Outside

With Congress still almost evenly split, and the Supreme Court not exactly stacked in favor of bold regulatory action, there are likely no landslides ahead. But that doesn’t mean Biden can’t get a lot done quickly. As soon as he’s sworn in, in fact, he can use the power of his office to issue executive orders—Trump, remember, tried to kill the Affordable Care Act hours after moving into the Oval Office—and then keep rolling from there. “It’s not just about putting things back together or returning to the status quo,” Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney at the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University, told Sierra magazine. “We need to strengthen regulations, because the climate crisis has accelerated dramatically over the last four years, and we have failed to take action on a federal level.” With no time to waste, here’s what Biden can do as soon as he takes that oath.