President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team has made it clear that climate change will be a top policy priority for his incoming administration. In crafting its policies, the Biden administration may heavily rely upon a blueprint already created by former Obama administration officials and environmental experts. Known as the Climate 21 Project, the exhaustive transition memo seeks “to hit the ground running and effectively prioritize [Biden’s] climate response from Day One,” after which it hopes to implement major institutional changes within the first hundred days of the Biden presidency. The project’s recommendations involve eleven executive branch agencies, including the Departments of Energy, Interior, and Transportation, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, all of which are now actively involved in environmental policy. But the breadth of the Project 21 initiative is evident by its inclusion of State, Treasury, and Justice, too.

The project makes a grim assessment of the (unnamed) Trump administration. In speaking of the Environmental Protection Agency, it notes, without identifying any particulars, that it “has experienced a prolonged, systematic assault to disable effective capacities, demoralize its highly expert and dedicated staff, undercut its own legal authorities, and betray the EPA’s core mission to protect human health and the environment.” To reverse these trends, the Climate 21 Project is determined to shift the EPA’s focus “to climate change and clean energy,” an effort centered “around a deep decarbonization strategy.” The memo adds that the Interior Department must directly seize on “climate mitigation opportunities . . . in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fossil resources owned by the public and tribes, boosting renewable energy production on public lands and waters, [and] enhancing carbon sequestration on public lands.”

The project’s seventeen-person steering committee consists of many Obama administration officials and environmental activists. Its co-chairs are Christy Goldfuss, formerly a managing director at the White House Council of Environmental Quality and now the head of Energy and Environmental Policy at the Center for American Progress, and Tim Profeta, Director of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. The committee contains no mainstream Republicans or market-oriented economists. Its orientation is captured by the repeated use of the words “crisis” or crises,” which appear fifteen times in its report’s summary alone, usually joined with the word “climate.”