| It’s policy crunch time for the White House. As next year’s presidential election draws near, the Biden administration is trying to carry out a suite of energy and climate priorities that are already drawing attacks from Republican lawmakers. The first half of 2024 is promising to be one of the busiest regulatory periods of President Joe Biden’s presidency, according to the administration’s semiannual rulemaking agenda released Tuesday. Among the administration’s goals are regulating natural-gas-burning stoves and methane emissions, speeding up the deployment of clean energy projects, cleaning up planet-warming pollution from buildings and protecting public lands in Alaska, where the White House recently green-lighted a massive oil project. In a notable departure from recent past agendas, the administration has pushed up the deadlines for several regulations. That could be an effort to insulate rules from repeal should Republicans take control of Congress and the White House in the 2024 election, said James Goodwin, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Progressive Reform. “The past agendas were essentially just a catalog of six-month delays,” Goodwin told Kevin Bogardus and Kelsey Brugger. "That's not really the case here.” Relighting the stove wars: The Energy Department’s goal of finishing a rule to cut asthma-inducing pollution from gas stoves by the end of 2024 has added fuel to a firestorm of conservative pushback. The proposal, which could torpedo half the gas stove models on the market, has prompted House Republicans to pass a bill that would block the regulation and “any substantially similar rule.” On Tuesday, 29 House Democrats joined Republicans to pass a separate measure that seeks to block the Consumer Product Safety Commission from regulating gas stoves. Neither bill is likely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. And blowback from greens: GOP roadblocks aside, the administration’s climate-friendly plans may not be enough to win back the favor of some environmentalists, who are still reeling from Biden’s recent moves to boost fossil fuels. White House approval of a series of oil and gas projects, most notably the Willow oil project on the North Slope of Alaska, could dampen voter turnout among progressives at the polls next year, political experts say. For a deeper dive into the Biden administration’s regulatory plans, check out this rundown by a team of POLITICO’s E&E News reporters and this one by POLITICO reporters.
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