U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has begun discussions with the utility and automobile sectors about decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, White House domestic climate change adviser Gina McCarthy informed Reuters.
The discussions are part of a broad effort by the Biden administration that McCarthy will spearhead to engage every federal agency to decarbonize the U.S. power sector by 2035 and the entire economy by 2050.
The United States is the world’s second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter after China, with the power and transport sectors making up over half of the emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
McCarthy’s first significant task will be to come up with a 2030 emission decrease target under the Paris climate agreement before Biden convenes world leaders for a climate summit on April 22.
“We’re already having conversations with the utility world and we’re having conversations with the car companies,” McCarthy said in an interview.
“The car companies understand now that the future for them is electric vehicles … so we’re going to be sort of working to make sure that we move forward with some kind of an agreement on that and a strategy to get us out of the gate fast.”
The White House has met some significant automakers, including General Motors, as it plans to begin talks with the industry about modifying vehicle emission standards through 2026 or beyond. GM said last week it intended to sell only electric cars by 2035.
She met virtually with the board of the Edison Electric Institute, the main utility lobby, which talked about its “support for recent energy-related executive orders,” a spokesman for the group informed Reuters.
McCarthy will chair a task force composed of the heads of all Cabinet agencies to see what measures can be taken through regulation, budget appropriation, and legislation to tackle climate change, she said.
Input from that task force will assist McCarthy to come up with a feasible emission reduction target the United States can achieve by 2030 that her international policy counterpart, John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy on climate change, can submit to the United Nations.
Biden brought the United States back into the international agreement after his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump withdrew years ago.
Oil and gas companies will also deal with new proposed limits on methane emissions later this year, she said, after Trump withdrew previous rules late last year.
The main U.S. oil lobby group, the American Petroleum Institute, long resisted mandatory methane regulations but is no longer opposing since January.
