virus is changing more quickly than once thought, and may well continue to develop in ways that help it elude the vaccines being deployed worldwide.

The briefing by the Biden team on Wednesday was beset with technical challenges. At the outset of their remarks, Mr. Zients and Dr. Fauci had their audio cut off. And with 500 people listening in, some journalists were unable to attend because the call had hit its maximum number of attendees.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who has decades of diplomatic experience, is President Joe Biden’s pick to be ambassador to the United Nations. — Credit…Pool photo by Michael Reynolds

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, President Biden’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Wednesday called for America’s muscular return to the multilateral body to counter the rise of China during her confirmation hearing, while facing tough questions for her decision to deliver a speech two years ago at an institute that some have described as disseminating Chinese propaganda.

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield gave the remarks in October 2019 at Savannah State University’s Confucius Institute, which has since closed. It was one of dozens of such entities around the country that offer Chinese-language classes, an operation that has drawn concerns about whether the Chinese Communist Party was using the centers to disseminate Chinese government propaganda on U.S. campuses.

A number of Republican lawmakers sharply criticized Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s speech to the institute as being overly optimistic about China’s relationship with African countries while not being tough enough on Beijing’s human rights record.

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said she had made a “huge mistake” speaking at a Confucius Institute, and that it did not constitute an accurate portrayal of her views on China.

“I do regret that speech,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said. “But if you look at what I have done prior to that, there is no question that I am not at all naïve about what the Chinese are doing and I have called them out on a regular basis, including today.” Lawmakers’ concerns about the speech was earlier reported by The Washington Post.

During her hearing, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield made sharp remarks about China’s human rights record, and said that the State Department was “reviewing” a determination made by the Trump administration declaring that the Chinese government was committing genocide and crimes against humanity through its repression of Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, because “all of the procedures were not followed.”

She said that the situation in China was “horrific” and noted that she had “lived through, and experienced, and witnessed a genocide in Rwanda.” The situation in China, she said, “feels like that.”

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield told the senators that if she was confirmed, the United States would become a more active presence at the United Nations, which saw diminished participation from the United States under President Donald J. Trump’s “America First” policy. A more prominent U.S. role, she said, would help stem China’s diplomatic advances on the global stage.

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s nomination has been praised by veteran diplomats, who said her 35 years of experience as a foreign service officer would help rebuild America’s standing at the United Nations.

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield entered the foreign service in 1982 and held a range of senior positions in the State Department. She served as U.S. ambassador to Liberia from 2008 to 2012 before moving on to become the director general of the foreign service for about a year. From 2013 to 2017, she served as the top U.S. diplomat for African affairs. In 2017, she was among a parade of diplomats who were pushed out of the department by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson.

On his first full day as secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken said that the State Department he would now lead was “not the same one that I left four years ago.” To illustrate his point, his remarks were delivered to a mostly-empty lobby at the department’s headquarters.

The pomp of past arrival ceremonies for America’s top diplomat was dispensed with as a pandemic precaution. Instead, Mr. Blinken was greeted on Wednesday by a few dozen employees and journalists gathered to record his return to the department where he served as deputy secretary during the Obama administration.

“We’ve never been in a moment quite like this before,” Mr. Blinken acknowledged in remarks that were broadcast online and on the State Department’s internal TV channel, for diplomats across the world to watch.

“The world has changed,” he said. “The department has changed, and we need only look around to see that.”

He repeated his pledge to rebuild trust among State Department employees who he has said were demoralized during the Trump administration. He urged them to “speak up without fear or favor” when they disagree with policies. He also reminded the department’s staff of the longstanding tradition of putting “country over party.”

That was a veiled contrast to the department under Mr. Blinken’s predecessor, Mike Pompeo, who openly embraced partisan politics during his tenure, including when he spoke at the Republican National Convention while on an official diplomatic trip to Jerusalem.

Mr. Blinken also indirectly referred to the right-wing mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — a culmination of years of national divisiveness that has left diplomats reeling over how to represent the United States abroad.

“The world is watching us intently right now,” he said. “They want to know if we can heal our nation. They want to see whether we will lead with the power of our example, if we’ll put a premium on diplomacy with our allies and partners to meet the great challenges of our time.”

He did not take questions at the end of his brief remarks, and headed to the White House about 90 minutes later for a ceremonial swearing-in by Vice President Kamala Harris.

President Biden’s plan would allow the Hernandez family to apply for legal status. — Credit…Jessica Pons for The New York Times

Maria Elena Hernandez recently retrieved a flowery box tucked in her closet and dusted it off. For more than a decade, she has used it to store tax returns, lease agreements and other documents that she has collected to prove her family’s long years of residence in the United States.

“We have been waiting for the day when we can apply for legal status,” said Ms. Hernandez, 55, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who arrived in this country with three small children in 2000. “In this box is, hopefully, all the evidence we’ll need.”

She had just learned of President Biden’s plan to offer a pathway to U.S. citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented people, announced as part of a sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.

The bill would allow undocumented immigrants who were in the United States before Jan. 1, 2021, to apply for temporary legal status after passing background checks and paying taxes. As newly minted “lawful prospective immigrants,” they would be authorized to work, join the military and travel without fear of deportation. After five years, they could apply for green cards.

The president’s proposal would be perhaps the most ambitious immigration redesign passed since 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized three million people.

Converting more than three times that many people into full citizens could open the door to one of the most significant demographic shifts in modern U.S. history, lifting millions out of the shadows and potentially into higher-paying jobs, providing them with welfare benefits, government IDs and Social Security eligibility and eventually creating millions of new voters.

“This is the boldest immigration agenda any administration has put forward in generations,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “But given that the Democrats have razor-thin majorities in Congress, the administration needs to have its expectations tempered.” Legalizing just one group at first — say, farmworkers — might be “more realistic,” he said.

In a sign of the hurdles ahead, another one of Mr. Biden’s early immigration initiatives, a 100-day freeze on deportations, was temporarily blocked by a federal judge on Tuesday after a lawsuit by the Texas attorney general, an advocate of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Immigration reform has stalled in Congress time and again, primarily over what is widely known as amnesty. Despite beefed-up border enforcement and employer sanctions, Mr. Reagan’s immigration overhaul failed to curb the growth of the undocumented population.

While Congress has wrestled with how to change the immigration system, immigrants have continued to live, work and raise families in the United States.

The family of Denise Palagan, 27, came to the United States from the Philippines in 2002 after her father, a financial analyst, obtained an H-1B visa.

“The Biden plan would fulfill our hope of keeping the family together,” said Ms. Palagan, who has two younger sisters, one of them born in the United States.

After the inauguration, Ms. Hernandez was at her dining room table thinking about the imminent birth of her second grandchild, who will be an American citizen. She and her husband planned to drive to Utah to meet the baby, and she worried about making a trip across state lines without legal status, lest law enforcement stop them.

When she learned that the president had unveiled a blueprint for legalization, she said, she was stunned at first. Then she went to retrieve the box of documents.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican who was elected in November, has promoted QAnon and other conspiracy theories. — Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated Press

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a first-term Georgia Republican, repeatedly endorsed executing top Democratic politicians on social media before she was elected to Congress, including telling a follower who asked if they could hang former President Barack Obama that the “stage is being set.”

A review of Ms. Greene’s social media accounts, first reported by CNN, found that she repeatedly liked posts on Facebook that discussed the prospect of violence against Democratic lawmakers and employees of the federal government. Ms. Greene liked a Facebook comment in January 2019 that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and liked another about executing FBI agents.

After a Facebook follower asked Ms. Greene “Now do we get to hang them,” referring to Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee, Ms. Greene responded: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off.”

In a lengthy statement posted to Twitter on Tuesday before CNN published its report, Ms. Greene did not disavow the posts, but accused CNN of “coming after” her for political reasons and noted that several people had managed her social media accounts.

“Over the years, I’ve had teams of people manage my pages,” Ms. Greene wrote. “Many posts have been liked. Many posts have been shared. Some did not represent my views.”

Ms. Greene has previously been scrutinized for promoting conspiracy theories, including QAnon, the pro-Trump fringe group that falsely claims the existence of a satanic pedophile cult run by top Democrats, and for wrongly suggesting that the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Fla., was staged. Ms. Greene earlier this week was chosen to serve on the House Education and Labor Committee.

On Wednesday morning, Fred Guttenberg, a gun control activist whose daughter was killed in the Parkland shooting, posted a video of Ms. Greene in 2018 following David Hogg, a student who survived the shooting and now advocates for gun control legislation.

In the video, Ms. Greene follows Mr. Hogg, who was a teenager at the time, while asking him why he was trying to “take away my Second Amendment rights” and accused him of “using kids” to advance his cause. Mr. Hogg continued walking and ignored her, prompting her to call him a “coward.”

She has repeatedly suggested that Ms. Pelosi should be tried for treason for her refusal to support former President Donald J. Trump’s immigration policies, emphasizing that treason is a crime punishable by death.

In the days before pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, Ms. Greene referred to the day as Republicans’ “1776 moment.” After the riot, she pledged that Mr. Trump would “remain in office” and that attempts to remove him from the White House constituted “an attack on every American who voted for him,” even though he lost the election.

Ms. Greene’s inflammatory rhetoric has drawn rebukes from some members of her own party. But since she joined Congress, House Republican leaders have declined to condemn her. Before she was elected, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, disavowed her comments as “offensive and bigoted,” and Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, went so far as to back Ms. Greene’s primary opponent.

A spokesman for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, told Axios that Ms. Greene’s newly surfaced Facebook posts were “deeply disturbing” and that he planned to “have a conversation” with Ms. Greene about them.

An officer was among those who died as a result of the riot by a pro-Trump mob at the Capitol this month. — Credit…Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Nearly 140 police officers from two departments were injured during the Jan. 6 pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol, including officers who suffered brain injuries, smashed spinal discs and one who is likely to lose his eye, the Capitol Police union said on Wednesday.

In a statement, the union’s chairman, Gus Papathanasiou, faulted leadership of the Capitol Police for failing to equip officers with proper equipment ahead of the attack.

He was responding to the closed-door testimony on Tuesday of Yogananda D. Pittman, the acting chief of the Capitol Police, who acknowledged that the department had known there was a “strong potential for violence” that day but failed to take necessary steps to prevent what she described as a “terrorist attack.”

Chief Pittman took the reins of the agency after the siege, replacing Steven Sund, who resigned as police chief under pressure.

“We have one officer who lost his life as a direct result of the insurrection,” Mr. Papathanasiou said. “Another officer has tragically taken his own life. Between U.S.C.P. and our colleagues at the Metropolitan Police Department, we have almost 140 officers injured. I have officers who were not issued helmets prior to the attack who have sustained brain injuries. One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs. One officer is going to lose his eye, and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake.”

Chief Pittman testified via videoconference before a meeting of the House Appropriations Committee that officers were outmanned during the riot, that internal communications were poor, and that officers lacked sufficient equipment and struggled to carry out orders like locking down the building.

Her testimony marked the beginning of what is likely to be a series of hearings investigating the law enforcement failures that allowed the Capitol building to be occupied for the first time since the War of 1812.

“By Jan. 4, the department knew that the Jan. 6 event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020,” Chief Pittman testified. “We knew that militia groups and white supremacist organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target.”

Mr. Papathanasiou called it “inexcusable” that such warnings were not relayed to rank-and-file officers.

“The officers are angry, and I don’t blame them,” he said. “The entire executive team failed us, and they must be held accountable. Their inaction cost lives.”

Jennifer M. Granholm spoke during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Wednesday. — Credit…Pool photo by Graeme Jennings

Jennifer M. Granholm, who faces a confirmation hearing Wednesday as President Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Energy, is widely expected to play a central role in the administration’s efforts to confront climate change.

But that raises a question: How much can an energy secretary realistically do to help reduce America’s planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions?

Only about one-fifth of the Energy Department’s $35 billion annual budget is devoted to energy programs. The rest goes toward maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal, cleaning up environmental messes from the Cold War and conducting scientific research in areas like high-energy physics.

But the one-fifth slice of the department controls some powerful levers that could help advance clean-energy technologies, including a network of 17 national laboratories that conduct cutting-edge research, tens of billions of dollars in unused federal loan guarantees, and regulatory authority to encourage energy-efficient appliances and new transmission lines.

Live Updates: Biden Signs an Array of Executive Orders Focused on Climate Change

Biden Signs Executive Orders to Confront Climate Change

On Wednesday, President Biden signed a series of executive orders aimed at combating climate change through job creation, and included a ‘pause’ in fossil fuel leasing.

White House Covid-19 Team Warns of Virus Variants

Members of President Biden’s coronavirus response team said they are increasing surveillance of potentially dangerous Covid-19 mutations.

Blinken Takes Over at State Department

On Wednesday, the new secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, arrived at the State Department and laid out his plans.

Harris Swears In Blinken as Secretary of State

Vice President Kamala Harris delivered the oath of office to Antony J. Blinken on Wednesday, his first full day leading the State Department.

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