# Executive Order 14008 **Title:** Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad **Signed:** January 27, 2021 by [[Joe Biden]] **Federal Register:** 86 FR 7619 (February 1, 2021) **Status:** Revoked in full on January 20, 2025, twice over: by [[Executive Order 14154]] § 4(a)(iii) and by [[Executive Order 14148]] § 2(s) The omnibus climate order of the Biden administration's first week. It made climate a stated consideration across domestic, foreign and national-security policy. Almost everything in it was a direction to agencies rather than a rule binding anyone else. That is why a single sentence in another executive order could erase it four years later. ## What it did - **§ 203, National Climate Task Force:** a cabinet-level body chaired by a new White House National Climate Advisor. - **§ 208, the leasing pause:** "The Secretary of the Interior shall pause new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or in offshore waters pending completion of a comprehensive review." - **§ 209, fossil-fuel subsidies:** agencies were to identify them and stop federal funding from "directly subsidizing fossil fuels." - **§ 215, the Civilian Climate Corps:** only a strategy, due in 90 days, "within existing appropriations." Congress never funded it; versions of Build Back Better that would have did not pass. The administration launched an **American Climate Corps** by separate executive action in September 2023. - **§ 216, the 30 percent goal:** discussed below. - **§ 223, Justice40:** a goal that "40 percent of the overall benefits" of covered federal climate and clean-energy investments "flow to disadvantaged communities." ## Section 216: the 30 percent goal Section 216, "Conserving Our Nation's Lands and Waters," is the section that mattered politically. Its operative text directs the Secretary of the Interior, in consultation with Agriculture, Commerce and the Council on Environmental Quality, to *"submit a report to the Task Force within 90 days … recommending steps that the United States should take … to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030."* **The legal force of the section is that verb, *submit a report recommending steps*, and nothing more.** It designates no land, withdraws nothing, creates no regulatory authority, defines no term, and imposes no obligation on any state, county or private landowner. Everything later attributed to "30x30" was done under existing statutory authority: the [[Antiquities Act]], FLPMA, Farm Bill conservation programs and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. The distance between what Section 216 said and what it was successfully made to mean is the subject of [[30x30 Conservation Initiative]] and of the [[Agenda 21]]-style opposition it drew from groups like [[American Stewards of Liberty]]. ## The leasing pause in court The § 208 pause was the most litigated provision, and the one that most clearly failed: - **Louisiana v. Biden (W.D. La.).** Judge Terry Doughty enjoined the pause on **June 15, 2021**. The Fifth Circuit vacated that injunction for lack of specificity in August 2022, and Doughty reissued it as a permanent injunction for the 13 plaintiff states the next day. - **Wyoming v. Biden (D. Wyo.).** Judge Scott Skavdahl upheld the postponement of early-2021 lease sales in 2022. On **Dec 31, 2024**, he held that skipping later 2022 sales was arbitrary and capricious. - **Congress closed the question.** The [[Inflation Reduction Act]] (2022) tied renewable development to fossil leasing for ten years. BLM cannot issue wind or solar rights-of-way unless it has offered onshore oil and gas acreage, and cannot issue offshore wind leases unless at least 60 million acres were offered for offshore oil and gas in the prior year. Biden's signature climate law thus ended his signature climate order's leasing pause. ## Revocation [[Executive Order 14154]], "Unleashing American Energy," revoked EO 14008 at § 4(a)(iii). The same-day omnibus [[Executive Order 14148]] revoked it again at § 2(s). With the parent order gone, Section 216, the sole legal foundation of the 30 percent goal, ceased to exist. [[Project 2025]]'s Interior chapter, written by [[William Perry Pendley]], had specifically told the incoming president to "vacate that order." ## See also - [[Executive Order 14154]] · [[Executive Order 14148]] · [[30x30 Conservation Initiative]] · [[Antiquities Act]] · [[Antiquities Act Timeline]] - [[Inflation Reduction Act]] · [[Paris Agreement]] · [[Climate Change]] · [[Project 2025]] · [[William Perry Pendley]]