Warming solvency is impossible absent strong a strong federalist system

The ability to articulate where local climate authority is vulnerable has important consequences. First, it allows local governments to make a more reasoned risk calculus regarding the kind of climate action they are pursuing. Second, it provides policymakers and scholars with a further tool for precise discussions about local authority on climate and how far that local authority is likely to extend. And finally, it has significant substantive ramifications for climate progress. While many local governments are engaged in efforts to fill in climate regulatory gaps, there is substantial overlap between states unwilling to take action on climate change and those that will enact preemptive legislation in response to local attempts to take action. Thus, part of the federal government’s role can be to support local initiatives where they are occurring and to either regulate in a more top-down fashion or attempt to shore up local authority in places where such authority has been blocked by the state. For all of those reasons, localizing the conversation around climate federalism will remain important even during a federal administration inclined to take climate action.

The shifts in federal administration in 2016 and in 2020 have been accompanied by markedly different positions on how (and whether) to handle the climate crisis. Those swings show the importance of national elections as well as the potential fragility of depending on only a federal response to climate change.79 Thus, while comprehensive federal action on climate change is enormously welcome and needed, both Congress and the Biden Administration should also ensure that any action they take preserves the flexibility of and possibility for climate action at the state and local level as well. Federal climate action should work to include states as partners and responsible parties in any regulatory response. And where the federal government can empower climate action by local governments that would otherwise likely be subject to preemption by the state, it can have a lasting impact in shoring up the role of local governments as environmental actors within the United States.80 In short, federal tackling the climate crisis during the Biden Administration should include a clear-eyed view of the federal, state, and local possibilities for action, and work to empower a climate response from all points along the federalism spectrum.