Dublin: Visiting US President Joe Biden said he will run for the presidency again, the Irish national radio and television broadcaster RTE reported.
Before departing from Ireland at midnight Friday, Biden on Saturday told reporters that he has made up his mind to run for a second term and will make a formal campaign announcement soon.
The US President arrived in Dublin for a three-day official visit on Wednesday. During his visit, Biden met with his Irish counterpart Michael D. Higgins and held talks with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, Xinhua news agency reported.
Former US President Donald Trump, a Republican, who lost to Biden in the 2020 election but has refused to concede, announced his bid in November for presidency in the 2024 election.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement that the proposed rule would “improve health outcomes for DACA recipients and would in turn improve the economic and productive capacity of America.” He estimated that roughly a third of immigrants enrolled in the DACA program are uninsured.
The details: The proposed rule submitted by CMS amends the definition of “lawful presence” to include DACA recipients, also known as “Dreamers,” for eligibility for Medicaid and marketplace coverage. Medicaid and exchange applications will have their eligibility verified electronically when they apply for coverage, the administration said.
While finalization of new rules usually takes some time, the Biden administration expects to have the new policy in place by the end of the month.
Context: President Barack Obama created the DACA program in 2012, shielding immigrants brought to the U.S. as children from deportation and allowing them to work legally in the United States. But DACA recipients have continued to lack access to key federal programs and benefits, such as health care coverage, because they lack permanent legal status.
Biden has focused on using his executive powers to protect and extend benefits to DACA recipients. And the president said on Thursday that he will continue to press Congress to create a path to citizenship for DACA recipients.
The moves represent a sea change from the approach taken by the Trump administration, which attempted to dismantle the DACA program.
State perspective: Several states, including California, New York and Minnesota, already cover DACA recipients through Medicaid. However, they have been unable to receive federal matching dollars for the coverage and have had to pull from their own state coffers.
Other states have taken creative approaches to expand health insurance access for immigrants, such as Colorado’s new OmniSalud program, which allows people to purchase health insurance through the state marketplace without disclosing their immigration status and potentially receive state subsidies to help with premium costs.
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“The United States has been your closest partner, your most dependable partner and your most enthusiastic supporter every step of the way,” Biden said. “In this moment, the world needs Ireland and the United States, and our limitless imaginations.”
Biden’s remarks came during a four-day trip across Northern Ireland and Ireland designed to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement. The visit also served as an opportunity for Biden to reconnect with his Irish roots.
A proud Irish Catholic who frequently quotes Irish poets in his speeches and cites his heritage as a defining element of his life, Biden on Thursday called his speech to the nation’s parliament “one of the great honors of my career.”
“You knew I’d be coming,” Biden told Irish lawmakers at the outset. “I only wish I could stay longer.”
The 35-minute address was by turns optimistic and sentimental, peppered with asides about his Irish relatives as well as other Irish Americans he’d met. The Irish people are the “backbone of America’s progress,” Biden said.
At one point, growing suddenly quiet, he mentioned his late son Beau, who he said was “the one who should be standing here giving this speech to you.”
But Biden largely focused his remarks on the economic and diplomatic possibilities he envisioned in a continued U.S.-Ireland partnership between the U.S. and Ireland. He singled out the nation’s political and humanitarian support for Ukraine even as it remains militarily neutral.
Ireland has been sharply critical of Moscow and offered extensive nonlethal aid to Ukraine, while taking in nearly 80,000 Ukrainian refugees — which Biden cited as an example of the continued strength of the global coalition opposing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Putin thought the world would look the other way,” he said. “That’s what he thought. But he was wrong, he was wrong on every point.”
Biden also addressed matters closer to home for the Irish, reiterating his support for strengthening the Good Friday pact that largely ended sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
“Peace is precious,” Biden warned those in attendance, which included former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and former Sinn Féin party leader Gerry Adams, two key figures in achieving the Good Friday accord. “It still needs its champions. It still needs to be nurtured.”
He also urged the U.K. to work closer with Ireland in smoothing out ongoing trade issues related to Northern Ireland — following Britain’s 2021 exit from the European Union, it remains the only part of the U.K. still inside the EU’s single market for goods. Biden said there’s “more to be done” to reassure the region’s British unionists that this arrangement, which keeps trade flowing freely between the two parts of Ireland, won’t threaten their future in the U.K.
Biden became the fourth U.S. president to address a joint session of the Irish parliament, a landmark event that followed separate meetings with Irish President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Varadkar earlier Thursday praised the U.S. support for Ukraine, telling reporters that “I never thought in my lifetime that we would see a war of this nature happen in Europe again.”
“If it wasn’t for American leadership, and for America and Europe working together, I don’t know what kind of world we’d live in,” he added.
In addition to the diplomatic meetings, Biden is using the trip to revisit his ancestral home for the first time since 2017. On Wednesday, he toured County Louth, the past home of his Finnegan descendants, including a stop at a 12th-century castle that he said was likely the last Irish landmark his great-great-grandfather saw before setting sail for America.
Biden is slated to visit County Mayo on Friday, where his Blewitt ancestors hail from. He told the Irish parliament that those connections, and the way they shaped his upbringing, are “emblematic of the stories of so many Irish and American families.”
“This is about defending the values handed down to us by our ancestors,” Biden said of the U.S.-Ireland alliance’s enduring importance. “This is a struggle we’re fit to fight together.”
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People in the oil industry were surprised at how ambitious EPA’s newest rule is, multiple oil industry lobbyists said, complaining that Biden’s regulators had skipped the Obama administration’s practice of meeting with outside groups while prepping a rule.
“The administration on these things, they tend to go big,” said Bruce Thompson, CEO of oil and grid consulting and lobbying firm CapeDC Advisors, adding that he saw the proposal mostly as a messaging exercise meant to energize Biden’s green supporters. “It’s almost as if they’re trying to convince people they’re actually doing something. It’s way over the top… I suspect a lot of this is theater.”
Biden’s supporters said they’re sure the new rules will hold up in court, noting that Congress enacted a climate law last year that’s pouring billions of dollars into the effort to get more electric cars on the road. And administration officials expressed confidence that the auto industry can meet the EPA’s audacious goal of having electric vehicles account for two-thirds of new sales by 2032 — despite the carmakers’ public misgivings.
“When I look at the projections that many in the automobile industry have made, this is the future,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Wednesday morning during the proposal’s official unveiling. “The consumer demand is there. The markets are enabling it. The technologies are enabling it.”
But whether the rule can succeed depends on multiple complicated issues, including the average electric vehicle’s hefty price tag, the patchy state of the nation’s charging infrastructure, and the Treasury Department’s recent tightening of a $7,500 tax incentive that was supposed to make EVs more affordable. Other challenges include China’s dominance of the supply chain for batteries and the need to upgrade the U.S. power grid.
Here are the opponents who could make the task even tougher:
Republicans and red state attorneys general push back
Republicans in Congress are already stoking the fires of what could be the next big culture war: A fight over what’s in Americans’ driveways. And they’re invoking the partisan flare-up from earlier this year over another fossil-fuel touchstone of Americana — a false accusation that Biden was proposing to ban gas stoves.
“First President Biden came for our gas stoves,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Wednesday morning. “Now he wants to ban the cars we drive.”
Biden does, in fact, want to get millions of Americans to give up their gasoline-powered cars. And there’s not much that Republicans in Congress can do about it immediately, aside from attempting to pass a resolution that would roll back the EPA rule. (Biden could veto such a resolution.)
But a coalition of 17 attorneys general from GOP-led states has already sued over an earlier EPA auto-emissions rule, along with plaintiffs from the oil and gas industry. Though none of those states have yet explicitly threatened to sue over this latest version, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey hinted Wednesday that another multistate legal challenge could be on the way. “We’ll be ready to once again lead the charge against wrongheaded energy proposals like these,” Morrisey said in a statement.
He also said the new rule showed that “this administration is hell bent on destroying America’s energy security and independence” and making the U.S. dependent on resources from “countries like China and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
Oil, gas and ethanol sharpen their knives
The oil and gas industry for the most part seems to be happy to let other industries poke holes in the rule, or for it to collapse under its own weight, lobbyists told POLITICO — or both.
But the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the main trade association representing refining companies, will be pushing the administration to make changes. And EPA is on shaky legal ground if it doesn’t, said Patrick Kelly, the group’s senior director for fuel and vehicle policy.
“I don’t think Congress has given the EPA authority to do this,” Kelly said in an interview just after an initial reading of the rule. “We need to look at where the EPA may have drifted into the Department of Transportation’s lane for setting fuel economy standards and where the EPA may have exceeded the authority Congress gave it.”
Ethanol interests also expressed frustration with the proposed rules and objected to the administration’s characterization of electric vehicles as being free of greenhouse gas pollution. They said the agency isn’t accounting for the energy-intensive nature of mineral mining and battery building, as well as the energy used to charge electric vehicles.
Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, noted that a majority of U.S. electricity today comes from fossil fuels. He said his group will be reaching out to members of Congress on what it calls a better approach — rather than what he called “carbon accounting gimmicks to create a de facto EV mandate.”
Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, an associate member of the national trade group, also accused the administration of putting its “thumb on the scale for EVs.”
And as an executive branch action, Wednesday’s rule proposal is vulnerable to being reversed by a future administration, much as former President Donald Trump’s regulators tried to undo EPA’s Obama-era regulations. Shaw predicted a continuation of “disjointed public policy” on emissions, characterized by “radical U turns” in policy until a consensus is reached.
But Thompson, from CapeDC Advisors, said he thinks the oil industry will “stay out of the crosshairs on this one” and let the auto industry lead the charge against the rule in the courts — assuming the carmakers do so.
The EPA rule is “more of an eyeroll than a source of consternation,” said one lobbyist, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
But another industry lobbyist, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the oil industry couldn’t just “leave it up to the autos because they have very different goals: The autos take issue with the speed with which they’re accelerating the energy transition, not the transition itself.”
Automobiles warn of a proposal that could be doomed to fail
Automakers are pouring more than $100 billion into the transition to electric, but they say the new EPA proposal goes too far too fast, especially considering the many challenges involving charging, minerals and the tax-credit restrictions.
One noteworthy feature of Wednesday’s rule rollout was what the automakers didn’t say. Officials from GM, Ford, Mercedes and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the principal U.S. trade group for the auto industry, were present for Wednesday’s unveiling at EPA headquarters in Washington but didn’t speak.
The event had originally been expected to happen in Detroit, the industry’s home turf, a person familiar with the situation said. But the person, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, said automakers were concerned that holding it there could make it appear they were endorsing a proposal they hadn’t seen yet.
But people in the industry made it clear they don’t love the proposal.
Alliance for Automotive Innovation leader John Bozzella noted in a statement Wednesday that the EPA’s goal for electric vehicle adoption goes beyond Biden’s original target of having EVs make up 50 percent of new vehicle sales by 2030. He questioned how the agency could justify steamrolling that “carefully considered and data-driven goal,” especially since the industry and the administration had agreed on it just two years ago..
“To be clear, 50 percent was always a stretch goal and predicated on several conditions,” Bozzella said. Those conditions included the climate law’s incentives for manufacturers, which “have only just begun to be implemented,” and the $7,500 tax credits that the Treasury Department is now dramatically curtailing to meet Congress’ domestic sourcing requirements.
Nobody in the auto industry was threatening to go to court, but Bozzella also wasn’t endorsing the administration’s more ambitious new goal.
“The question isn’t can this be done, it’s how fast can it be done, and how fast will depend almost exclusively on having the right policies and market conditions in place,” he said.
Individual statements from some major carmakers were more noncommittal. Ford touted its advancement of electric vehicles and promised “strong coordinated action from the public and private sectors.” A GM spokesperson told POLITICO that policy staff is still going through the massive rule but that the company would likely submit comments on the rule.
Manufacturers exclusively invested in EVs, such as Rivian, applauded the EPA proposal.
The Zero Emission Transportation Association urged the administration to act swiftly to encourage more Americans to buy electric vehicles — and to ensure the industry is capable of providing them.
James Bikales and Alex Guillén contributed to this report.
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Their projection was for “a mild recession starting later this year, with a recovery over the subsequent two years,” according to the minutes, released Wednesday. That would spark a jump in unemployment. They estimated the economy would fully recover by 2025.
The economic outlook is always difficult to foretell with any confidence, and staff members underscored their uncertainty at the meeting. If banks don’t pull back on lending as much as they expect, then the economy might not suffer as much. But if the financial system were to face even more stress, then the prognosis could be much worse.
“Historical recessions related to financial market problems tend to be more severe and persistent than average recessions,” staff noted, according to the minutes.
For their part, officials with an actual say in rate policy aren’t quite forecasting a recession. At the March meeting, their median projection was for the U.S. economy to grow 0.4 percent — a rate so slow that it could easily dip negative. Meanwhile, they expect unemployment to rise roughly a percentage point, conditions that would be consistent with an economic contraction.
Fed officials expect the recent string of bank failures to lead cash to flow less freely through the economy as lenders are less willing to part with it, something Chair Jerome Powell has noted could act as essentially another rate hike.
Central bank policymakers are considering whether another rate hike will be needed when they meet next in May, or if borrowing costs are high enough for now to bring inflation down over time.
Members of the Fed’s rate-setting committee said in March “that it was too early to assess with confidence the magnitude of the effect of a credit tightening on economic activity and inflation, and that it was important to continue to closely monitor developments,” according to the minutes.
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“Where barbed wire one sliced up the city, today we find a cathedral of learning built of glass that lets the [light shine] in and out,” Biden said. The agreement “just has a profound impact for someone who has come back to see it. It’s an incredible testament to the power and the possibilities of peace.”
Northern Ireland has been unable to form a government for nearly a year under rules that require its main pro-British party — the Democratic Unionist Party — to share power with Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein. The DUP is also holding out against a proposal aimed at settling post-Brexit trade concerns between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
But Biden made only glancing mention of the standoff, emphasizing the importance of democratic institutions and urging all parties in Northern Ireland to work together.
“For politics, no matter what divides us, if we look hard enough, there’s always areas that’s going to bring us together,” Biden said.
Northern Ireland has prospered overall since the agreement, Biden noted, even as critics say that it’s failing. Its gross domestic product has doubled, an initial number Biden said he expects to triple if growth stays on track as American businesses continue investing in the region. The president also nodded, as he often does, to Irish arts and culture, which has produced world-renowned poetry, movies and television shows in recent years.
Much of that growth has been driven by young people, Biden added, who will push Northern Ireland forward in widening fields like cyber and clean energy. The president also announced that later this year, Joe Kennedy III, the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs, will lead a trade delegation of American companies to Northern Ireland.
“It’s up to us to keep this going,” he said, pledging to “sustain the peace, unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning … Your history is our history. But even more important, your future is America’s future.”
Biden has studiously avoided any thorny political territory during his stint in Northern Ireland, saying only that he was “going to listen” to party leaders during a private meeting ahead of his speech.
The president earlier on Wednesday also ignored questions about the potential for a trade deal sought by the U.K., and officials said they did not expect him to address the issue during a meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Still, those political tensions have trailed Biden throughout what has largely been billed as a personal trip to reconnect with his ancestral roots.
Amanda Sloat, the National Security Council’s senior director for Europe, faced several questions on Wednesday about whether Biden’s pride in his Irish background signaled a dislike for the U.K.
“It’s simply untrue,” she said. “President Biden obviously is a very proud Irish American, he is proud of those Irish roots, but he is also a strong supporter of our bilateral relationship with the U.K.”
Sloat added that the Biden administration was working “in lockstep” with the U.K. on a variety of global challenges.
Perhaps aware of the scrutiny of his allegiances, Biden during his speech at Ulster University made uncharacteristically little mention of his Irish heritage. Instead, he kicked off the speech with a different anecdote about his family history, reminding the crowd that “Biden is English too.”
Following the speech, the president traveled to the Irish Republic for the first time since he traced his lineage through the countryside as vice president in 2016.
Myah Ward contributed to this report.
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The move, a longtime ask of abortion-rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers, comes just days after a Texas court ruling threatening access to the abortion pill — the most common method for ending a pregnancy. Vice President Kamala Harris will meet Wednesday afternoon with the White House’s Task Force on Reproductive Health Care Access to discuss the new HIPAA rule and other potential responses to the court decision.
During a call with reporters on the new rule Tuesday night, a senior administration official said that while the agency released guidance when Roe fell last June telling doctors they do not have to comply with demands for information from law enforcement or state officials about a patient’s abortion, they have gotten feedback from health providers and advocacy groups that a clearer and more binding rule would offer better protection.
“We found that even with the permissible disclosures [policy], some providers get fearful when they receive a subpoena or they might feel like they have to turn the information over,” said the official, granted anonymity as the condition for the briefing on the new rule.
That chilling effect, the official added, is also affecting pregnant patients and causing them to avoid the medical system entirely.
“They’re scared, they are concerned about their medical information being misused and disclosed,” the official said. “As a result, individuals may hesitate to interact with providers, health plans, pharmacies or related health applications out of fear that their data will be tracked or shared inappropriately.”
The agency will take public comment on the proposed rule for the next 60 days, and will then issue a final rule.
Democratic lawmakers and abortion-rights advocates have been pleading with the Biden administration for months — beginning before Roe was overturned — to take this step, and the calls have grown louder as conservative states ramped up enforcement of their anti-abortion laws.
In January, Democrats in Congress introduced the Secure Access for Essential Reproductive (SAFER) Health Act that would have made similar updates to HIPAA with respect to abortions and miscarriages, but the bill has not moved in either chamber.
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This is, as President Joe Biden said in a different context, a big f–ing deal. His administration wants to change the way Americans have traveled the roads for more than a century. But by pushing the industry to make the transition faster, Biden could risk a backlash from unwilling consumers, complicate questions about China’s dominance of electric vehicle supplies, and escalate his administration’s legal fight with the oil industry and GOP governors who oppose his efforts to phase out internal combustion engines.
On the plus side for Biden, though, electric vehicle sales are already rising. And carmakers, who are investing big money in going electric, have defended the EPA’s previous pollution rules in federal court.
“Whether you measure today’s announcement by the dollars saved or the gallons reduced or the pollution that will no longer be pumped into the air, this is a win for the American people,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi told reporters on Tuesday.
Still, even some supporters of the president’s climate policies say they worry about a host of complications, including consumers’ ability to afford the $50,000-and-up price of many electric vehicles now on the market. Biden’s signature climate law offers $7,500 tax breaks to lessen the sticker shock, but the Treasury Department announced rules just two weeks ago that will make those credits more difficult to get.
Under the EPA proposal unveiled Wednesday, carbon dioxide emissions for new cars and light trucks would need to fall by 49 percent on average from 2027 to 2032. The agency is also proposing tightened standards for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, with the latter including dump trucks, school buses and tractor-trailers.
“Everybody cares about global warming,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from the auto industry’s home base of Michigan. But she added, “I’m hearing from too many people in this country — I mean, strong Democrats — that they can’t afford an electric vehicle.”
Other obstacles to getting more motorists to go electric include the patchy availability of charging stations and questions about whether the new breed of cars and trucks will be made in the U.S., with American-sourced parts and minerals, or would further dependence on China.
Some Republicans were caustic, including Florida Rep. Kat Cammack, who called the proposal “another clueless harebrained plan that actually has no basis in reality.”
“That seems to be the joke of the Biden administration — one of many, in fact — where they say, ‘Oh, you are concerned about rising gas prices, oh, you peasant, go out and buy an electric vehicle that costs $80,000,’” Cammack told Fox Business on Monday. “It’s absolutely absurd how out of touch this administration truly is.”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told POLITICO in a statement that the administration’s proposed rule “made clear it wants to decide for Americans what kinds of cars and trucks we are allowed to buy, lease, and drive.”
“These misguided emissions standards were made without considering the supply chain challenges American automakers are still facing, the lack of sufficiently operational electric vehicle charging infrastructure, or the fact that it takes nearly a decade to permit a mine to extract the minerals needed to make electric vehicles, forcing businesses to look to China for these raw materials,” Capito said.
Environmental groups and automakers that specialize in electric vehicles, such as Tesla and Rivian, have urged the administration to go big, saying Biden should seize the opportunity to lessen the country’s largest source of greenhouse gases — the transportation sector.
“These regulations will reflect, in my view, the single most important regulatory initiative by the Biden administration to combat climate change,” said Margo Oge, a former head of EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, at a briefing Tuesday organized by the Environmental Defense Fund. “The administration is going to make history if indeed, at the end of the day, they finalize these ambitious standards.”
Matthew Davis, senior director of government relations with the League of Conservation Voters, said the administration should use the EPA rule to “drive innovation” — building on the electric vehicle incentives in Biden’s infrastructure and climate laws, which have already inspired investments in manufacturing and charging projects.
“If these rules aren’t strong enough, they won’t send a strong additional message to the federal investments message that already has been sent,” Davis said. And that could frustrate the Biden administration’s hopes of having electric vehicles account for half of all new car and truck sales by 2030.
Electric vehicles made up about 5.6 percent of cars and trucks sold in 2022, up from 1.8 percent just two years earlier — but still not nearly enough to achieve the large emissions reductions that scientists say are needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, according to data from S&P Global Mobility cited by POLITICO’s E&E News.
A majority of Americans are at least open to buying an electric vehicle, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday. Twelve percent of respondents said they are “seriously considering” buying an electric vehicle and another 43 percent said they might consider it in the future, versus 41 percent who “unequivocally say they would not.” Four percent of respondents already owned one.
Yet the interest is highly partisan: 76 percent of Democrats were either seriously or somewhat considering purchasing an electric vehicle, while 71 percent of Republicans said they would not buy one, the polling firm found.
EPA’s new rules will push automakers toward electric vehicles regardless, said Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst at the consulting firm Gartner. “These rules would really just take away any sort of safety net or ability to turn back,” he told E&E News.
Already the auto industry, which has eagerly welcomed a variety of tax credits for manufacturing and selling electric vehicles, is deflecting blame in case it can’t meet the standards.
In a memo issued last week, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation — the trade group representing nearly the entire U.S. auto industry — cautioned that carmakers’ success in meeting strong new standards for lowering pollution will depend on matters outside their control: The proliferation of chargers, the health of the supply chain, the availability of critical minerals, the capacity of the electrical grid and more.
The move toward electric vehicles “requires a massive, 100-year change to the U.S. industrial base and the way Americans drive,” the auto industry group wrote. “A clear-eyed assessment of market readiness is required. The answer on rule feasibility is: It depends.”
“It’s a difficult dance,” said Stephanie Brinley, an automotive analyst for the auto intelligence service at S&P Global Mobility. “In order to have a more fuel efficient vehicle, it will be more expensive. It will be more expensive to produce; it will be more expensive to buy. It just goes with the territory. And that’s at the core of the conundrum.”
Still, she said, Europe and China have long had stricter regulations than the United States, so manufacturers already have some practice conforming to higher fuel economy standards.
The Republican attack line has already become clear, with some accusing the Biden administration of attempts to social-engineer people out of their pickup trucks and into “some puny electric car,” as Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) tweeted on Monday.
Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) called the EPA proposal “yet another draconian rule from the Biden” administration and invoked this year’s partisan dust-up about gas stoves, which one federal regulator had suggested banning. (Biden has opposed a stove ban.)
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) last month chastised the EPA for its efforts to boost electric vehicles, arguing that they strain the grid and are impractical for people like his wife, who he said drives 5,000 miles per month taking their children to school from rural areas.
“I don’t want ‘California’ rules,” Mullin said, referring to that state’s electric vehicle mandates. “I don’t want them to play a role in Oklahoma. I want affordable and reliable energy.”
The gas stoves scuffle could seem tame compared with an all-out feud over what’s in tens of millions of Americans’ driveways. The Obama administration took a GOP strafing over policies aimed at getting people out of their cars in favor of bikes, walking and transit — outrage that kept the conservative blogosphere buzzing for months. (Writing for Newsweek at the time, George Will dubbed then-Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood the “Secretary of Behavior Modification.”)
In contrast, Biden has proclaimed himself a “car guy.” And his administration and its allies are pitching the new EPA pollution standards as an economic opportunity for the U.S. to dominate the transportation technology of the future.
A recent report from the Environmental Defense Fund and the engineering and design firm WSP USA found that automakers had announced $120 billion in electric vehicle investments since 2015, with the bulk of that money coming since the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act last year.
Much of that spending, and the jobs that come with it, is happening in red or purple states. Georgia leads the pack on announced new EV jobs, followed by Tennessee, Michigan, Nevada and South Carolina.
The administration said the new standards would save the economy $850 billion to $1.6 trillion between 2027 and 2055, avoid about 20 billion barrels in oil imports, and save the average buyer of a car or light-duty truck $12,000 over the vehicle’s lifetime.
Josh Siegel, Zack Colman, Mike Lee and David Ferris contributed to this report.
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In an interview, Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau told POLITICO that the department’s current approach is aimed not just at equipping the department to act unilaterally if needed, but also providing “markers” to states as they negotiate.
“I really do think there is unity in the basin to continue and strive for a consensus approach to maintaining the system,” he said.
During an event overlooking the Hoover Dam Tuesday where Interior announced the move, state negotiators expressed a renewed commitment to those talks, with a California representative saying that “ideally” a seven-state deal could be reached within a month and a half.
Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s lead negotiator, noted that some of the options at Interior’s disposal could lead to litigation, which could freeze negotiations and tie water managers’ hands at a time of crisis.
“Instead, let us accelerate our discussions in the basin for a collaborative, consensus-based outcome,” he said.
The Colorado River is in the midst of a 23-year drought that has shriveled flows by 20 percent, and hotter, drier conditions fueled by climate change are expected reduce supplies even more in the coming years as the planet continues to warm. But thirsty farms and cities in California and Arizona have continued using water at rates far greater than the volumes flowing in the river, draining the two main reservoirs at Lake Mead and Lake Powell to the point that they are now about only about a quarter full. While a strong snowpack this winter has forestalled the crisis for now, Beaudreau argued that the federal government needs to be prepared to act if dry conditions push the system to the brink of crisis again in the next few years.
Last fall, federal projections showed that water levels at Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream of Grand Canyon National Park, could fall so low by the end of this year that it would halt hydropower production that is central to the stability of the Western grid and threaten the ability to make downstream water deliveries to Nevada, Arizona and California.
The Biden administration at the time called for the states to craft a plan to cut consumption by as much as a third of the river’s flows, and it launched an environmental review process to shore up its legal authorities to act unilaterally if the states remained at loggerheads. The Interior Department’s new draft version of the environmental analysis released Tuesday laid out a series of options it could take for heading off a crisis.
But rather than provide a clear roadmap of what Interior would do if it must step in, the department instead analyzed variations of the two competing proposals put forth by the states, as well as a scenario in which no reductions are made and reservoir levels fall precipitously.
One of the action options, similar to the approach backed by California, would have Interior impose water cuts using the century-old legal framework that governs the river, which cuts off newer water users entirely before senior users — mostly farmers and ranchers — see any reductions.
Another option hews to the spirit of a proposal backed by Arizona and the five other states that share the river, spreading the cuts more equitably across all water users. But, whereas the states’ proposal had done so by taxing users for water that evaporates from reservoirs and leaks from canals, Interior’s proposal would do so using legal authorities it has for protecting human health and safety, ensuring water is being put to “beneficial use” and acting in an emergency.
John Fleck, a Colorado River expert at the University of New Mexico, said that by avoiding picking sides, Interior’s approach could give it leverage over both sides in negotiations.
“It leaves space for productive negotiations, and now that we have a good snowpack, we have some room for the possibility of those productive negotiations to happen,” he said.
But Interior officials also made clear they are prepared to step in if necessary.
“It is our hope and our fervent desire that the tools laid out in the supplemental [environmental impact statement] never have to be used,” Beaudreau said, citing optimism for the negotiations. “At the end of the day, though, it’s the Secretary’s responsibility to keep this system operating and continue providing services. And we’re going to protect those minimum critical levels at both Powell and Mead in order to accomplish that.”
The current process is part of a short-term effort to avoid a crisis on the river in the next few years, while the states begin negotiating a longer-term set of rules to govern the river that must be in place by 2026.
The Biden administration is also seeking to win as many voluntary reductions as possible using new funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act. Last week, Interior officials blitzed the region, announcing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of investments in conservation deals and infrastructure upgrades.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Joe Biden managed to tread carefully around historic and current political sensitivities during the first part of his trip to the island of Ireland this week, marking 25 years since the U.S.-brokered Good Friday Agreement sought to secure lasting peace for Northern Ireland.
But not long after crossing from that U.K. region into the Republic of Ireland on Wednesday, the U.S. president made a major gaffe: He confused New Zealand’s “All Blacks” rugby team with the notorious “Black and Tans” British military unit that fought the Irish Republican Army a century ago.
At the end of a rambling speech in a pub Wednesday night, Biden — flanked by Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin and star rugby player Rob Kearney, a distant cousin — tried to pay a compliment to one of Kearney’s greatest sporting accomplishments. That would be when Ireland’s rugby team defeated New Zealand for the first time in 111 years, in November 2016 in Chicago. New Zealand’s squad is famously called the All Blacks, in reference to their uniforms.
Trouble is, Biden let slip a reference that could well reflect his affinity with Irish rebel history and its folk songs.
“He’s a hell of a rugby player, and he beat the hell out of the Black and Tans,” Biden said to audience laughter.
The Black and Tans were an auxiliary unit of Britain’s security forces that fought IRA rebels in their 1919-21 war of independence from Britain. Their name reflected the improvised and inconsistent colors of their uniforms.
The unrelentingly pro-Biden coverage on state broadcaster RTÉ, which televised his speech live, didn’t acknowledge the mistake. The commentator’s sign-off? “Well, that’s Joe Biden: a little bit sentimental, a little bit schmaltzy, but a thoroughly decent guy and a great friend to Ireland. The trip is off to a great start.”
But the gaffe and “Rob Kearney” blew up on social media in Ireland. Some listed the retired rugby fullback’s career accomplishments including, most famously, his single-handed defeat of the British forces a century ago.
“The greatest gift Ireland wanted from Joe Biden was a signature gaffe. And … didn’t he just go and give us one for the century,” tweeted comedian Oliver Callan.
Attempting to hose down the row on Thursday, Biden aide Amanda Sloat, the National Security Council senior director for Europe, said: “I think for everyone in Ireland who was a rugby fan it was incredibly clear that the president was talking about the All Blacks and Ireland’s defeat of the New Zealand team in 2016.”
She added: “It was clear what the president was referring to. It was certainly clear to his cousin sitting next to him who had played in that match.”
Lost in the shuffle was Biden’s other Kearney gaffe: He still hasn’t figured out how to say his name.
When introducing Kearney at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, Biden called him Keer-ney. The Irish pronounce the name Kar-ney. Biden stuck with Keer-ney on Wednesday.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
