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And just like that, President Biden’s first 100 days were over. Or nearly: This largely symbolic period ends on Thursday. TNR’s Kate Aronoff will be weighing in on Biden’s climate record thus far, but for now, here’s a brief recap of the past few months.

On Day One, as promised, Biden revoked the Keystone XL pipeline’s permit. TNR’s Nick Martin took the opportunity to make the case for canceling all pipelines currently under construction. No luck as of yet: The Biden administration has been strangely passive about the Dakota Access Pipeline, inclined to let things play out in the courts. Also in his first days, Biden signed an executive order to have the United States rejoin the Paris Agreement, and directed federal agencies to update their fleet with “clean, zero-emission vehicles.”

Deb Haaland was confirmed and sworn in as secretary of the interior, a huge step in a complicated history of Native representation in government, Nick wrote, as well as a reversal of the recent tradition of the Interior Department being run like a colonizers’ and oil drillers’ theme park.

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The administration did abandon Elizabeth Klein as nominee for deputy secretary after Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski objected—an interesting case study not just in Murkowski’s veto power but in her attempt to balance the interests of the oil industry and her Native constituents. How this Interior Department will deal with a long, problematic legacy of drilling on public lands and helping to broker drilling deals with Indian Country remains to be seen.

Biden announced an infrastructure plan that included $500 billion for clean energy investment. Is that enough? Kate convincingly argued that, unfortunately, it’s not.

Progressives and climate activists have not given up on the Green New Deal. For a look behind the scenes, check out Kate’s piece on the different groups and the proposals they’ve been coming up with. Or read her story on why one of the key differences between the GND approach and Biden’s may actually be strategic, not ideological.

Finally, Biden held a climate summit last week, pledging to cut emissions by 50 to 52 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. “The UNFCCC’s own standard baseline for judging reductions is against 1990 emissions levels, not those from 2005,” Kate noted. “That means the pledge is in reality a much more modest 43 percent reduction by 2030.” (The administration also let Bill Gates speak at the summit, for reasons passing all understanding. Gates may cosplay as a climate expert, but he isn’t one. What he is, Kate explained in March, is an evangelist for private sector innovation as a response to crisis: “Socialize the risk, in other words, and privatize the reward.”)

Incidentally, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the summit to attempt to get rich nations to pay his administration not to continue presiding over rampant destruction of the Amazon rain forest. As Andre Pagliarini observed, rich nations probably should be paying poorer nations as part of an equitable climate response, but Bolsonaro really can’t be trusted to protect either the Amazon or the many people living within it.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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