When President-elect Joe Biden takes office, Harvard law professor Jody Freeman says he’ll have “an awful lot of authority” with the EPA and other agencies. Despite Republican power in Congress, executive clout can get the U.S. “back on a path of dealing with climate change” by shoring up environmental protections unraveled by President Trump. As Biden’s new Climate Tsar, John Kerry can restore America’s role in the Paris Agreement, which he helped draft as President Obama’s Secretary of State.
Princeton international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer concedes that Biden’s goal of “net zero” by 2050 doesn’t mean eliminating fossil fuels, even though that’s what it sounds like. But he and Freeman say it’ll do some good, despite “honestly motivated” criticism from climate advocates.
Later on, when it comes to Trump’s famous big lie that Joe Biden stole the presidential election, Brown University politics professor Corey Brettschneider says, “I think it is extremely dangerous for a sitting president to try to undermine faith in our elections, when there's no evidence that there was any fraud.” He says U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is part of a team with Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch that threaten Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, and the Biden White House.