To make real progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, President Biden and Congress will need to break with environmentalist dogmas

See How Serious Are Biden and the Democrats About Fighting Climate Change by Ted Nordhaus. Excerpts:

"First among them is the longstanding belief that the nation can meet its energy needs with wind and solar energy alone. Wind and solar are great as far as they go. But there are limits to how far that is. Because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, powering an electrical grid entirely with wind and solar energy is a dubious proposition. To reliably provide electricity when and where it is needed without fossil fuels, most analyses find that electrical grids need substantial reserves of what the Princeton engineering professor Jesse Jenkins has dubbed “firm, low-carbon generation.”

The most likely candidates are nuclear energy or natural gas turbines capable of capturing and storing their carbon. We will probably need both. And America’s electrical grid is not even half the battle. Getting to zero emissions requires eliminating emissions associated with things like steel, refining, cement and fertilizer production. All of these processes require either process heat or direct fossil energy inputs, and often both.

Electricity, whether produced by fossil fuels, renewables or nuclear, cannot meet these needs. But a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors, capable of operating at very high temperatures, can provide industrial heat. And fossil fuels can also continue to play these roles in a low-carbon future, if we can eliminate their carbon emissions.

During the Trump years, Congress and the Energy Department took important steps with bipartisan support to accelerate development of both carbon capture and advanced nuclear technologies. As licensing and commercialization efforts for these technologies move forward, the Biden administration will need to decide whether it is willing to stand up to prominent environmental advocacy groups that have spent decades attempting to regulate and litigate them out of existence." 

"America boasts the most environmentally efficient agriculture sector in the world. U.S. farmers produce more food on less land, with less water and fertilizer, than almost any other country. Big agriculture is a dirty word for most environmentalists, who rail against corporate farming and have long campaigned against trade deals that would open up foreign markets to U.S. producers. But thanks to large-scale, intensive and highly technological farming and livestock production, the U.S. is the largest agricultural exporter in the world, and almost every bushel of grain and pound of meat produced in the U.S. displaces higher-emission production elsewhere."

Finally, making the transition to a low-carbon economy will require saying yes to new things, not just no to bad things. That includes not just nuclear energy and carbon capture but projects like long-distance transmission lines for wind and solar energy, pipelines and storage for captured carbon, hydrogen and low-carbon fuels, rail lines, new housing in urban areas and much else.

Over 50 years, environmentalists have erected a thicket of laws and regulations at the local, state and federal levels so dense that even projects that would unquestionably improve the environment are hard pressed to find a way through. Many of these rules and regulations were well intended and reflect a range of competing social, environmental, cultural and jurisdictional priorities. But you can’t cut emissions deeply or rapidly without building lots of big things quickly."

"Congress will need to enact major reforms of the National Environmental Policy Act and other federal policies dear to environmentalists."