Biden designates two national monuments, touts climate legacy (original) (raw)

President Joe Biden on Tuesday established two massive new national monuments in California and highlighted his environmental initiatives as some of the defining achievements of a presidency that will end in less than a week.

“We’ve been carrying out the most aggressive climate agenda in the history of the world,” Biden told nearly 300 people gathered in the White House’s East Room. Without directly mentioning President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, he added: “We don’t have to choose between the environment and the economy or between conservation and clean energy — we can do both at the same time.”

Biden signed proclamations at the event designating the roughly 624,000-acre Chuckwalla National Monument and the roughly 224,000-acre Sáttítla Highlands National Monument. The move bars oil and gas drilling, mining, and other industrial activity on vast swaths of public land that several Native American tribes have considered sacred for thousands of years.

Chuckwalla will be named after the chuckwalla lizards that roam the junction of the Mojave, Sonoran and Colorado deserts. It will be immediately south of Joshua Tree National Park, which ranked as the ninth-most-visited national park in 2023, attracting more than 3.2 million people that year.

Sáttítla is the Pit River Tribe’s name for an area in northeastern California near the Oregon border. The area is often called the headwaters of California because of its crucial role in supplying clean water from volcanic aquifers to communities across the state.

Conserving these places “not only protects the livelihoods of the people who depend on them; it preserves a key piece of our history and a full American story,” Biden said. “It unites us through the ages. It connects us to something bigger than ourselves.”

Biden was originally scheduled to designate the national monuments during a trip last week to California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. But the White House rescheduled the announcement because of strong winds in the area that ultimately fueled massive wildfires in the Los Angeles area.

Biden has spent the final months of his presidency bolstering and at times defending his legacy, taking last-minute actions within the limitations of his executive power, but also using the bully pulpit to make his case for the history books. Just before Christmas, he commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row to life without parole. He has also given several speeches defending his economic legacy and his foreign policy decisions.

Tuesday’s event was bookended by two high-profile presidential addresses. Biden delivered a eulogy Thursday at former president Jimmy Carter’s state funeral, and he is set to give a farewell address to the nation Wednesday from the Oval Office.

With the exception of Carter, who helped conserve more than 100 million acres of land in Alaska, Biden has now protected more public lands than any other president in a single term, according to the White House.

“President Carter would have been proud of the conservation legacy that President Joe Biden has left,” John D. Podesta, senior adviser to the president for international climate policy, said in an interview. “I’ve traveled with the president for several conservation announcements … and I can personally attest that he sees this as some of the most important work of his presidency.”

Biden had previously created eight new national monuments and expanded four others. Trump, in contrast, shrank two national monuments in Utah by a total of 1.9 million acres during his first term, saying the reduction would “reverse federal overreach.”

Democrats from California — including Rep. Raul Ruiz, Sen. Alex Padilla and former senator Laphonza Butler — have sponsored legislation to create Chuckwalla. Padilla has also introduced a bill to designate Sáttítla. But both measures have stalled in the divided Congress, prompting Biden to invoke his executive authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which empowers the president to protect lands and waters for the benefit of all Americans.

“Obviously, the legislative process is always ideal, but I’m not naive to the reality of a House Republican majority that has expressed zero interest in trying to advance these proposals,” Padilla said in an interview. “So I welcome the president exercising the authority that he does have under the Antiquities Act.”

Biden’s designation of Chuckwalla follows years of advocacy by several tribes that consider the area part of their ancestral homelands. It also comes after months of private negotiations between White House officials and renewable energy developers that have sought to build solar farms, long-distance power lines and other projects in this stretch of desert. Such projects are key to Biden’s plans for accelerating the nation’s transition to clean energy at a time when Trump is promising to boost fossil fuels.

“We have done all that we can to ensure that activities important for both conservation and clean energy can go forward,” said Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in an interview.