To mark the inauguration taking place right now in a very cold-looking Washington DC, we’re dropping some photos of another mighty capitol city. It’s our way of celebrating the U.S. government’s imminent return to an international accord that bears that city’s name. Imperfect as it may be, the Paris Agreement is the absolute gold standard among existing, signed, and fully notarized international plans for fighting climate change.

Though the outgoing administration meant four years without U.S. climate leadership, it had the unintentional effect of inspiring the rise of powerful new leaders elsewhere. So, Biden’s new bigger, better, and super-brainy Cabinet-level climate team — led by John Kerry and Gina McCarthy — enters a much more dynamic scene than the one we vacated four years ago.

It will take time to rebuild credibility and re-establish leadership — or at least good-faith partnership — in the challenges of mitigation, adaptation, and climate justice. But, five minutes ago as we write this paragraph, Joe Biden signed an executive order rejoining the Paris Agreement — and that’s one of many things to celebrate.

There’s reason to believe he will also cancel the Keystone Pipeline once and for all — a move that will have immense symbolic and practical implications on the climate. And who knows what-all else is stacked up there on a newly energized Resolute Desk! 

Update 1/21: Handy summary from Wired, “Biden Returns the US to the Paris Climate Accord. Will It Matter?“

Yes:

President Joe Biden pulled the US back into the Paris climate accord on Wednesday, an international agreement that experts say is vital to getting the world’s nations to slow the emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The executive order— the third of 17 executive orders or actions issued on his first day in office—means that US officials now will begin calculating a new target for the nation’s overall carbon emissions by the year 2030.

 

That target, in turn, will require federal, state, and corporate decisionmakers to set new standards for factories, cars, and power plants to use cleaner energy to meet that goal—while likely offering both incentives and penalties to reduce overall energy use by all US residents.

 

If that wasn’t enough climate action, Biden also signed an order canceling the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have brought crude oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, an amount of petroleum whose production, refining, and burning would create the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions from 35.5 millioncars per year. Another executive order signed Wednesday directs federal agencies to block former president Donald Trump’s previous weakening of federal rules that limited the release of emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling operations, to revise vehicle fuel economy and emissions standards, and to update appliance and building efficiency standards.

 

Along with his dogs Major and Champ, Biden is bringing with him to the White House a big team of climate change experts…

We’d be happy to recommend another hundred or two leaders for the federal payroll, but this “big team” is a great start and will connect to a vast international mosaic of work that moved forward even as Washington fitfully slept.